MacOS X and even the new iMac (although it'd be cooler if it booted off the network and had a gig or two ram-disk, so it could be completely silent in the 20-20,000Hz range) look pretty cool, but I'll never know because I'll never buy a Mac or suggest one to a friend. Spent yesterday evening trying to get a web browser set back up on Catherine's Performa 550. The battery had died, and the PowerPC upgrade defaults to "off", so in the process of trying to track down why Netscape was giving me a -192 error (PPC executable) I accidentally destroyed the install.
So once I figured this out I was trying to reinstall a browser. Opera installs and runs just fine, but doesn't find the PPP network stack. Even back in the days of Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock I don't think we had this problem. The first several versions of Netscape I downloaded need 7.6 (I don't want to move that machine from 7.5.3 if I can help it).
If the usage pattern were "buy a new one and throw the old one out" the Mac would work just fine, but given that the people who I'd be recommending a Mac to are also the sorts of users who don't buy a new computer every two and a half years, I can't justify recommending them any longer.
Thursday, January 31st, 2002 danlyke@flutterby.com