In case you haven’t heard, I recently acquired an old Apple PowerPC G4 to better familiarize myself with Mac OS X. Specifically, I’m using 10.4 Tiger, and while it’s only UNIX-like, that’s fine, as I have Solaris 10 for my UNIX needs. That, and there’s not really a huge difference between Tiger and 10.5 Leopard.
I remember being quite disappointed when Apple moved off of the PowerPC platform and onto the x86 one. Sorta’ like watching the noble spirit of Apple die off to be consumed by the iPod/iPhone Religion of Steve Jobs.
The computer can be booted to into Mac OS 9.2.2 as well, though a foray into that ancient OS left me cringing and crying. As OS 9 can’t be run on an x86 architecture, this is probably used through Classic, which is basically dropped in Leopard. In any case, the G4’s Mac OS X persona (which I’ve named “Terramaria”), is fine for my purposes.
The system is a little slow, but generally everything still runs smoothly. Presentation has always been Apple’s strong points (though, sometimes they rely on this a little too much), so there’s little on-screen jerkiness to indicate your computer is pushing its limits.
I’m inclined to use Safari, of course, as this is all supposed to be a learning experience for me. Switching to another browser would put me back at square one. In any case, Safari blends much better with the OS than it does on Windows (where it clashes badly with visual styles).
iTunes was easy enough to use, though I found it a little tedious to create a new custom playlist. In Windows Media Player, I’d search for a song and drag it over to its place in the List Pane (in Edit Mode). iTunes is much more geared towards people who are too lazy to make their own playlists; I have to manually drag-and-drop my music onto my playlist entry, and the playlist itself isn’t in view in case I want to change the order. Boo. (Edit: Updating iTunes to the most current version seemed to have added the feature to add a song to a playlist through the context menu, though it’d still be nice to actually see my playlist grow.) I’m also not interested in the vast majority of music in iTunes Store, as my interest primarily lie in Japanese pop, soundtracks, and anisongs. So, yeah. Not my cup of tea.
Of course, like any other OS, I was able to successfully crash it through absolutely normal operations. Having successfully set it up with an Internet connection through my XP machine, I browsed a few sites to see if things were working correctly. I also browsed my local webserver. The problem occurred when I tried to access one of my local MediaWiki installations again; while my server was processing the request I decided to minimize the window.
FREEZE. And this is the first day I’m using it.
Boo.
We’ll see how much I can figure out about this OS, that way I can develop a more mature and authoritative opinion about OSes in general.
Edit: iTunes is incredibly copy happy, wasting large amounts of space creating DUPLICATE ENTRIES when I’m adding in an updated folder of music (taken from my XP machine). It seems like someone needs to learn how to manage databases correctly…
