Posted on 05/19/2015 7:50:57 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Mac laggards signal difficulty of matching PC upgrade results with mobile's homogenization
Although Apple has done a better job of moving its Mac users along with each new operating system than has rival Microsoft, the Cupertino, Calif. company has been unable to eradicate fragmentation as it accelerated upgrades to an annual cadence.
According to data from analytics firm Net Applications, three OS X editions that were three years or older retained five or more percentage points of user share last month. Those three editions -- 2009's Snow Leopard, 2011's Lion and 2012's Mountain Lion -- powered 20% of all Macs in April. When 2007's Leopard was included, the number climbed to 21.3%.
There's no question that Apple's policy of giving away its OS X upgrades -- a practice begun in 2013 with Mavericks -- has reduced fragmentation by pulling Mac owners onto the newest edition faster than did versions that carried a price tag. The current OS X Yosemite, for example, accounted for 57.5% of all Macs in April, 23 percentage points higher than where Mountain Lion stood at the same point in its post-launch timeline. Mountain Lion was the last upgrade that cost customers money.
But the annual upgrades, even free, have been unable to eliminate laggards. While Yosemite powered the majority of Macs last month, Mavericks accounted for 21%, Mountain Lion and Lion for 6% each, Snow Leopard for 8%, and Leopard for nearly 2%. More than four in every 10 Macs ran an aged OS in April.
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
I always suspect OS upgrades are intentionally designed to slow down older machines, thus prompting purchases of new machines.
My MAC is going on 8 years old, I upgraded to Mt Lion 10.8.4 and can use the magic slide mouse. I also added memory. I’m good for another 8 years. This thing is really built. The only problem is the blue tooth mouse does go thru batteries pretty quickly.
It only every existed at a point in time. The only way to insure it will continue to "just work" the way it did when you first installed it is to make sure that the hardware it runs on and any other systems in has to interact with never change.
Well - there is some logical reasoning behind this... but the answer is not simple (unless one doesn’t mind forced obsolescence).
Apple hardware (laptops/desktops) has a tendency to have a longer useful life. Our primary desktop at home is a PowerMac Dual G5 machine... and if not for some software that just cannot be updated due to the lack of intel processor... it would be even more functional than it is. Its certainly isn’t limited by hardware capability.
But - for efficiency in OS function, the fragmentation is a pain. Most companies simply eventually drop all support. OF course, that ticks off a lot of consumers (who have otherwise perfectly functional hardware).
IMHO the fallacy is in thinking of the price of a computer as entitling you to use that computer in perpetuity. You should think of it more as a lease.That logic especially applies to hard drives; you should understand that
So it makes no sense to think of cleaning up a hard drive when it gets full - the logical thing to do is to just buy new.
- Hard drives don’t live forever, and
- Hard drives get bigger (for the same price) over time.
Same thing with your ‘outer. You can’t run new OS X versions on ancient machines; that’s just a fact of life.
I wish Apple would just provide software to make old G4 boxen into dumb terminals - and enable the user to use a Mac mini to run OS X and the apps, feeding into your “dumb” terminal. Probably it doesn’t make economic sense, really - but at least if that combination were on offer, you would feel better about the fact that your old, “perfectly good” Mac can’t be upgraded.
bmfl. THANKS
On Macs, the older computers usually run faster with an OS upgrade. Not always, but I'd say nine times out of ten that's been the case.
Most people get rechargeable batteries and keep a set of batteries always recharging.
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