Hmm here i go again, trying to install mac os x 10.4 onto an lacie external FW disk only to discover, apple put all sorts of hinderences in your way.

Fist of all Why OH bloody WHy do they give you a set of disks with the machine that will only install on the machine you bought it with specifically ? And then not mark those disk clearly as being crippled in such a manner ? 10.4 for macbook pro intell generation x specific internal drives only etc for example, I suppose from apples wanky vanity point of view, it would spoil the appearance of their discs to have to deface them with valuable information, that highlights exactly how limited in use they are.

If Apple are going to restrict the install disks to specific machines/gestalt IDs and specific processors then they must at least have the courtesy to label the limitations directly on the installation disks themselves, surely it’s this kind of misinformation that the EU should be regulating against, and while they’re at it, let’s get hard drives sold by their formatted capacity rather than their unformatted capacity, as to make use of a disc at all, you have to format it.

First of all with 10.4, you couldn’t purchase an Intel 10.4 universal installer, there was only a PowerPC one available, And that PowerPC 10.4 universal installer box was not clearly labelled as being for PowerPC only. For people who do technical work supporting various peoples computers is a real pain in the arse. As this means you have to dig out the clients 10.4 install disks which came with their machine, and quite often the client may not be able to find them, so how are you supposed to be able to install 10.4 on such Intel machines?

Considering the kind of money Apple is making nowadays, with their profits and cash rich war chests you would have thought they would have been more generous with the latitude of usability to install on different machines with their generic install disks.

Of course the other thing that’s not labelled on the box is the fact that the install disks that come with your machine, refuse to install on external FireWire disks, or may be it’s just that I haven’t partitioned my FireWire disks as GUID disks because i just upgraded to an intel machine, and all my discs are HFS plus with journaling turned on. But this of course means that I have to empty the external FireWire disc in order to test this theory and try to install on it.

Or as usual spend an hour trawling google and various web sites, looking for an equally as sad as me muppet whos laid out an explanation as to exactly what the maze of entrapment, in what I’m attempting to do looks like. I swear this is where the ignorant greed and inefficiency of over complicating a technical issue, for the profitable benefit of the individual corporate entity, by artificially limiting peoples options is not worth it in the long run, because it is at the expense of the larger group whos energys and time and money it wastes, to create its profit … great! Joy joy!

Installing on FireWire disks, should be relatively easy considering it’s a replacement for SCSI which had no difficulty acting as a boot disk for a machine, and was hot swappable or perhaps compared to earlier Apple days we are going backwards again, on the technology front as things seem to be more complicated to achieve now than they were then.

Then there is many things that I think are backward step in comparison to how polished Macos 9 was, e.g. file sharing was much more controllable and precise, permissions didn’t intrude into every day file activity, it was this polish in Macos 9 that you noticed, the find dialog box capturing your keyboard input, before it had drawn the dialog so that when it appeared, your keyboard input was already there, Mac os X’s find dialog appears with either a half the text typed or worse none and even then the damn thing defaults to searching by content and not name!. Also you could navigate macos 9 with the keyboard much much faster than the mouse, keyboard navigating under MacOs X is a much cruder affair, and very often a lot slower. Also let’s be honest Mac os X boots and shuts down slower than Mac os 9 ever did. And application launches are also a lot slower, these programmes may have a lot more features, but if you don’t use those features and just you say the base set of features that were in the programme four years ago, then in fact the programme is slower to boot and run than its 68040 equivalent. Certainly evident in say quark new and quark old.

Apple seriously need to put some refined polish into Macos X, rather than adding a slew of new features, that will slow the machine down, mirror effect dock being a perfect example of throwing away CPU cycles for the hell of it.