I suppose it would be less restricting if I find an article that allows me to share my thoughts and feelings, rather than just talking about something interesting.
The article I read today is a short article about an infographic: 534 Apple Products On One Giant Poster
About the article itself, there's nothing to talk about, but the article did remind me of my history with Apple computers.
The earliest Mac I used was some purple-cased Apple that had a 5.25-inch floppy drive (unfortunately, I can't remember what it was called, and I don't have enough info to search for it... maybe the case wasn't purple, but it's been at least 20 years, so maybe I'm remembering wrong) back in elementary school; I also used some other Macintosh that was a little more modern at the time.
In middle school, it was the early iMacs (the translucent, aqua-colored ones).
At home, I grew up with the Performa 550, which was replaced in 1998 with some HP computer. After moving into a new house in 2000, I still used the Performa 550 for some of the games and to sort of mess around with, but once I broke the registry with too much tinkering, I decided to retire it. I was also going to reinstall Mac OS 7 to see what was on some old floppies, but the monitor wouldn't turn on - wouldn't doubt if a spider died in the power supply and shorted the power for the monitor, or if it was just old age - so it finally went to get recycled.
Sae-chan was the next Apple I owned, followed by Shizuma.
What I'm getting at is that I used to be quite the Apple fan (I excluded the iPods, since they're not proper computers), but after Shizuma, that began to fade. After the PowerMac G5 and iBook G4 Debian PPC projects, I've really lost the appreciation for Apple that I used to have, because of a few reasons.
The first reason is that old architectures that are no longer supported. Sure I can update Mac OS X 10.4 to the final version of 10.4.11, but that's as far as the updates will go. Even major software (like Firefox) has officially stopped supporting the PPC architecture (it's unofficially supported with TenFourFox for OS X or in any PPC Linux).
Another reason is that some of the up-front quality is nice, but some of the lesser parts (namely the built-in FTP service) isn't as quality. I'm sure Apple never meant the file-sharing service to be used as an actual FTP or to transfer gigabytes of information, and I'm sure they never imagined it being used in that way either. It was a feature that was just quietly in the settings that (probably) not too many people used. In 10.7 (Lion), the graphical way to toggle the FTP service on/off was removed, but still accessible via command line. Again, I'm sure it's because not too many people used it, so they (Apple) figured it'd be better to remove the graphical option.
I used 10.6 for quite a bit of time, but it wasn't all that great. The 64-bit kernel did make most things a bit faster, but the cost was that certain 32-bit support was finicky - I had to switch between the 32 and 64-bit kernels until I gave up and just used the 32-bit kernel. I think that was the only time I saw something "broken" of Apple's, even though their products are usually quite fluid - the result of fine-tuned code for a small pool of hardware.
The prices are another reason, but I probably don't need to really explain it all that much.
And I turned this into a rant (LOL), but again, my point is that I've lost quite the appreciation for Apple even though I've pretty much grown up with Apple.
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