I recently had a discussion about Apple products with a friend. As usual when I discuss Apple, it reminded me of how much control companies have over our overall technological experience.
I recently picked up a vintage Power Mac G4 (a Graphite G4 AGP, for those wondering), and the first thing I thought of was “what OS should I put on it?”
If you’ve read my blog for any amount of time, you’d know that I’m a proponent of Linux, and I knew Ubuntu at one point had a distro made for PowerPC-based computers, so I started digging. And what I found kind of both disgusted me, and confirmed what I knew about Apple all along.
Time warp: I remember, back in the late 90’s, when they first introduced Mac OS X. It was a huge slap in the face of Microsoft at the time, because it signaled a transition to a “real” operating system, based on Unix. Which of course meant that it was stable, fast, and easily extended. And then of course, Apple took the very best things about Unix, locked them down, and made it into a proprietary platform that was (in some ways) worse than Microsoft Windows.