piranha | welcome to apple

so we're getting ready to upgrade to tiger (OSX 10.4). the paramour pointed out that we have some proof-of-purchase coupons that came with our last upgrade. i found them on the desk (how organized is that!), but they don't have numbers, and need to be filled in with (way too much) info. so i searched all over apple's site to find out under which circumstances they are applicable, and how much we can save with them. couldn't find anything. also, apple's store design -- much too small a font, guys!

google and blogs to the rescue. it turns out that there are upGRADES (such as from 10.3 to 10.4) and upDATES (such as bug fixes between such upgrades). most people download those updates online. for those people who don't have broadband, they can take those coupons to an apple store and get a free CD with the updates (or i guess mail them in to have the CD shipped to them).

ok, totally useless for us. fine. but it would certainly be a good thing if apple printed that on the bloody coupons.

so tomorrow i get to buy new software, if at list price. good ghod, leaving the house already again! and i had barely hunkered down. :)

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Twice with Tiger, the routine updates have taken down my kernel and put me into the no-boot zone. The first time, I had to go buy an external drive to build into a boot drive to rescue what was on the internal drive. Had to boot from the external drive again with an update just a couple of weeks ago. It's the kind of thing that makes you real careful about backups.

@%<

There are four apple machines in the house (there were six, but two have gone away to school). Stacey upgrades her desktop and laptop each time one comes out. Almost no problems. The last round, though, has screwed up her cannon printer driver. The cannon prints just fine from the laptop, but, from the desktop, the output is VERY pale. But those have been the only problems.

The other two machines, however, are a different story. Two more desktops. Same model as Stacey's. The last upgrade will not install on either machine. It gets part way through and has a fatal error. It stops at the same place reliably on each machine. It is a different place on each machine, though.

A couple of times I have ssh'd into Stacey's desktop to fix some problem or another that we couldn't find a gui way to fix. It is nice that one can get a shell. It is also nice that x11 will run on an apple machine. Stacey can run almost any bsd/linux software.

It is difficult to do manual intervention on the machine in that Apple has taken over the permissions/accounts system. Sigh.

All in all, I like the apple better than a windows machine. Although a lot of software that was written for microsoft then ported to apple doesn't work all that well or has missing features. Quciken is one. But most of that software has been cloned in open source and runs full-featured on my linux machine.

If I were to start over I would have had a mac from the early days and microsoft would never have gotten a dime.

All that said, you can buy your upgrade online, can't you? and have it shipped. Hunkerers of the world unite!

Love.

oh man, the horror stories really make me look forward to this upgrade! :)

All that said, you can buy your upgrade online, can't you?

i could, but the reason we're upgrading at all is work-related, and that also means that we've gotta do it quickly. i also think i might buy an external firewire drive at the same time. make backups easier.

The external firewire drive is an excellent, excellent idea. And once you've got it, there's a freeware backer-upper from LaCie called SilverPlatter. This is very useful, because there are some permissions-dependent things on OSX that can re-e-ally screw you up, as I discovered two crises ago, an adventure in which I learned enough that the most recent crisis wasn't a crisis.

@%<

Sorry, SilverLining.

@%<

thanks! the drive i bought included backup software, but i made a note of silverlining in case it doesn't do a good enough job.

Stacey has an external lacy harddrive. It is great. It did NOT work with firewire, though. She also has a camera on her machine hooked up to firewire. The firewire kept getting confused and tried repeated to write to the camera instead of the harddrive.

It works wonderfully with usb, however. Except for the part where it suddenly became read-only. That was a problem with itunes, I think. We found something online to deal with that.

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