Mac OS X: Living Long and Prospering

And when it's time to back up your data, you don't need to scour the hard drive. Just copy your home folder to as many CDs or DVDs as it takes to hold everything.

· Each application acts as one, indivisible file. Credit Apple for persuasiveness here: After five years, Apple has convinced the vast majority of programmers to support OS X's optional "application bundle" feature. This lets a developer package a program and its supporting cast-- code libraries, foreign-language translations, plug-in components, help files and so on -- in a special folder that OS X displays and treats as a single file.

It would be hard to make installing an application simpler than it is under this system: After downloading the program, you drag its icon to the Applications folder. There is no step three.

Likewise, "uninstalling" a program consists of dragging its icon to the trash. (Preference and cache files will be left behind, but they won't harm the system and can be deleted easily enough if you want.)

Not all programs work this way. For example, printer drivers and some high-end programs, such as Apple's iLife suite, need the help of an installer. But even then, those programs still generally appear as single files in the Applications folder, which as a result is far easier to read than the Start Menu's All Programs list, much less the Program Files folder.

Some of those three characteristics show up in other operating systems, such as Linux. Some will appear in Windows Vista when that ships.

But they've been present in OS X from the start, giving Apple time to add such outrageously convenient features as the Migration Assistant that automagically whisks your files, settings and applications to a new Mac and the "Archive and Install" system fix that gives you a clean copy of OS X while preserving everything else on the Mac.

This progress has come at a cost, though: To leap this far ahead, Apple had to ditch a lot of old baggage. While OS X can run "Classic" applications written for the old Mac OS, that compatibility has always been a bit awkward in practice. And on Intel-based Macs, it's gone entirely. Even many newer applications have been rendered obsolete by OS X's major updates.

This transition has been rough on developers and on users, but most of them -- and many others who switched from Windows -- have followed Apple's lead.

Could Microsoft, with so many more customers to satisfy, have made the same trade-off with Vista? Probably not. But maybe it should have. In operating systems, a little revolution every now and then isn't just a good thing, sometimes it may be the only way forward.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.