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Panther Released into the Wild
u2fan00 writes "Those fortunate enough to have an Apple Store near them were in for a treat last night -- crowds! Oh, and also Panther. Check out the local reactions, photos and stories from some stores across the nation."
Who, me? You mean I'm supposed to WANT to go stand in line with hundreds of people and stand around for an hour while everyone froths with praise for St. Jobs and The One True Way of Apple?
:-)
Sure, I might do that for a Linux gathering, but Apple? No way.
Note that you WILL NOT be using your mac to play games. The games support just isn't there. You can play a small, random, usually not terribly good selection of the games that were released for the PC six months to a year ago. As a developer, your mac will make you extremely happy. As a gamer it will not.
the selection of games available on the mac isn't random, actually. other than the small smattering of games that are released simultaneously on Mac and PC, the others are games that make it over because they were profitable.
it doesn't matter how cool a game is, how many copies it's sold on the PC... if it's not profitable, it will not be ported. period.
woof!
I upgraded and just everything works fine.
There is a problem with Toast 6 and how bootable disk burning is handled in Panther, but as long as you don't want to make a bootable disk in Toast, it works fine from my experience. Just burn the bootables with Disk Utility. I'm sure Roxio has an update for Panther in the works.
It should be noted that I don't run any system hack widgets off someshadysite.com. I'm thinking the problem children with upgrade issues are running hack widgets that need updating for Panther.
Solution: Remove widgets before upgrading. That should be obvious anyways.
would life crumple if one were to avoid the crowds and pick it up the next time you happen to be near the electronic store?
Life would crumple, because it wouldn't be as much fun.
These people aren't lining up and throwing parties because expose and fast user switching are going to change their lives. They're throwing parties because they want to throw parties, and the release is a good excuse to get all the mac users out there for some fun.
The guys who wait in line for an hour are not spending an hour of their lives to get OS X a day earlier, they're spending that hour hanging out with friends, making new friends (they all have something in common-being fans of the os-so it's a good way to meet people), and enjoying themselves.
The "cult of consumerism" is a real problem only insofar as consumers allow themselves to be exploited. Some may argue that Apple's policy of charging full price for annual upgrades is exploitative, but there are many who feel the pricing isn't unfair. Do the math, and it actually beats the cost per year of Microsoft's professional (ie, no product activiation) versions of windows. Apple is not a designer clothes brand selling the same materials from the same foreign country with a more famous label and a tripled price. Neither is Apple a monopoly gouging consumers without alternatives. The consumers in this picture are lining up like partiers outside a club. Look elsewhere if you want to find cattle.
For a hint as to where to look, try Keenan's recent paper, "Modern Dynamics in Consumerism: The Brand as a Proxy for Tribal Identity." It's an intriguing look at the effect of corporate branding on individuals' social lives. Certain social circles share a disturbing number of characteristics with cults, and the cult paradigm is a useful tool in analyzing how the most materialistic among us operate.
But getting back to the party at the Apple store, it worked really well for me, Panther wasnt the only cat I picked up. While we were hanging out waiting for the release, I ran into a girl who was touching up the digital version of her latest painting on her powerbook, and we ended up, um playing with our new kitties together after the party. You have no idea how hard it is to meet other lesbians who aren't raving, battle-axe-wielding, death-to-all-men feminists these days.
So, while the "cult of consumerism" is a real force in modern American society, the Panther release is a very poor example to use. It's just a case of people using a convenient excuse to have a little fun.
p.s. pickup games of medal of honor over airport with the rest of the line rock!
It's kind of sad that this is the only place where you get that same kind of ...release buzz...that you used to get back in the late 80's or early 90's almost regularly.
The industry just plain sucks nowadays. The shrinkwrap software market is dead. I walk into computer stores and find no one at shelves. No one is really buying anything. Computer shows are pretty much dead, even the swap meet kind. Building your own system is only for old geezers like me. The old local geek meetings like computer clubs pretty much barely exist. The onset of the net killed BBS's dead, eliminating that 'local' link.
This was ultimately the result of Microsoft's dominance. I curse everything I ever did to facilitate it. Sadly, with every day I got up during the 90's to go to work, I helped in many ways, along with thousands of others.
Stupid.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.