Hello all,
is someone still using Snow Leopard? And if yes, why?
Greetings
Yes, for reasons both practical and philosophical.
For practical reasons: My home machine is 7 years old (2007 15" Macbook Pro), and it took a **** when I tried upgrading it to either 10.8 or 10.9. Snow Leopard is as far as that machine will ever go.
My work machine is 4 years old (2010 27" iMac) and came with Snow Leopard. Two other guys in the office have Macs and always upgrade them to the newest OS at the first chance they get. One of them has had nothing but issues with network drives constantly dropping from the Mac, and even had to write his own AppleScript just to give himself a button in Finder to refresh and reconnect his drives. My machine just runs.
For philosophical reasons: My Macbook is the first Mac I ever owned, and was sold to me at a time where one of the Mac's major selling points (in a mostly Windows world) was their longevity. I feel like I owe it to the Apple of 2007 to prove them right. Plus, the software really does everything I could possibly need right now. Granted there are a few apps here and there that require 10.7, but I've gotten along without them. Thank god for Postbox.
At work, I like being the archaic guy. I feel like American culture is too ready to throw away their old, perfectly good devices just because the new shiny thing is out. I don't want to be one of those people so I'll continue using old hardware and software until it stops working, unless there's a significant advantage to me upgrading. So far, I haven't seen enough of one. Granted, I don't have an iPhone so there are fewer reasons for me to care.
Now hardware, that's certainly better these days, and that's the tragedy for me. I'd love to have the exact same programs and file structure of my iMac, but with an SSD installed instead of the current HDD. My boss's old iMac got ruined when he tried doing a hard drive replacement on it (faulty hard drive, not an upgrade). So I'm pretty unwilling to open up my machine on the chance of breaking the video connector, even if work was willing to spot me the cost of the SSD.
My Macbook fares better because it has an ExpressCard slot where I've stuck an SSD. However, battery life on that thing is awful, and I wish I could just somehow install one that would last for 6+ hours instead of the 2 I currently get. Shrinking it to a 13" form factor with the same resolution would be nice, too. Oh well. That's what magnetic chargers are for.
Personally, I think we'll continue to see a growing divide between the Dinosaur Users like me who are comfortable with their Good Enough systems and their non-service software, and the On The Edge crowd that are willing to deal with a bit of change to play with the new toys. It's the same divide we see between those who want copies of their music on their hard drives versus those who just log into Spotify and couldn't care less about ownership. I don't think there's anything wrong with either approach, I just happen to be in the first camp.
But hey, I'm a designer, and if Photoshop is any indication, I can probably get away with using hardware and software even older than what I have now.
