I can’t resist…Yet MORE Techno-Drivel

Some of my friends are going to glaze over and possibly start bleeding from their ears and / or eyes.

Sorry


Yesterday was lost in a flurry of upgrades.

NewImage

some of you may be aware that Apple announced a number of new products yesterday, just in time for the Christmas shopping season.

Among the announcements were a couple of key things for me personally.

1) The delta between my current iPad mini and the new iPad mini isn’t great enough for me to begin lusting after a new iPad. Yes the retina display is nice and the processing horsepower might be handy but it’s not enough for me to chuck my iPad Mini in the bin.

2) Apple announced the release of their newest OS X called Mavericks and that it was FREE. Along with that announcement as that they were making their version of office suite applications free. As well as their iMovie, and Garage band applications.

Yipeee! I was downloading the stuff as soon as it became available.

Thus far this has been the absolute nicest OS upgrade I’ve ever done. Impressive as heck, and Mavericks runs just fine on a 5 year old MacBook Pro. Lets see you run Windows 8 on a 5 year old Dell.

NewImage

Oh and did I mention OSX is free? 

The systems upgraded perfectly, they were a bit slow at first mostly due to indexing and other stuff going on behind the scenes plus downloading application updates and housekeeping.

This morning the machines are their normal selves and fast as ever.

Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have all upgraded on my iPad, iPhone and on my computer too. Yes I still use the MS Office suite but for most things the Apple equivalents are just as good, read and write Office formats, and total cost is $60 instead of $200 or $300.

Some people in the news have called Apple a bit mean for their references to Microsoft during the announcements I personally think they weren’t mean. I think they were simply stating that the emperor’s got no clothes. 

I’m kind of hoping that Microsoft will take this as a challenge, or a red hot poker in the butt. I hope that they start concentrating on quality, and paying attention to what their customers want and need instead of the crap that seems to be coming out of focus groups.

NewImage

After all I do have to support clients running Windows. It would be far easier if Windows was stable and my clients liked it. As it is I’m supporting XP, Vista, Win 7 and Win 8 god help me.

Apple on the other hand is obviously trying to get all their users to the same OS and application versions. If they’re successful it will mean it will be a lot easier supporting their user base than having 4 or 5 variants in the field.

Another amazing number to me was the number of users that had upgraded to IOS7 in one month. It was something like 60% of their installed base. Dang! That speaks volumes and I have to admit I’m much happier since I drank the Apple Kool-aid and have a homogenous computing environment.

I think Apples catchphrase should be “Everything Just Works”

But then again…

I’m biased.