Why I won’t be buying Leopard

November 1st, 2007  |  Published in Hardware, Open Source, Technology Zen  |  3 Comments

As many of you know, Apple’s newest version of the Mac OS, 10.5, shipped just a few days ago. I have been an Apple user since 1980, and a Macintosh owner since 1987. I have owned about a dozen Macintosh computers (or clones) over the course of 20 years. I still own a Mac mini, which I expect will be my last Macintosh, and I won’t be upgrading that Mac mini to Leopard.

Those of you who are loyal Mac users are gasping. I’d gasp if I read this a couple of years ago. The Macintosh operating system has without question, the best, most intuitive user interface ever invented, built on top of the best OS invented, UNIX. Things “just work” (for the most part - apparently Leopard has been having issues.) And I’ve been quite happy that the Mac OS is gaining market share over Windows - it would be great to see that continue.

There are a number of reasons for my deciding to slowly leave the Macintosh platform:

  • I want to focus more energy and time on free and open source platforms - I might donate what I would have spent on Leopard to some deserving projects.
  • I’m not liking Apple’s increasingly closed and monopolistic tendencies when it comes to the iPod and iPhone.
  • I don’t use my Mac much anymore - I migrated to Linux as my main desktop, and will be sticking there. I do have a few things I need to migrate, including time tracking (I’m starting to use GnoTime to do time tracking,) PIM data (I haven’t decided which avenue I’ll be going, but I’m definitely migrating that data this month to Linux), and music (which will be hard - I have quite a number of DRMed iTunes Music Store albums I will have to painstakingly convert.) The only thing that will be left is games.
  • I like building my own systems - I need a new desktop, and I like the idea that I can build my own easily, and get a fair bit of power fairly cheaply.

It’s been fun, these 20 years with Macintosh. It seems a fitting moment to say goodbye to Apple.

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  1. Kevin Mark says:

    November 1st, 2007 at 2:57 pm (#)

    As someone who started with an Apple II, then a Pineapple(clone), then a Timex-Sinclair 1000 & 2068, then Performa 450, then PowerComputing(clone), then PC’s with Win98 and now Ubuntu, I guess I understand.

    But Dual-booting Wintel in most ways is equivilant to Dual-booting Mactel, practially and philosophically. But at least with Mactel, it looks shiny! So you could have done that.

    But if you want to go the FLOSS route, that’s cool too. Welcome your new Penguin overlords ;-)

  2. Gordon Montgomery says:

    November 20th, 2007 at 7:57 pm (#)

    You make some very good points and I think I will “go Ubuntu” too. have you thought about which laptop might be best to load Ubuntu up on?

    Music converters:
    http://www.hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/
    http://askbobrankin.com/convert_itunes_to_mp3_format.html
    http://www.blazemp.com/convert_protected_aac.htm

  3. Gordon Montgomery says:

    November 20th, 2007 at 8:00 pm (#)

    http://www.hymn-project.org/jhymndoc/

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