The end of an Era for Apple users

It has happened to Apple users more than once.  Apple has moved on and what seemed like bright shinning hardware at the time has now been left behind.  I left Apple in the summer of 2004.  I ended up purchasing an aluminum Powerbook G4 that August.  In December, I bought a dual G5 "Supercomputer."

My aluminum Powerbook turned out to be one of my less reliable Apple purchases.  Eventually in the summer of 2006, I replaced it with a MacBook, which is my only Intel based Mac.  My dual G5 system continues to be a workhorse.  The drives have been upgraded a couple of times, and I might be getting ready to do it again.

I understand the need to move on, but I really hate to see those G5 systems left in the dust.  The G5 to me brings back great memories.  I like to think back to the Va. Tech Cluster made of desktop G5s and ranked briefly among the world's top supercomputers.  I still have one of the tee-shirts from that adventure.

The thing is my G5 does everything that I need it to do, so I will probably hang on to it for a few more years.  I am sad that it will not have a serious operating system upgrade during that time.

As is always the case, the promise of a new operating system is always in what the developers make of it.  You always hear words like "lay the foundation" and "a foundation for growth."  I am fond of torturing died in the wool Apple systems engineers with questions like- "Okay so what application is the best example of all those technologies under the hood that you have been touting?"

Maybe my computing needs are so stable that I do not need anything new, but in the last five years, I have yet to get the name of a single must have program that I actually could not live without.

That is not a terrible thing since I am very pleased with the Apple part of my computing environment.  Trust me Leopard has been a much better ride than Vista.  Linux has been a better ride than  Vista.  That's why I take with a grain of salt articles like Infoworld's, "Apple's Snow Leopard Is a Pale Imitation of Windows 7."  I am much more inclined to believe ComputerWorld's take on Snow Leopard which stresses the refinements under the hood.

The reality is that for most of us Mac, OS X is a better operating system than Windows.  It costs more because you have to buy it with Apple's hardware.  In the end it usually (with the exception of my Aluminum Powerbook) works out fine since Apple hardware is very reliable.  We have one Mac that is ten years old, and still working great.

My Windows Vista laptop finally came up with Service Pack II as an upgrade last Saturday.  It literally took hours to finish.  I still maintain that there is a productivity tax of nearly $700 per year on Windows machines.

While I would love to have Apple's latest and greatest on my G5, I know that missing an operating system upgrade is not going to change my productivity.  The application integration is the real key to the power of a Mac.

I will go one step further and say that the real power of the Mac is its ability to take Windows data and integrate it very well even to the point of sending it back to Windows for printing.

Recently I did a flyer in Pages on the Mac.  It had a map that I had done on SnagIt on the PC in it.  It was double-sided on legal size paper with a really nice color photograph.  I opened the document in Word on my PC laptop and was able to print four hundred double sided copies without a flaw.  I had to use word on the PC because of some authentication software which prevents me from using my Macs on our large office Konica printer.

I will look forward to my copy of Snow Leopard, but I am not in a rush. Things are working pretty well in my computing world. 

Hey, we even survived Hurricane Bill with just a little changing of the sands, not getting an operating system upgrade is a piece of cake.                                                            

Comments

[Tim Robertson]

I think that 10.5 is a great OS, and that if your G5 is still running great, and does everything you require, there is no need to upgrade to a new machine. Just as long as you don't start to complain about it;-)

[Tom Elam]

Why single out Apple for moving forward? USB thumb drives made my expensive iOmega USB Zip and Jaz drives obsolete. Vista will not run on my 4 year old Dell. Recent advances in hacker technology are about to render my wireless router's WAP security obsolete (and yours too, I might add). Time moves on...

[ocracokewaves]

I don't think I was very harsh with Apple. Apple (and those of us there at the time) sold the G5 as the architecture of the future. One could logically assume that the architecture of the future would last a little longer. Had Apple not switched processor platforms Snow Leopard would probably work on G5s. I don't question the reasons or the results behind Apple switch. However, I along with lots of other are left holding the ball. Fortunately the ball we're holding is a lot better than Vista.

The Dell not working with Vista is another problem altogether. Vista barely runs well on new hardware. Even when it runs it causes problems. I spent the morning trying to help another real estate agent recover from a Vista service pack which turned off her ability to send email. Of course I can remember one Apple upgrade that did that to me but that is another story.

I'm not too worried about hackers in our neighborhood, we're just a little off the beaten path and in a gated community.

http://coastalnc.org/bluewatercove/

[Tom Elam]

On the subject of Vista...a little follow-up story.

Late last year an HP laptop, with Vista, just stopped working. The fact that it was dropped from 6 feet probably had NOTHING to do with that!

I had a meeting coming up in Australia less than a week after it failed. So I went to a local store an bought a new HP machine that was similar to the one that "failed". Lacking the time to reinstall all the extensive software collection on the new machine I simply switched hard drives. Several of the drivers (modem, wireless card, Ethernet, video, sound) were different on the 2 machines. When I booted up the new one it mostly worked, but not networking or any of the other items needing updated drivers. So I went into Device Manager, saw all the stuff not working, used the wife's Dell to download the drivers I needed off the HP site, and in about an hour I had everything working. That was last October. I am still using the new machine every day, and it has run like a champ. Included in that experience was SP2, which caused no problems here. YMMV. :)

Tom

[ocracokewaves]

The difference is that with a Mac you would not have needed to download any of the drivers. I get to see lots of people using Vista. For every one positive story about Vista, I can give you three or four negative ones. If it is such a great operating system, how come Microsoft is working so hard to ditch it? I use Vista because I have to in certain cases. Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux are both superiour operating systems.

[Jon]

You know, you can't really run Ubuntu on the G5 either.... Oh, you can, if you can find the download, but what you can run under it is more limiting than under OSX. No Flash, no Skype, and lots of other non-distro software won't compile for the PPC (usually because the coders know nothing about it). I tried it on my Pismo, but gave up, and went back to Tiger. I finally got a Netbook to replace it. It's much faster, and runs Windows, Ubuntu (right now, Mandrake, but when 9.10 is truly ready, I'll probably wipe that and go back to Ubuntu) and Leopard. ;-) Linux on x86 is much nicer--much nicer.

-Jon