win some, lose some

[kaigou]

Well, wiped the drive & upgraded, and now I have to (a) figure out wtf Mac has changed for all its settings, (b) wtf is up with making me use my admin pw for EVERYTHING, and the most important, (c) MAKING IT DO WHAT I WANT. Sadly, experience has taught me it's the last that'll take the longest (if it's ever achieved). On the plus side, very speedy now! Though I wonder how much of that is because my address book got messed up and/or didn't save to the backup drive, and now... well, that was a lot of addresses. Guess I just need to spend a few days convincing myself that I didn't want to write any of you, anyway. Sheesh. It's always something...

Comments

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Wow, I did not know either that they were going to pull Snow Leopard from the market or that it was going to be impossible to skip a version to do the upgrade to Lion, assuming one wants to upgrade to Lion. How . . . irritating.
I suppose if it comes to that I'll be able to borrow the intermediate OS installation disks, but the whole thing seems irrational and unlike Apple. In the old days, after all, you could go straight from OS9 to Panther, and never miss a beat or lose track of a file.

[kaigou]

Thing is, I'm not sure if this means you can't do a clean from-fresh install of Lion... or not. The way the propaganda sounded, it made it seem like you could only upgrade to Lion, not new-install-from-nothing. Which meant you had to have Snow Leopard, to do that upgrade. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me -- normally a new version must also have a fresh install from scratch method -- but hellifino. The only plus side was that Snow Leopard was only like $30, which is painful but not nearly as painful as the days of new versions being $150 and up.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Hmmm, well . . . It occurs to me that even if it turns out you do need Snow Leopard, it ought to be possible to boot from a drive that does have it and use that to jump through whatever stupid hoops Lion requires. Unless I'm deluding myself, and there's something even ickier going on than insisting that we have to buy things through the apps store, which doesn't work without goddamned Snow Leopard. Which was one of the only reasons I ever even considered the intermediate upgrade.

But the more I try to contemplate this, the odder it seems that they wouldn't keep SL available -- surely they want people to adopt the new OS? And one of the reasons some of us are loyal to Apple is the way their high-end laptops are solid enough machines so that they'll be functional through many generations of OS; it's not as if all their users whose machines came with Leopard installed are going to be looking at new computers before Lion itself is obsolete.

[kaigou]

Honestly, I have no idea. The irony about the complaint I'm about to repeat is that it's now moot (since my laptop died a quiet death right when we arrived at the hotel, two weekends ago, while travelling) -- but only with Snow Leopard did I discover that my laptop could no longer be upgraded. Like, at all. Improper type of harddrive or whatever, I can't recall now. Essentially rendered obsolete by the company's own OS, which was a first for me, at least in terms of Macs. Then again, most people I know don't have laptops that are ten years old & still working fine.

Well, was working fine. Now it's just... spontaneously dead. Though it does seem suspicious to me that it went through TSA's box o' microwaves and then it died. But still, I got ten years out of it, so I don't think I can complain all that much. Relatively speaking.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

I suddenly feel a powerful sense of kinship. My Pismo currently lives with friends in New York, so that I can travel there and bring only a portable hard drive if necessary, but it still works and I still use it from time to time. I haven't even tried to upgrade the OS beyond Panther, and it is true that the chip is really too slow for .mkv video. But otherwise? Last time I looked, it was still working, and I will mourn it when the day comes that it doesn't.