Advantages of Macintosh Operating System 10 over 9 and their Integration into a Windows Environment

By Vance Watson, MD and Curtis Fatig

Over the past several years the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems (OS) have undergone dramatic changes. These changes were undertaken due to business and government needs for integration, the need for more capabilities at a user's workstation, the desire by companies to sell more products, and the inability of a single company to dictate the basic computer protocols. These changes not only altered the capabilities of the OSs but have radically changed the user's experience too.

As operating systems change there is a natural resistance to upgrading by a majority of users. Computer vendors often force upgrade issue by integrating the new OS with new computer purchases and the OS vendors limiting support for the older OSs after a few years. When Macintosh introduced UNIX based OS 10 (a.k.a. OS X) there was great concern regarding obsolescence of software and computers tied to Mac Classic based OS 9. Because of this, Apple was forced to provide a way to integrate OS 9 into OS 10. This was done with an emulation mode that can be conceptualized as Virtual PC for Mac. Further discussions on the upgrade paths for Mac OS X are presented later.

UNIX has long been considered by many as a superior operating system compared with Windows and Mac classic. What Apple was able to provide with OS 10 was a UNIX based platform with a friendly and attractive Graphical User Interface (GUI). The advantages of Macintosh OS 10 start at the heart of the system, a UNIX-based core. This core feature allowed for standard industry developed tools to be used, as well as the built-in security advantages that were considered at the start of the development of Macintosh OS 10. It also created a horizontal computing hierarchy / architecture compared to the vertical of OS 9. LINUX can also be simulated in the native UNIX mode of OS X. Java and C++, programming is fully supported and was difficult in OS 9. A few more key advantages of Macintosh OS 10 when compared to Macintosh OS 9 are:

Protected memory	An application crashing will not effect the operating system or other running applications.
Memory management	Multi-tasking/Multi-threading/Dynamic memory allocations allow for faster applications running concurrently.
Communications	Gigabit Ethernet, high speed wireless (802.11g), and Bluetooth built-in with Windows services available for linking computer systems. All can be changed on-the-fly without rebooting the computer system.
Security	Firewall functions available for every desktop user as well as encryption of data on the hard drive and secure file deletion.
Multiprocessing	Now fully supported and robust. The world’s cheapest and fourth largest supercomputer was made by parallel linking thousands of Mac chips.

When compared to a Windows based operating system, the advantages of Macintosh OS 10.x are a more appealing interface and stability. Web based browsing, however, was slower on earlier versions of OS 10 compared to Windows, but appears to be increasing in speed. Security continues to be a sore spot for Microsoft Windows, and OS 10 is practically impervious to all attacks. It is important, however, to run the security updates. OS 10.1 had very limited device driver support for external drives. Fortunately OS 10.2 and 10.3 supports most external hardware and several reports in computer journals state that peripherals are easier to install on a Mac than a PC. There are claims that productivity is 44% greater on Mac Systems compared to Windows and 36% cheaper. The variety of software available for the PC continues to exceed Mac. Given this, all software developers that cater to both platforms are making sure that the Graphic User Interfaces (GUIs) are identical for the Mac and PC versions of their software. Most graphic designers and video producers still migrate to the Mac.

Performance increased dramatically from Mac OS 9 to 10, and in each successive upgrade of OS 10. The initial versions of OS 10 were called a work in progress. But, after OS 10.2 which is also named Jaguar, the operating system was considered well engineered and strong. Apple's plan is to provide a yearly operating system update and delivered the current version OS 10.3, which is named Panther, in October, 2003. It has further advances. The criticism of this approach is that there is the potential of users continually buying operating systems at $129 which have the bugs associated with any newly released software. The advantages are that the Mac world receives the newest advances.

One of the key technologies in OS 10 is Quartz Extreme. Quartz is an umbrella term that describes core technologies used by Mac OS 10 to render images, and has two parts: Quartz 2D and Quartz Compositor. Quartz 2D is a vector-based 2D drawing library. The Mac OS 10 System Overview describes its capabilities succinctly:

[Quartz 2D's] APIs allow you to create text and images by specifying a sequence of commands and mathematical statements that place lines, shapes, color, shading translucency, and other graphical attributes in two-dimensional space. You do not need to specify the attributes of individual pixels. As a result, a shape can be efficiently defined as a series of paths and attributes rather than a bitmap.

The Quartz Compositor has been implemented as a single "window server" process that is responsible for managing all on-screen windows. From the System Overview:

[The window server] composites and re-composites each pixel of an application's window as the window is drawn, redrawn, covered, and uncovered. Each window is represented as a bitmap that includes both translucency (alpha channel) and anti-aliasing information. The bitmap serves as a buffer, allowing the window server to "remember" an application's window contents and to re-composite it without the application's involvement.

There are some performance problems with this Quartz architecture. The memory used by the window server quickly becomes substantial and it scales linearly with the number and size of windows on the screen. So, if several windows are open at the same time, the main memory pool is heavily taxed and when full the OS falls back to the hard drive and performance drops. This is where Quartz Extreme enters. It sends calculations required to composite each application's windows onto the screen to the GPU on the graphics card rather than the main CPU. The end result is that the CPU cycles previously spent compositing windows are now free for other purposes. So it is not surprising that two of the requirements of Quartz Extreme support are at least 16 MP of VRAM and an AGP2X bus. The video card must support arbitrary texture sizes and pixel formats as well as multi-texturing.

Bundled software with OS 10 includes the web browser Safari, I-Photo (redesigned for Panther), Mail, Address Book, and a variety of third party software. Garage band is a music program introduced with Panther. While not necessarily bundled software, the built in PDF functionality in OS 10 is a major bonus. For example, when you execute print a menu option asks if you wish to save as a PDF. This function provides the ability to easily produce PDF straight out of Office without additional software.

The integration of the Macintosh OS into a Windows environment has not always been easy, but this is also true for older Window OSs and other UNIX OSs. Apple, working with Microsoft, has made great strides in providing a more pleasant experience and easier integration with Windows 2000/2003/XP environments. Working within Microsoft Office products, the transitions are transparent. None of this should be too surprising given that Microsoft employs the second largest group of Mac programmers in the world.

In summary, OS 10 is a robust and stable UNIX platform with a very pleasing GUI allowing for happy computing in 2004. Those looking for real time video editing are strongly encouraged to consider switching to OS 10, as the industry has moved largely in this direction due to simplicity, speed, and much lower cost compared to alternatives.

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