2002 Technology of the Year: Apple platform

Last year, Apple could have made an easy case for aborting its play for the business and Unix markets, retreating back to its cozy "creative professional" niche. Looking in from the outside, we saw loyal customers and software vendors balking at the tedious upgrade to OS X. We watched the Linux/Unix/BSD/open-source crowd descend on Apple, critiquing and demanding changes to the platform without spending a dime on it. Mac desktops and the new Xserve took a beating from ever-faster, ever-cheaper PCs, and it looked as though Motorola's 32-bit PowerPC processor might have reached the end of the road.

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Instead of backing down, Apple rolled up its sleeves. A rapid-fire sequence of updates addressed bugs and gaps in OS X. Apple stuck with and expanded its open-source efforts, ignoring harsh criticism from GNU for not being open enough. It's been unusually forthcoming on the hardware front, posting detailed technical documents and putting up QuickTime videos showing customers how to install their own upgrades.

With its platform, Apple tried to balance three seemingly conflicting goals: Keep existing Mac users happy, make OS X's GUI and application support as rich and accessible as Windows', and be regarded as the best Unix client platform on the market. The Mac platform is taking shape as one that users and developers outside Apple's established niche markets can embrace.

We'll highlight one aspect of the platform that's evolving particularly well: the Unix layer. Apple spent a lot of effort to make OS X source-code compatible with BSD. There are some quirks that complicate the porting of text-based Unix applications and services to the Mac, but 2002 updates to the OS and development tools netted vast improvements. OS X is now a supported build target for the most visible open-source projects, meaning the latest cut of Apache or Mozilla is likely to hit the Mac at the same time it hits Linux, BSD, and Solaris.

Plus, Apple finally addressed what was a showstopper for some Unix developers. On January 7, Apple released its beta of the first hardware-accelerated X Window server for OS X. It seems like a small thing, but hundreds of open and commercial Unix graphical applications would not run, or would run with unacceptably poor performance, under OS X. There is more work to do, but the Apple platform is here to stay.