We’ve had a lot of people asking about the upcoming release of OS X for Macintosh. There are several beta versions being circulated already. First of all, if you have digital audio or MIDI hardware and software you want to use DO NOT install OS X on your machine. Once you do it there are serious difficulties getting all of the components back out again and it’s unlikely your equipment will be fully functional with the versions currently being tested. Basically you’ll have to reformat your hard drive and start from scratch to get back to OS9.
That said, there are some very exciting things happening in OS X with regard to MIDI and audio, and we think it’s going to be an excellent OS for serious work once everything is finalized and the manufacturers have time to react to it in terms of updating drivers and such. Some folks complain that Apple is moving in the wrong direction by building machines with only USB and FireWire ports. There are already several excellent USB audio interfaces for Mac, and within the next year there will be many more. We also expect to see a lot of FireWire based audio interfaces within the next year as well. A good source of up to the minute OS X information is MacNN. They have a whole web site devoted to OS X news.