Horizons, Issue 46, August 1998

Rhapsody is Dead; Long Live MacOS X!

Steve Jobs, interim CEO of Apple Computer, announced Apple's latest operating system strategy at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference on May 11. Rhapsody (see Horizons, issue 43, May 1998) 1.0 will be released, only slightly behind schedule, in late summer 1998, but no further releases are planned. Instead Apple will release MacOS X (pronounced ten) in late summer 1999, which will include all of the enhancements intended for Rhapsody with the MacOS brand name.

MacOS X will have a Mach 3.0 kernel, with a 4.4 BSD (Unix) layer providing support for POSIX programs, and a windowserver supporting both Extended QuickDraw and Adobe's PDF. The Yellow Box API, which supports object oriented programming using OpenStep, and is portable to Windows NT and 95/98, is fully supported, and can be programmed using a mixture of C, C++, Objective C and Java. Most application written for MacOS 8 will run on MacOS X, but won't be able to take advantage of many of the new OS features. This is exactly how Rhapsody was described at last years WWDC, but now has the MacOS X label attached.

The one new feature in MacOS X is the Carbon API. This is a development library that includes 6,000 of the 8,000 APIs from MacOS 8. Apple claim that over 90% of the function calls used in the typical commercial application will be supported under Carbon, and that porting should only take several weeks.

Alongside the 1.0 release of Rhapsody, running on both PowerPC and Intel hardware, will be a matching release of Yellow Box for NT. This runs on Windows NT and 95, and provides 100% code compatibility between Rhapsody and Windows. Last year Apple promised that run time licenses will be free for developers, but they won't be able to deliver on this promise with Rhapsody. Instead, run times will be available for $20 per user, with a minimum purchase of $1,500. The promise for free run times has been extended for MacOS X, by which time Display Postscript will have been replaced by Extended QuickDraw, released Apple from royalty demands from Adobe.

Reaction from developers for both MacOS and Rhapsody was warm, with the only serious criticism coming from Open Transport developers. Representatives from Adobe and Macromedia were on stage during the keynote to speak in favour of the Carbon APIs.

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Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: July 6, 1998