I’m stuck with Mac OS X Snow Leopard for awhile. That unexpected delay wouldn’t suck so much if Apple’s newest operating system hadn’t decided to eat my Macbook battery. There’s a debate among Mac users about why Snow Leopard seems to flag previously good batteries as failing, frequently popping up the warning, Service Battery. That would be fine if your battery was actually failing. Some aren’t.
But there are elements of Mac OS X I love. They won’t motivate me to stick with the operating system, but I’d sure like to take them with me when I finish migrating to a new OS. Primary among them is Time Machine, Apple’s point-and-click, behind-the-scenes backup functionality.
Many of them have expressed shock, anger, and in the case of the AngryMacBastards podcast, a desire to ‘put a bullet’ in my head for writing publicly about my disillusionment with Apple Computer.
I dove into Linux at the suggestion of several commenters who urged me to take a look at the open-source end of the OS world before deciding to go over to the Microsoft dark side. Why not? I figured. One-half of my goal is never again to have to pay several hundred extra dollars for specially branded hardware just to run my OS of choice, and the other half is to remove myself from Steve Jobs’ heavy-handed control of the applications I choose to install there.
I’ve persisted in owning no fewer than 11 Macs in 12 years. When Macs work, they work–so well, in fact, that we tend to forget when they don’t. Even when, as in my case, they don’t work a lot of the time.
Back from the Christmas break, and happy to have not spent too much money during the holidays, when what has to go and happen? Apple iCEO Steve Jobs has to release sweet, new, formerly ‘The Enemy’ Intel Core Duo processor-based media-center iMacs, to replace the now-aging G4 and G5 IBM/Motorola processors that essentially built the Macintosh platform. And me with an extra paycheck in hand, too.