Imagine having a boyfriend whose highest qualifications are a high school diploma, but he expects you to have a masters degree before you can be considered eligible to go out with him. He’s 63 years old and looks closer to 95, but he expects his girlfriends to be no older than 19.
Then there’s the other boy, who’s a millionaire genius but loves you even though you’re a good 8 years older than he is. He doesn’t care that you aren’t the sweet young thing of every man’s dreams. He loves you the way you are.
I met the second boy tonight.
I saw, firsthand, the installation of a beta copy of OSX 10.5, also known as Leopard , on an aging iMac G4 that had only 256mb of ram. The documentation states that the minimum configuration was 512mb of ram, but this little old lady was all we had.
Installation took a while, but when the operating system was loaded, we watched in awe as the green grass wallpaper came on screen, the transcluscent menu bar appeared, and the new 3-dimensional dock sat at the bottom of the screen.
We fired up the improved finder and went straight to coverflow. The iMac struggled with the initial rendering, but sliding back and forth was smooth as a baby’s bottom. We also tried stacking application shortcuts in the dock. Spaces will undoubtedly increase productivity by a bunch, but we couldn’t find enough to really stress test the system given that the installation was new and the computer was empty.
I’m still shocked that we got a cutting edge operating system to run on a computer that has less ram than most thumbdrives.
Take that, Vista.
Comments
Hats off to an excellent review.
Take that, Vista, take that indeed.
Posted by: Sicarii | June 29, 2007 2:29 AM
Ok I’m not a big Vista fan either but I have to tell you Tiger on a brand new MacBook (1.8GHz C2D) with 512MB RAM just sucked. Until I went to SimLim and upgraded my RAM to 2 Gigs, all I could do was to open Firefox. In this scenario, Ubuntu or any decent Linux distro would kick both Vista’s and OSX’s big time! I can still run Ubuntu Dapper on my ancient iMac G3 (and I mean real usage - OpenOffice is pretty usabale).
Posted by: Harish Mallipeddi | June 29, 2007 3:08 AM
Thanks Sicarii.
Harish, I’m sure any Linux distro would work better on less specs, but that is something I’d expect - less eye candy working on lesser hardware.
What Apple does surprises and delights. To have more on less is definitely a steal. Granted that you probably wouldn’t want to run Leopard on 256mb ram for use your day-to-day machine, and 8 gigs of ram would always be preferable, I was ecstatic to see it run at all.
Posted by: Lucian | June 29, 2007 7:48 AM
In reply to “Take that, Vista.” I consider Mac OS just as a showpiece. It looks beautiful but you are very much limited when building any app for it as a developer. Apple ties your hand. Windows is much easier. Most of the negative strikes against windows come from 10 year olds who thinks a beautiful system is best. I think both OS has its ups and down, and depending on the users need, one of them is preferred.
Posted by: vinay | July 9, 2007 5:21 AM