At last the long awaited Mac OS 8 has arrived. For quite a while, Mac users everywhere have waited with baited breath for an eighth incarnation of their favorite Operating System. It would seem it has arrived, but not as the fabled Copland, but rather as an adaptation of an existing, lesser known OS, NeXT.

Ironically, Apple bought NeXT from Pixar, the wizards behind the movie Toy Story, which in turn is owned by a certain Mr Jobs (Mr Steve Jobs was one of the two Steves who started Apple back in 76)

Did Apple sell out just to put something on the table?
Hmm!! I think it depends on who you ask. Copland may have been great. A total rewrite of the OS in PPC native code, multitasking, multithreading, multiprocessing support, and as far as I can tell (with my limited technical knowledge) to be built around a Kernel (the core of Unix like OS's).
But all this kinda died...

Instead, they bought NeXT, an OS with multitasking, multithreading, and built around a Kernel... Fancy that!
The drawback? It doesn't run on Macs. But thats probably easy to fix compared to writing an OS from scratch.

So what do you have? An OS that's Unix based with the look, feel, and reassurance of the Mac OS interface that we've grown to love.
At the moment it's probably not the most stable OS in the world, but the groundwork's done to start building the greatest consumer/publishing/internet accessing/corporate OS in the world. Will it be? Time will tell.

OS 8 paves the path to Rhapsody, the name given to the new Mac OS being released in stages, and its various "Boxes" (see Treasure Boxes).

Is it better than what we've got already? Well you'll have to take a peek at it to find out. The interface isn't going to blow anyone away as most people have been using the Aaron Extension or Kaleidoscope from Greg Landwebber, to simulate OS8's look for a number of years now.
I've noticed a number of unexplainable crashes using it which is most likely to do with backward compatability issues, but due to OS8's "Protected Memory", when an application does grind to a halt you can exit it gracefully and be merrily on your way without restarting.
In reality, unless you restart anyway, you'll never get the damn thing to stand on its own two feet again anyway without further crashes.

Verdict: .....you decide.