Mac – OS
Is Yosemite Apples Vista?
One of my first computer had MS DOS installed and I loved and used PCs for years. I remember very well my first Windows 3.11, followed by Windows 95, later Win 98, the not so great Win ME and of course the fantastic Win XP. I felt lucky getting my hands on Windows Vista, before it was officially released. I remember how exited I was when I first saw it and how disappointed after using it for some time.
My disappointment with Windows Vista, dealing with the problems for quite some time and the clever marketing campaign from Apple made me think if I should switch to a Mac. After doing research for some months and talking to other Mac users I finally decided to get one myself. I bought the MacBook 13-inch Mid 2009 and remember that I was quite nervous when I first opened it. I was scared that I may have bought an overpriced laptop and that I would need to get a Windows version after all, erase the Mac OS and be angry with myself for falling for a clever marketing campaign. But I loved my Mac from the first day. I even decided to go “all in” and didn’t bothered getting MS Office for Mac and started using iWorks instead.
I became a real Apple fan. I upgraded almost immediately to the next Mac OS as soon as it came out. Bought later an iMac to have a bit more powerful machine and liked the fact that it was so easy for me to work on my documents thanks to iCloud.
It was amazing to me that my Mac seemed never to crash, at least not as bad compare to Windows. Opening an Application was almost in the blink of an eye and working such a pleasure.
But then Yosemite happen…
Since I upgraded to the new Apple OS X called Yosemite I have so many problems. Sure… my old MacBook might get too old for the latest and greatest Mac OS, but I also have issues with my iMac. And I am not the only one.
When I was using my Mac with the previous operation systems I almost never saw the rainbow coloured beachball, which is Apples version of the hourglass and indicates that the computer is processing your request and need more time. But since Yosemite I constantly have to deal with the beachball. Even opening a simple plain text document with TextEdit can take more time now. Starting the computer seems to take forever and shutting down too.
The Notification Centre, a great feature, is useless because of the fact that it is slowing down your computer even more.
It is especially frustrating that the issue seems to be random. Sometimes I have no problems opening more than one application and work for hours without any problems and than there are times where I can not even open a website without seeing the beachball of hell.
As mentioned earlier, I am not the only one with issues. Friends and colleagues have also problems. Even a MacBook Air, bought a few weeks before Christmas, has problems.
Beachball and to be forced to Force-quit applications are just a few of the annoying features of the Mac OS X Yosemite.
With a little research we found out that the so called kernel_task is responsible for slowing down your machine. A problem Apple knows about.
The experience with Yosemite is for me very similar to the one I had with Vista a few years ago.
I am very disappointed and frustrated. My hope is that Apple will not make the same mistake as Microsoft did with Vista. In my opinion Microsoft main problem with Vista was that they tried too hard to make it work and invested too much in marketing instead of fixing the problems. I even have the feeling when working with a Win7 computer that it is simply a repainted Vista with a new name. Well and Windows 8 does not know what it wants, in my opinion. Is it a tablet OS? Is it a desktop OS? It tries to be both and ends up to be nothing at all.
Lets hope Windows 10 will be as good as promised ant that Apple will be able to fix issues with Yosemite.
Mac OS X Mountain Lion is now available
If you are a Mac user you probably heard already that there is a new Cat in town. Since today you can download the new OS, which is called Mountain Lion, right from the Apple App Store. But is that an update you will need? Is it save to update now or should you wait? I will try to answer some of your questions here in this post.
Let me start with the price. I was already impressed when Apple announce last year the new OS Lion for just $29.99 and thought this is quite cheap for an OS. This year Apple dropped the price even further and therefore you can get the new cat for only $19,99 which is really cheap, if you think about the extra features you will get.
Twitter is fully integrated into Mountain Lion, the Reminder function, many of us like on the iPhone, is now an extra application. A notification centre is integrated as well as iMessage (which I use since the BETA and love very much). You have now a nice extra Note App like you have on your iDevice (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and even Game Centre is now on your Mac. So basically Mountain Lion is building finally the bridge to your iDevices, something we kinda hoped for with Lion, right?
I could start explaining how every single of those function works, but first of all there are already tons of reviews out there and second I think most of us know how to use them. So I would like to mention one concern I had when I started the download, which is Games.
I had my bad experiences in the past, when I upgraded my OS to soon. Had problems to run certain programs, because the game developer were maybe not paying enough attention or didn’t care for those of us who not only work with their Mac, but also enjoy to play with it. Maybe it was because a few years ago the Mac wasn’t really a computer you use to play with. But in the last two years this has changed in my opinion. Many games became available on the Mac and I liked especially Blizzards effort in securing that their programs (Star Craft II and Diablo III) were shipped for Windows as well as Mac OS at the same time.
So now the question for those who like to play games on their Mac… Is it save to upgrade or should you wait?
Well I upgraded to Mountain Lion this morning and tested a few games already. So far I wasn’t running in any problem, was able to open Diablo III, used my Steam account and the games I had there such as the Witcher, Dungeon Defenders and Splinter Cell (to name a few). All of them were running just fine, I even had the feeling the games loaded slightly faster than before.
Of course I had not the chance to try out every single game, but had the chance to run a few and tried to pick them based on their age difference. So far no problems, which is good news, if you ask me.
Beside the games I tried also the new features and think that Mountain Lion is a very stable and great upgrade which isn’t that expensive. Spending $19.99 on a new OS, which by the way has also a lot of security features I didn’t mention yet, is in my opinion a no question. Of course for those who are skeptical it doesn’t hurt to wait a few weeks and to read more reviews, but for those who want to get their hands on Mountain Lion I would say go for it. Just make sure you read the instructions first, not all Mac’s are able to handle the new cat. Also a good idea is to make a backup before you start the installation process. I did not loose any documents and had no problem at all with the installation, but it is always better to be save than sorry.
I hope this short review was useful for you and if you have any comments please feel free to post them.
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