Lion: I Quit
From Troy:
I tried to swallow the new flavor of the Kool-Aid: OS X 10.7 Lion. I bought it, installed
it on my iMac Core 2 Duo and on my MacBook Pro. I tried to work with
the backwards scrolling, tried to like the new iOS style apps, tried to
like the new way Mail is formatted by default, and tried as hard as I
could to do without some of my favorite games (SimCity 4 Rush Hour in
particular), but I could take it no longer. Sure, I could tweak, but
why should I have to?
So I spent $30 on iPartition and
installed OS X 10.6 Snow
Leopard there. The more I am back in Snow Leopard, the more I am
thinking it is time to ditch Lion.
Troy
Hi Troy,
The more reports I hear from frustrated and
disgruntled Lion users, the more thankful I am that I resisted the
impulse to upgrade my Core
2 Duo Aluminum MacBook to give Lion a look-see in service. I'm now
anticipating that Snow Leopard may be the end of the upgrade road for
this machine, the way that OS X 10.4 Tiger has been for my
Pismo PowerBooks.
That's fine for the immediate future, but the Mac OS
world will move on, and the conundrum for me - still far from resolved
- is whether I will move along with it. I suppose I probably will
eventually, but not with a spring in my step and a song in my
heart.
I still harbour faint hope that Apple may be brought
to its senses by a user revolt, but that's likely fanciful. I don't
think there is probably a large enough cohort of Mac power user
veterans dismayed enough to boycott Lion to exert sufficient pressure.
The best we can probably realistically hope for is that Apple can be
persuaded to fix some of Lion's more egregious shortcomings and/or make
some of the "iOS-ified" feature set optional and restore traditional
Mac OS conventions, and that's likely optimistic. Apple didn't invest
heavily in setting up the iCloud infrastructure to change course now,
so we'll have to like it or lump it.
This week, The Register's Tony Smith, a longtime Mac
user,
remarked that he and his colleagues at The Reg who made the mistake
of upgrading quickly wonder if Lion may turn out to be the biggest boon
Windows has ever had in the Mac/Windows OS wars. Smith observes that
least they can, with some difficulty, "downgrade" (in this instance a
misnomer) to Snow Leopard, as you've done, but that's alas not an
option for owners of Mid 2011 and future Mac models who are stuck with
Lion and whatever follows it. Consequently, he's calling on the
Hackintosh community to develop a hack that will allow the real Mac
OS X, Snow Leopard, to run on Mid 2011 and later Macs.
Sounds like something we should be encouraging.
Charles
End of Apple USB Modem Support
From RL in response to Lack of USB Modem Support Could
Be a Lion Deal Breaker:
I couldn't agree more. It's such a trivial thing, but it pisses me
off that they couldn't be bothered to support the modem they sold less
than three years ago. Yeah, I could put out another $50 to get a
compatible one, but seriously? I don't rely on a modem for dialup, but
I do use it for onscreen caller ID, occasional faxing, and automatic
dialing.
And Rosetta would have been nice too. I've spent days looking for a
suitable replacement for Quicken. And the nanny OS? No thanks. It all
makes me really despise Apple, or what it has become. I agree they have
contempt for perfectly functional older technologies.
If you know of a place where venting might actually get someone at
Apple to listen, I'd love to hear about it.
Hi RL,
Apple listen? They don't even do focus group market
research. Or at least they didn't with Steve Jobs as CEO.
To be fair, they did put a second USB port in the
second-generation iBook
after finally adding a FireWire port to the original clamshell iBook
design late in its product life. Then they took the FireWire port away
again in the Late 2008 Unibody MacBook. Then put it back in the
Early 2009 13"
MacBook Pro. Then released the first-generation MacBook Air with
only one USB port and no FireWire. Then added a second USB port in the
second generation Air, with a Thunderbolt port added to the first
revision. And so it goes.
I expect that they do pay some attention to customer
and pundit critique, but rarely act on it.
I fear that we're stuck with the nanny-OS.
Charles
Bypassing Flash
From David in response to PowerPC and
Flash:
Charles,
Excellent suggestions regarding bypassing Flash on PPC; I have a
couple more:
DownloadHelper
extension in TenFourFox. Download Flash or MP4 files from most Flash
sites and play them in anything, VLC, QuickTime with Perian etc. Also,
there is the FlashVideoReplacer
extension that uses QuickTime plugin instead of Flash. Works okay, a
little buggy on my Mac though. Herr Kaiser is also working on a neat
little TenFourFox haxie that hands off some web video content to
QuickTime. Works quite well but is very beta right now. None of the
above help with Farmville or anything Facebook, but honestly growing
virtual crops has never been my thing, and I got off of Facebook when I
hit 123 friends. Something was very amiss: I have never had 123 total
friends in my life, period.
Also, one can always try out MintPPC. From your recent round tables, I
know you LEM guys aren't fans of Linux, but I have MintPPC on my iBook
G4, and I gotta tell you, it's a fracking revelation.
Iceweasel 6 is hellaciously - almost mindblowingly - fast,
renders perfectly, and runs circles around TenFourFox. Above methods
work well for 80% of the web video I want to watch, on Linux
FlashVideoReplacer uses Gnome Mplayer, and it works way better than
QuickTime on Mac OS X. There is a project called Lightspark to bring
an open source Flash to PPC Linux; so far it doesn't work well in
MintPPC. Developer is looking at porting Gnash, but that won't get us more than Flash
10.0 equivalency, if it even works.
over and out
Dr. Dave
Hi Dr. Dave,
Thanks for the comment and suggestions.
Charles
Using YouView for YouTube on PowerPC Macs
From Sebastian P.:
Dear Charles,
in your recent mailbag you discuss the options for PowerPC users
wanting to watch YouTube videos. A while ago I discovered an
application that allows to browse, watch, convert, and download YouTube
videos. It was specifically designed for us PPC Tiger folks. I put it
on our family's PowerBook G4
(1.33 GHz, 1 GB RAM), which had trouble playing YouTube
videos. Thanks to YouView it
works fine again. I thought you might like to add that to your next
mailbag.
Don't forget to send the author a small donation if you're
satisfied, hopefully encouraging him to do more updates in the future
:-)
Best Regards from Germany
Sebastian
My blog: We're "Obsolete"?
Who Cares!
Hi Sebastian,
Thanks for the helpful information.
My wife watches quite a bit of YouTube video on our
old 17" 1.33 GHz G4
PowerBook, but it's running Leopard and has 1.5 GB of RAM, which I
assume helps somewhat.
Charles
Chill Mat Fan Failure
From John, following up on Chill Mat for
Mac:
Hey, Charles,
Since I emailed you, one of the two fans in the Chill Mat quit
working. I think it's just a loose connection, as when I whack it on
the frame near the fan and then start it up, the dead fan tries to run
but then quits. It doesn't really matter though, because I mostly use
the mat without the fan(s) on. I find that the mesh top and bottom
allow a lot of natural airflow while keeping my lap cool.
As far as laptops go, I intend to use this 1.67 GHz G4 as long as I can.
It's plenty fast, and its only shortcomings are the 2 GB RAM
ceiling and the choppy video performance on certain websites. As a
matter of fact, right now I'm listening to the audio of an NFL
Tennessee Titans video, and that video plays perfectly. Others
apparently are denser, however, and play at varying rates.
My wife is a high school computer teacher at our church's school,
and she has the latest MacBook Pro (MBP) that the school provides. Our
college son, the baby of the family, has a 2006 or 2007 MBP that I got
for him on LEM Swap two-plus years ago.
No. 1 daughter just finished her dermatology residency at Vanderbilt,
and part of her deal was the medical center bought her the computer of
her choice. She went for a 17" MBP, which she likes very much. No. 2
daughter in Atlanta, having been raised on Macs, convinced her PC
husband to get an Intel iMac and an iPad. We're pretty well
covered.
Keep up the good work.
John
Hi John,
It probably is a bad connection as you suspect, but
still annoying. Should be grounds for a warranty replacement or
repair.
My wife is still getting great service from our old
17" 1.33 GHz PowerBook.
Sounds like you have a great family of Mac
enthusiasts!
Charles
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