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• Friday, November 9, 2007 10:22 AM

  Suckers born every minute

  "After just a year or two of use, a Windows machine gets so gummed up with spyware, viruses and other nasty stuff that it seems malicious to ask anybody for money for the thing.

  Wild. I guess I must be tying this on an ~imaginary~ PC that I bought in 2003 with an Athlon XP1600+ processor which runs Windows 2000 Pro just seemlessly. (and WoW, too.)

  My computer before that was a shiny iMac (snow) with MacOS 9.1. Then OSX came out, and my *new* iMac couldn't run it except under incredibly clunky (unusable) speeds. So I went back to 9.1. For which Apple made no other program upgrades ever. It was OSX or bust. And to run OSX, you needed - surprise - a new computer.

  When I went to the store to upgrade my video card from it's (pathetic) 8g just one year later, I was told "sorry, that cannot be upgraded. ever."

  I tried to salvage it by running Linux on it, but the two PPC linux distros were next to impossible to get on there. I had a lot of help from a friend to finally get it loaded only to discover that it ran into several problems which made it essentially a giant paperweight.

  Apple has built in obsolescence, snazzy design, and marketing as it's foundations for profit. NOT long term usability.

  MY PC can be upgraded. It can adapt. Eventually a new killer app will come along and compel me to buy a new motherboard and CPU which will necessitate a whole new box, but this thing will read email etc. for pretty much as long as I keep good care of it. (no spyware or viruses, here, thanks. I know what I'm doing.) Eventually, I'll probably donate it to a non-profit.

  And the price? My box, with all the subsequent upgrades has totaled about $800. My iMac before that was $2000. My friend's new iMac that she bought last year was $2100. (Her design school practically forced her to get an Apple.) That's not a $100 difference. That's a ~world~ of difference.

  But your computers are very pretty. I'll give you that.

  —sagcat Read sagcat's other letters
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