[pliny]

As MacWorld New York looms (X.05?) and more and more apps begin to get ported to X, I was wondering: how much life does OS 9 have left in it? I for one am very ignorantly happy with 9 and its workings on my trusty grape and have no plans to switch over to "rock solid" X any time soon even though my DV 400 w/ 320 ram/40 gig could run it. I look in the general direction of X and say nyet.

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"i look in your general direction"

[reader50]

OS 9 probably has a year or two of Apple development left. Mostly bug fixes and small refinements to make it run better in the OS X Classic environment. Considering how many people are using OS 9, I suspect that 3rd party software developers will keep supporting it with new software for another 3-4 years.

This is the general pattern that happened when Apple switched from the 68K series processor to the PowerPCs.

[Hobbes]

And remember that there's at least one more upgrade of 9 in the works... 9.2. And rumor has it that 9.5 might be developed as well.

[Moonray]

Don't worry, there are Companies outside using Macs for professional work and they won't switch any soon until OS X becomes faster and it's able to work with the OS X Finder at least the same as it's possible now with 8/9.

There is still software developed to run smooth on OS 8/9 without looking too much on OS X cause it's still in development (if you view at it from a professional side you can say OS X is still in alpha stage).

I'm also very happy with OS 9 and it would cost me much more time to do what I do in OS X.

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[spicyjeff]

Mac OS 9.2 will be the last update (withholding the need to fix any bugs intorduced with 9.2 of course).