My First Kernal Panic

I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a bit more than 5 weeks. In that time I’ve only needed to restart my Mac for OS X updates. Tonight was the first time I’ve had to reboot my machine for non routine reasons. I’ll tell you what… A crash in OS X is quite graceful and makes you think… “uhhh… ok, I guess I need to restart”. Its completely different than the “OH SHIT! What the hell happened?” feeling you get when a big nasty blue screen of death pops up on a windows box.

I find it interesting that Apple keeps OS X super simple all the way down to crashes. Your average user doesn’t need to know any specifics about a crash beyond that a restart is needed. Those long cryptic messages Microsoft puts in their BSOD scare you more than anything. If you’ve experienced a windows crash… have you ever needed the information thats displayed? I thought so.

After being a Windows user for well over a decade I’m surprised that its taken this long for OS X to have its first crash. Luckily when the kernal panic occurred I was just tagging some photo’s in iPhoto. Its nice that iPhoto saves added/edited keywords on the fly. So I didn’t lose any time/information. Had I lost a hours worth of keywords I would have been quite bummed.