ashki's Profile

I knew it was a whole new machine as soon as I heard that first, sweet, clarion-clear boot tone. I had made sure to put on a pair of headphones before pressing that button (like a stick drawing of an upside-down mushroom), at the top of the keyboard. I had been in undesired exile from the Mac world for several years; the last time I had seen a functioning Mac OS was on the screen of a performa, the platinum plastic windows of OS 9. This iBook came preloaded with 10.3 Panther. It's always been a funny sort of mixed metaphor — to cram all of these different species of raging jungle cats into the smooth, purified hardware that Apple sells. But it works for me. The introduction movie and the setup screens that followed were just a gateway. They blocked me from the tasty computer that I was just on the edge of experiencing. I filled out all of the required fields with the hasty calm that one uses for setups. Patient enough to be sure to type everything correctly, while anxious enough to have my usually dry palms turn sweaty. I had grown up on a Mac Plus, black and white and beige all over; the Performa was the second machine, bringing a disc drive, the internet, and color; this iBook G4 would be the third. But as stunning as the hardware was, nothing could have prepared me for Aqua. To see an operating system with realtime transparencies, window shadow effects, and eye-tempting icons that you could almost reach out and touch . . . It was almost too much. I spent the first ten minutes just scrolling through the folders, staring at all the pretty iconography. It's rare to have software that achieves a more persistent stablility than the hardware it runs on. But with OS 10.3 this was finally true. An operating system that never crashes? Programs that hold steady all day and all night, playing nice and sharing ram? And to hold all of this incredible stability not inside some utilitarian (read ugly) interface, but instead hiding it behind lovely renderings and motion effects . . . It sounds like a fantasy land — it sounds like personal computing's holy grail. Apple reached that legendary place with Panther, and perhaps that's why the new release on Friday, though exciting in itself, feels more like a follow-up than a reinvention. For me, it was Panther that made it hard to go to sleep that night, it was Panther that I woke up to with fast heart beats at six in the morning. Over the last year my affection has only grown greater. When PC-hardcore-4-life kids come into my room and see Exposé flash across the screen, or the video conversations of iChat AV, they often gasp in wonder. When a million-odd lines of code can inspire not just interest, but wonder in a person, you know that things are going right. Apple's mission from the start has been to make a computing experience that the everyman will not only tolerate, but come to love. That was the goal back in the days of the 1984 advertisment, and it continues to be the goal with Tiger whatever lies down the road. Panther was the turning point. It brought the sunshine into personal computing.