According to MacUser review, BeOS is better (compare to system 7.5.5) at hardware-abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, protected memory, modern virtual-memory system, and symmetric multiprocessing. However, all of those features mentioned above are provided by WinNT! There are additional advantages like multithreaded user interface and 100% object-oriented application programming interface... All those features will make the OS runs faster and easier to program on. End users won't be able to take advantage of them except for speed difference.
However, system 7.5.5 are still better at multimedia support, file sharing, and networking. There features are what make MacOS wonderful. And Copland (OS 8 whatever) is supposed to provide most, if not all, of the features mentioned in the 1st paragraph. Why couldn't all those Apple software engineers figure out how to write those codes? And it has been more than 2 yrs now; what do they do in these 2 yrs?
As for physical appearance, I think this is more like a personal feeling. BeOS resembles the NeXTOS (and Win95) physically. Maybe I just got so used to MacOS' ease of use. And, come on, I am sure you know what to change a mac icon on the desktop, don't you?!
Well, if in case Apple is to adopt BeOS, the backward compatibility problem has to be solved. You mentioned that old Mac programs can run in "emulation mode." Aren't we tired of running things in emulation mode? (i.e. We are still running 68k program on PPC machine and PPC program under 68k OS; how do you like it?)
And for the future, I think it is either Wintel or Internet except in the improbable case that Apple coming out with a great OS in the first half of 97. The war is over... |
