I quite honestly think that some people don't read their emails before responding. Nowhere in my email did I say that Apple was forcing me to upgrade to Sierra. The point is that I can't do so even if I desperately wanted to without buying a new machine. Indeed, I don't agree with something being forced upon anyone. I feel the reference here is towards Microsoft and Windows 10. Believe me I am no fan of such an approach.
However, here is an interesting point. I am running a 5-year-old desktop custom built machine. It has 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive. Despite the speck remaining the same in every sense, including the CPU, Windows 10 is much faster than Windows 7 ever was on this machine. So, please feel free to lambast Microsoft. Times they deserve it, times they don't. I do not feel protective towards any provider of either goods or services. It is simply a financial transaction between them and myself. Long gone is the day when providers cared anything about their customers, and as far as I am concerned, the feeling is mutual. Despite that however, I strongly feel that people should pay for the goods and services they receive. This is equally true when the goods are licenced software. There are those who feel it is fine to share such products with friends and family members in breach of very clear guidelines to the contrary, but the less said about that the better. Thank goodness none of my friends subscribe to this list. Another responder points out that my Mini is, and will probably continue to function using El Capitan for a long time. I have no doubt of that and I have said as much myself. Macs are built too last. It defeats the purpose however if the hardware cannot be upgraded to match the needs of the software, at least to some degree, without buying a new machine. Here is something in my appalling ignorance that escapes me. I have a friend who bought a Mini at the same time as myself. An off the shelf Mac Mini in late 2009 had a speck of 1GB of RAM and a 128GB hard drive. He decided to double the Ram to 2GB and stay with the same size hard drive. I, on the other hand, decided on 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. As you can imagine the price difference was significant. Now, here is the point. He is also running El Capitan with absolutely no performance difference to my own machine. Like myself, he cannot upgrade to Sierra, but as we have both light-heartedly laughed, he has only been half as well screwed as I myself have. So, do chill out friends. The sun still shines and the world continues to revolve. An almost pathological adherence to any one supplier over another cannot be a good thing. Apple produce a great product with great built-in accessibility. The weakness in their model from a consumer's perspective is that they provide both the hardware and the software. Although this has many benefits, it is not an ideal situation in one crucial area. Namely, it is not financially to their advantage to support hardware beyond a short time frame. Microsoft will be just as bad in this respect now that they have also got into the hardware game. Because of that, under no circumstances, will I purchase any of their hardware. They will use the same old flannel to encourage their customers to buy the latest offering so that their well-heeled shareholders can buy a bigger and better yacht than their equally well-heeled neighbours. I have a rule that I always follow when assimilating any information coming from a source that has a financial interest in that information. Don't believe everything they tell you. Indeed, only believe a small fraction of what they tell you, and you can't go wrong. Kind Regards: Martin -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor. You can reach mark at: macvisionaries+modera...@googlegroups.com and your owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at: http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
