X 1.3 upgrade from marketing?

[Daniel Rubinstein]

Like many others i was eagerly awaiting the arrival of "Panther", 
counting the seconds on the Apple website, looking at the tantalizing 
screen shoots and reading the reviews of the lucky ones who got their 
hands on the upgrade before everyone else. I was expecting something as 
spectacular as the upgrade from X.1 to X.2, which made me recommend OS 
X to everyone who didn't make the move yet.
And yet, three month after the smooth transition to X.3 i am feeling 
that i took part in an event of mass self-hypnosis, as the hype sinks 
down, what remains is a big hole in the place where the enthusiasm and 
anticipation used to reside.

Is it only me, or others too find X.3 relatively useless upgrade? I 
been working daily on my PB 550 with 768 RAM every day since the 
upgrade, and I don't find myself using most of the new features that  
X.3 was celebrated for. Sure there are some nice things, for one I now 
type this message in Mail, which became my favorite email app. and 
Entourage is not raising its slow and ugly head any  more. But the 
price of a system upgrade for a dissent email application? it is a bit 
rich even for a MAC enthusiast.
On the down side, my scanner (Canon 9900F ) now works only when logged 
in as an administrator which is annoying and disrupting to my workflow. 
Canon tech support are telling me the the drivers for OX X.3 are not 
released yet, which is fair enough, but i didn't have this problem with 
X.2
The only use i have for the celebrated Expose is exposing the finder 
without moving windows around. Something you can do in Windows OS by 
simply pressing the Windows button and D, since Win95. And yes, the 
finder is more useable now, but it only makes me feel that i was 
participating in Beta testing all along.
My partner has a G3 ibook, and wile it was running reasonably under X.2 
with the pre-installed 127MB of RAM, after installing  X.3, it is  in 
dire need of a 512 stick, which will add another £100 to the price of 
the upgrade. Which means paying extra just in order to keep the old 
functionality.
Apple's shameless slogan for X.3 was "it is like having a brand new 
mac" - what a lot of rubbish! Clever marketing for a mostly cosmetic 
upgrade.

Hardly surprising, of-course, Apple is as much about profit as any 
spaghetti-O manufacturer, and why should they try to give me good value 
for money if Flash animations and strategically placed advertorials 
will make me part with my cash anyway.

Hasta laVista Apple, See you at OS X.4


Daniel Rubinstein

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"Terrorism is the nuclear bomb of the poor" - Jan Paul Sartre

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