The Leopard hunts in daylight
So when you get buy a mac you get the latest operating system chucked in free with your purchase. customers would be a little annoyed if that were not the case. But during the lifetime of the hardware you’ve purchased, the chances are that apple will release a newer operating system. When it comes out, you have to pay for it. It costs £50. Should you? Yes. And here’s why.
Apple launched Leopard (OSX 10.5) this week. As far as I can tell, there was OS 9, which was shit, and then OSX. Which was good. And there are various flavors of OSX you can have, all named after cool bigcats. But even though they have cool, cat names, they are really just OSX… plus a version number (I have version 10.4.10 - which was the default release on the intel-chipped mac-books.)
Herein lies the genius of mac marketing. I love good marketing far more than I love good technology (and I luuuuuuurve good technology) - I’m ALMOST willing to pay £50 to upgrade, if I couldn’t nick it off a mate, which I can.
Windows. You’ve had ….. Windows ‘95 (which I started on, soon enough superseded by 98 (which was shit), then 2000 (which was great). Then they realised that the year naming convention thing made them look silly. So we went to XP (which was ok). And now…. vista (which is shit). The Operating System is what we use everyday without thinking about it. It’s important, but frankly people will use any old shit. They have to.
Sorry - sidetracked - back to the leopard. So on Friday… on the first day of release, the mac-o-phile company I work for got hold of a copy of the new mac operating system. Now in the olden days….. when a new operating system came out, nothing happened. People waited for a while for two reasons. Firstly because they had to buy it, and anti-cracking security takes time to break. And secondly to find out if the thing actually worked. Try to ‘upgrade’ your computer and watch everything disappear, break and generally require you to ‘reinstall the operating system’ from scratch, loosing all your email, programs and data.
Here’s how you install leopard. You stick in a CD with a lovely design on it, and reboot your computer. If you have less than 5GB of free space, it will not let you do it. If you have the required free space, you click ok a few times and wait for an hour. Then…. you have the brand new leopard OS, will all the cool new features and a nice little american voice-over’ed video on the new features you should have a little shuftie at.
It just works. It’s easy. And it doesn’t break your computer and loose all your files. Your computer is totally intact, and simply runs on a new, improved (and it IS improved) OS. Brilliant. Genius. Nothing short.
There’s even a phrase for it amongst mac-o-philes….. ‘Trust the Jobs’. (Referring to Steve Jobs, the face of apple). I trust the jobs. I don’t trust those twats at Microsoft. Never did.
STOP PRESS!
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