On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 09:53:38AM -0600, Skip Montanaro wrote: > Here's the rub. Apple seems to rather quickly drop support for what appear > (numerically) to be minor releases. 10.1 is long gone. I have 10.3 on my > G5 and 10.2 on my laptop. I'm loathe to buy 10.3 at this point for my > laptop because 10.4 is in beta (right? Apple offered a preview version of > 10.4 to me for $500 recently). I figure as soon as I buy 10.3, 10.4 final > will be released. 10.3 will start to corrode and I'll be stuck again with > "old" software once again.
10.3's popularity was a lot greater than 10.2's; also, the time between 10.3 and 10.4 was considerably greater. I imagine it'll last you longer than 10.2 did, but you may find yourself wishing for 10.4 in a few months. > Only now I have two Macs, so the costs are double. Not quite; you can get a "family pack" good for up to 5 machines owned by an individual or family for less than twice the price. <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000E6NKA/104-1061095-1859926> > It seems that Apple's upgrade policy almost forces me to buy new versions as > soon as they are released. If I snooze when new releases come out I quickly > get left in the dust and wind up either skipping a version or upgrading > right before the next release. (This has happened to me in the past.) I > really hate to say this, but in this respect backward compatibility in > Windows seems to be much better. Am I missing something? Only that Mac OS X started out a lot less mature than recent versions of Windows, and is evolving a lot faster than Windows, so often the reason why a new Mac OS X version is required is that the functionality simply didn't exist in the prior version. Yes, backwards compatibility in Windows is better than Mac OS X, with most products I see still supporting back to Windows 98, and some requiring Windows 2000 (released December 1999, to use one definition). Mac OS X 10.0 wasn't even released until March 2001. I used 10.0, but had to reboot into Mac OS 9 a lot. 10.1 (September 2001) was a marginal improvement, but not a paid upgrade; still I couldn't use OS X full-time. 10.2 (August 2002) was the first version I voluntarily gave other people to use, and 10.3 (October 2003) the version I gave my mother. 10.4 is unlikely to be released before April 2005. Note that the time between releases continues to increase. I doubt Mac OS X is ever going to see Windows' multi-year release cycles, but you can expect better backwards compatibility in future. -- Nicholas Riley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley> _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - Pythonmac-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
