My theory as to why Apple made the radical OS switch from OS 9 to Unix-based OS X has finally been borne out.

I have long surmised that an ego like Steve Jobs must have been incredibly irked when walking around Pixar and not seeing any Apple hardware. And for good reason, the Apple OS was not up to any serious office task, much less digital animation. And before the Mac zealots chime in, just admit it. The ‘Classic’ OS suffered a good many faults. It didn’t play well with other OSes (a requirement in most offices), networking with that piecemeal garbage called Open Transport was a mess, and the daily crashes that Mac users came to expect were not well tolerated by people who just wanted to get their document typed and didn’t care about pretty user interfaces.

Steve Jobs knew of the problems with the Classic OS when he came back to Apple in 1997 with the merger of NeXT. This was no coincidence. At that time Pixar was running alot of IRIX and Sun-based hardware, some even running NeXT, but most importantly, they were running a Unix-based OS, because it was solid and dependable. Recently they even started running Intel-based Linux render farms. Same Unix principle combined with relatively cheap hardware.

So the decision was made early on that the Classic OS was to be dumped and completely replaced by a new OS based largely around NeXT. The OS X Finder is the NeXT finder, the same one many of us thirty-somethings used in College. The internal transition was not smooth. In another ego battle, the NeXT team did not heed any advice from the former Classic teams, and so we witnessed the complaints of missing Apple OS features in the first iterations of OS X. Yet from the start, OS X achieved what the Classic OS could not, it was much more stable than Classic, networking was solid, and due to the memory protection inherent in Unix kernels, one misbehaving application couldn’t drag the whole system down. By OS X version 10.2, Apple had finally arrived at a decent marriage of the former Classic OS and NeXT. Now it just needed hardware.

Throughout 2001 and 2002, as Apple improved OS X, G4 hardware improvements lagged. It was at this time that Apple tried to push the theory that clockspeed wasn’t everything, but they knew it wasn’t true. It was increasingly hard to sell a 1Ghz machine for almost $1000 more than a 2+Ghz Intel box. On top of clock speed, most afficianados knew that the bus speed was the real killer. Apple for the most part hadn’t moved their bus speed much above 100mhz. Only achieving 133Mhz with the last G4s. With this kind of bus, the CPU was basically starving for RAM as the hardware couldn’t deliver it fast enough. In late 2002, rumors were heard of a new IBM processor that had a likely suitor in Apple. A 64-bit chip starting at 1.6Ghz and capable of using a much faster bus speed, the ‘G5’ was the hardware Apple was waiting to pair with its new OS.

In early 2003 Apple G4 hardware sales were flat. Rumors were flying and everyone knew the G5 was coming. Finally in June 2003 at Apple’s WWDC Apple announced the slick looking G5, with dual-processor support, up to 8GB of RAM, and up to 400Mhz main memory bus. To complement the new 64-bit chip, Apple would also release a 64-bit version of the forthcoming OS X version 10.3.

The G5 started shipping in late September 2003. At MacWorld January 2004, Apple introduced the G5 version of their rack-mountable XServe hardware. All the pieces were finally in place.

Yesterday at Apple’s Uncompressed for Final Cut Pro, it was announced that Pixar would be switching to OS X and G5 workstations for it production work.

I think the side benefit of a consumer-level Unix-based OS supported by a major player is a good thing for all. Most of us in the IT biz knew that a unix-like kernel-based system would be the final victor, and looking at the current market of Windows XP, OS X and Linux, this has also been borne out. If Apple is serious about increasing market share, look for an increased committment to business computing and enterprise services. OS X can play in a mixed-OS environment and has alot to offer many businesses, but management systems are lacking. I expect some overtures from Apple to convince IT managers that Apple is committed to the enterprise and business computing.

And when you see Steve Jobs walking around Pixar with that smug look on his face, you’ll know why.