Longtime Heathen know that we’re crazy about Macs here at Heathen Central, but it wasn’t always so. Up until about 1998 or 1999, we were Wintel people, but trying to live on a Windows laptop on the road was absolutely miserable. Sleep never worked right. It crashed constantly. Finally, realizing we did Office docs for a living, and that MS Office is the same on Macs and PCs, we took the plunge on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook, and haven’t looked back.

Back then, Macs still ran the great-great-great-grandson of the original Mac OS — all greys and lines with that Chicago font everywhere — and they weren’t all that much stabler than PCs for most things; however, the mobile platform was one place where they had the advantage, and it was huge. Done? Just close it. Need it back? Just open. And, unlike Win98, OS 9 didn’t eat itself every few months. We were happier, but not genuinely happy.

Or, rather, we weren’t until Apple made the jump to OS X. In one of the bravest moves in the history of consumer computing platforms, they more or less scrapped the long-in-the-tooth operating system and started over with a kernel based on the FreeBSD open source platform. For the first time, Macs were, essentially, running Unix. And for the first time, a Unix-like OS was a completely reasonable choice for you, your brother, your mother, or even your grandmother, so well had Apple hidden the complexities. Unlike in OS 9, though, those complexities were available for the savvy user, and consequently that’s when we became true Mac partisans. This new OS was capable of running old-style Mac programs using an emulation layer called Classic, but Apple made it pretty clear this was a temporary state, and that all new work should be done for OS X.

If Apple hadn’t made this move, we’d have long since gone to full-time Linux — and, we suspect, Apple wouldn’t be the roaring success they are today (they’ve now got a market cap larger than IBM).

Because of our unconventional Mac history, then, we’re not really invested in the old style Mac paradigm; we don’t miss any Classic programs, and haven’t even bothered to enable it on our last several machines. It’s a dead issue for us.

Well, now it’s really a dead issue for everyone, or at least everyone who runs Leopard. New Macs haven’t been able to run Classic at all for a while (PowerPCs can; Intel machines can’t), but the Leopard upgrade is the final nail. Leopard has the Classic hooks removed. Mac Luddites, it’s time to join the future.