Shedding a skin

Like a snake that needs to shed its skin, a seemingly painfull concept for human, so to is the thought of swapping OS or platform.

I remember the days when we weren't just choosing what OS to run, but what computer brand to buy, Amiga, Apple, Atari, Amstrad, MicroBee, Spectrum, Texas Instruments and many more. We had so much more choice, until we all fell for the myth of the perpetual upgradable machine. With changes in chip design & memory over time, obsoleting many of the parts you already invested in; it turns out to the "perpetual upgradable machine" no more real than the perpetual motion machine.

Lets face it, if obsolence isn't built into a product, then how will a company ensure a cash flow for all those shareholders? So many great machines have passed. But now hardware is just a commodity and a computer (regardless of hardware platform) is just another appliance, it is software & in particular the OS that is the deciding factor. But innovation is rare because of the huge task of keeping backward compatible. Well I'm sick of having a pathetic OS that is carrying the baggage of mistakes from the last 20 years. Time for a fresh start, shed a skin, take some pain, but it will be worth it.

So that brings me to the options. When MS Longhorn was announced, it sounded like an innovation, but now so much of the new ideas have been dropped & delayed, that it doesn't seem to be much more of a patch for XP, its not even a skin graft, no more than bandaid on an oozing sore. Linux to fragmented, some distributions suffer design by committe, too much choice.

(How can there be too much choice?... philosophers have argued that we fear free will & we fear choice, fear of making the wrong choice. Research on shopping behaviour is also showing that give someone 6 items to choose from and you will get more sales in total, than if you have 12 items for sale)

BEOS was cool and had some nice ideas but its company went belly up. So where is the current innovation, who is taking design & usability & beauty to new levels? Well its Apple. Currently riding high on the iPod, it seems to be finding the cash & time to push its G5 chips to their limit. Apple OSX Tiger appears to be what I've been missing since the days of the Amiga, and OS that realises it is there to get out the way & let you work, but help by making simple things simple.

Time to shed my skin...
I'm going to buy Mac at the end of this month (after Tiger OSX released on 29th) . The new OS is just so far ahead of anything MS is planning in the now gutted and delayed Longhorn. If I need windows, I'll run it in an emulator.

There is currently a groundswell of developers moving to the Mac (free high-quality dev tools). This reminds me of the start of the landslide when people starting shifting from Amiga to PC.
http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/features/dashboard/

And now REBOL is working on OSX port again... life will be simpler again and perhaps the joy of computing will return..