Posted by Greg Mills
With all the stories that are going to be posted in the next few days or weeks on Mac OS X Lion, the adoption of the newest system is a slam dunk for many of us. There are those however, who are still running the OS that came with their older computers.
Some people aren’t up on what is going on with the platform they are using and really don’t care. That is their right and hey, if email and surfing the web is all a person cares about, perhaps even $29 for an update to Lion is a poor investment for them. Some older computers won’t even run Lion, so the issue is moot for them anyway.
I have a sister-in-law who was storing her all her documents in the trash. The trash had never been emptied for a couple of years. When I updated her system for her, somehow the trash got emptied and the screams of anguish were gut retching to say the least.
Who is so detached from the proper workings of the computers they use every day, as to keep documents that need to be saved in the trash? I won’t mention Gail’s name. I showed her how to create a new file and how to drag documents into that file instead of the trash to clear the desktop. She begrudgingly agree that the new procedure wasn’t too hard to understand.
Some people fear updating for a while “for all the bugs to be worked out”. This Microsoftonian theory is based on the flawed business model of letting your customers debug your software to save money. That method of debugging saves a lot of money since good software engineers get paid a lot more than customers who can only complain until a patch is posted.
Apple tests its new OS with thousands of experienced people using every flavor of Mac that has ever come out. Minor glitches are bound to show up, but major problems are generally not a problem. Apple does most of the debugging in house and also relys upon its developers.
The cost of upgrading isn’t any longer such an issue. $29 for a major OS update is cheap enough. Remember when you had to add $100 to that figure and did so gladly? Apple has cut the retailer out of the update market since Lion is a download instead of a disk, sold at retail. That allows a price break. Lion is expected to run about 2 Gigs, so a high speed internet connection is going to be helpful helpful. Apple welcomes users to download at their local Apple Store using high speed internet connections.
Some people fear having to learn new ways of doing things on their computers. Remember when the transition from the Mac OS to OS X happened. There was a considerable learning curve back then, but Apple helped us get through it.
The Vista nightmare in the Windows side of the world was so bad a lot of people scrubbed their hard drives and dug out the older previous Windows OS disk and were very angry as they returned their copy of Vista to the retailer who sold it. Then there were “Vista capable” computers that weren’t capable. Hardware manufacturers and Microsoft were sued, gee what a mess.
There is a saying, that “the worst day fishing is better than the best day at work”. I guess we could say, the worst day using a Mac is better than the best day running a PC.