You boys do realize that as college students you get $60 off the price, right?
Regardless, Fire works great and the newest version seems to have fixed the AIM block that AOL had put in place last week against 2.1a and prior versions. So, if you need IM services, it does AIM, ICQ, YahooIM, and MSN Messanger seemlessly in OS X.
I have yet to get enough bandwidth on Apple's site to get AppleWorks 6.1 [the update/preview] so I don't yet know how well that works.
AirPort works great, I was in a store today and spent some time working with it.
Location Manager in Mac OS X is near perfect.
Thing is though, you don't see it unless you look for it. Here is how it works.
If you select "automatic" the following happens.
You don't set up different "sets" of network settings for each location, instead the OS auto-detects the best connection and uses it. If you have AirPort installed and there is an AirPort Network available but not an ethernet network, then it will contect to the AirPort Network and contact it to determine all network settings without you even knowing. Later if you connect via ethernet it will use that connection since it is faster. All without the user ever being notified or bothered.
Course, if you want to make the determination yourself, you can. Just don't select "automatic."
Classic seems to run very well. I was able to run IE 5 [Classic], AIM, OE 5 [Classic, there is a beta or alpha Carbon build out], Fetch [Classic, although there is an OS X version out], all without problem. Although I have read in a TIL from Apple that one should not run two version of IE at once or you will get some kind of error.
QuickTime 5 seems good but I have yet to try a lot of different file types on it.
The OS seems quite snappy, but some things are still there to complain about. Window resizing will be a big issue for people who want to complain, its a legitimate complaint, but it won't ruin your life either.
Reportably network printers and Classic do not get along the best but do work, I haven't tried it yet myself though.
I have run it on a G3 600 iMacSE, PowerMac G4 Cube 450, and a G4 PowerBook 500. RAM ranged from 128MB, to 256MB.
In OS X native work 128MB seems like alot, but in Classic work I think you need it all and more is better. Just an opinion.
I seem to be writing long posts lately so I hope you guys bare with me.
At this point I am really excited by the UNIX 2/3s of this OS. Fact is that although we see 100% Mac OS Aqua, the reality is something like 85% UNIX or UNIX like stuff.
The best part of the release from a Mac community stand point is the Developer Tools included in the retail box. Much like in the days following 1984 software for the Macintosh now could well return to those grassroots it came from then.
I hope many Mac users take it upon themselves to create little projects like Fire that may become nationally known, platform wide standards.