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OS Updates
Thursday, October 24th, 2013 10:58 amI am very happy that with the introduction of “Maverick” or OS X as it is also known, by Apple, that the days of paid operating systems seem to be over. If you but a computer, it seems rude to have to buy the bloody operating system without which it will do anything other than eat electricity.
There is enough money to be made in paying for specialist apps, which seems to be the way things are going: you get the basic package as part of what you pay for when you buy the machine and the fancy customisation is what you pay for, a bit at a time as and when you decide you need it. Frankly, on the Mac, with Open Office I have a word processing package that is up to my needs and beyond that all I would really like now is a reasonably priced Mac alternative, or rather equivalent to Paint Shop Pro, or Photo Shop.
I was rather unprepared for just how long it took to download Maverick last night. It is amazing how quickly we forget the horrors of dial up in these days of broadband (I refuse to call it ‘super fast‘ broadband: I still get buffering on iPlayer from time to time, even with what is supposedly Virgin Media’s 20meg service). I mean objectively, 5gB or so of data doesn’t take that long to download, but it felt like it and I ended up just going to bed and letting it come down over night. For all I know it had finished by the time I had turned out the light, but the first 3gB took an annoying amount of time. The ‘annoying’ of 2013 is rather different to the ‘annoying’ of 2003 and I am talking tens of minutes rather than hours.
This morning, I was again caught out by the installation time of the downloaded software. The iMac is only a few months old, so I naively assumed that it would do the job in a few minutes. I should have known better. It took well over 40 minutes to install and restart, followed by a further 15 or so to do the mysterious confirmation of whatever of the installation that the Mac is so fond of.
The result is that I now have Maverick installed and operating on my Mac, but no idea of what’s changed or how clever it is because I had to switch the bloody thing off and race to catch the bust to the station, having left it too late to walk.
I only turned the machine on in the first place to sort out a couple of daily tasks on Warcraft. I didn’t have time for that in the end.
I bet I forget tonight…
There is enough money to be made in paying for specialist apps, which seems to be the way things are going: you get the basic package as part of what you pay for when you buy the machine and the fancy customisation is what you pay for, a bit at a time as and when you decide you need it. Frankly, on the Mac, with Open Office I have a word processing package that is up to my needs and beyond that all I would really like now is a reasonably priced Mac alternative, or rather equivalent to Paint Shop Pro, or Photo Shop.
I was rather unprepared for just how long it took to download Maverick last night. It is amazing how quickly we forget the horrors of dial up in these days of broadband (I refuse to call it ‘super fast‘ broadband: I still get buffering on iPlayer from time to time, even with what is supposedly Virgin Media’s 20meg service). I mean objectively, 5gB or so of data doesn’t take that long to download, but it felt like it and I ended up just going to bed and letting it come down over night. For all I know it had finished by the time I had turned out the light, but the first 3gB took an annoying amount of time. The ‘annoying’ of 2013 is rather different to the ‘annoying’ of 2003 and I am talking tens of minutes rather than hours.
This morning, I was again caught out by the installation time of the downloaded software. The iMac is only a few months old, so I naively assumed that it would do the job in a few minutes. I should have known better. It took well over 40 minutes to install and restart, followed by a further 15 or so to do the mysterious confirmation of whatever of the installation that the Mac is so fond of.
The result is that I now have Maverick installed and operating on my Mac, but no idea of what’s changed or how clever it is because I had to switch the bloody thing off and race to catch the bust to the station, having left it too late to walk.
I only turned the machine on in the first place to sort out a couple of daily tasks on Warcraft. I didn’t have time for that in the end.
I bet I forget tonight…