Tell them, my song.

I’m still using my Mac Pro, but I’m currently making Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit my main platform.  It me a long time, but I’m finally giving up on Apple. This blog has a collection of a lot of things with which Apple has pissed me off over the last years, and now with the release of Aperture 3 I had to make a choice: Suck it up, be a stupid milk cow and put even more money into that company – or – decide to leave all the disappointments behind.

Speaking of disappointments: I have a 64-Bit Mac Pro workstation that still has Apple Care until September this year, or, in other words: This computer is not even three years old. Yet, Apple has decided to NOT officially support the 64-Bit kernel of Snow Leopard on this 64-Bit workstation and they also have decided to NOT officially support the 64-Bit version of Boot Camp on this computer.

While I cannot get Snow Leopard to boot into its 64-Bit kernel (because the Mac Pro only has a 32-Bit EFI), I can get 64-Bit Windows -and- the 64-Bit Apple Boot Camp drivers 3.1 installed. And everything “just works”. Although His Steveness does not want me to run 64-Bit Windows on this computer. Maybe he is afraid that his older customers will discover that Windows and even 64-Bit Ubuntu perform so much better on that hardware than Apple’s own operating system.

Windows 7 is fast like lightning on that machine. Snow Leopard feels bloated and sluggish in comparison. It’s the same with Ubuntu, but unfortunately, Ubuntu does not support my scanner and it also does not run Civilization IV and a few applications that I need for work once in a while.

So I’m using Windows 7 for compatibility reasons, not because I think it’s a better system than Ubuntu Linux. I use Ubuntu a lot at work – on our servers – so I’m familiar enough with it to use it full time, if I want to. It’s just that I do not like crutches; either my OS can run the stuff that I need without emulation and compatibility layers, or it can’t. In some relevant cases, Ubuntu can’t, but Windows 7 can. I gladly paid the 120 bucks for the Win 7 license for that.

I will probably still keep Snow Leopard on a separate hard disk just to keep on using Aperture and Photoshop CS3 until I have decided how to proceed from here. This software was expensive, but I do not feel like supporting Apple and Adobe with more of my money. They don’t deserve it for many reasons, but until I have found alternatives that work for me, I’ll keep on using the software that I already have.

Well, whatever. I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and don’t feel like writing much more about it. I’ve reached the point where I no longer want to tolerate Apple’s total lock-in, and I’ll change that now. If it wasn’t for some games and compatibility reasons, I would go with Ubuntu. But such as it is, I cannot yet do that.

I know the Microsoft world for something like 26 years or so now, so I know how to work around their lock-ins (which are software only).  Most of the stuff that I need to get a lot out of Windows is available free as in beer, whereas in the Apple world I had to purchase tons of Shareware to get the same stuff done. So in the first iteration, the OS license is all that I need to buy to get going, and that I have already done.

Anyway. I guess I’m going to be a PC again.

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