upgrades

DropBox Smart Sync and High Sierra; or, I thought I was supposed to upgrade, why me.

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Not interested in my ramblings? Skip down.

If you’ve been paying attention to the narrative coming from IT over the past few years, including us, one of the most recurring themes is this:

Stay up to date.

Staying up to date is the number one way to keep your hardware running well and, most critically, keep you secure. In the past, this advice came with some wincing, since updates, particularly system updates, could bring along a plethora of issues. This wincing advice was gradually replaced with certainty––Apple Mac OS updates have been more and more robust over the past few years, to the point where I was almost, almost ready to just start pulling the plug and upgrading to the latest version of the OS as soon as it came out.

But lo, Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. High Sierra definitely tooketh away.

I mean, percentage wise, it’s still been pretty painless. There have been some really wince-worthy security issues with High Sierra, but in terms of functional show-stoppers, it’s still in the 10% range. It says a lot about the past few years that this feels really bad.

But one thing that has been completely consistent throughout our High Sierra deployments is that new installs of DropBox do not work with Smart Sync.

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OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, or the Evolution of the Lion

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With all rumors focused intensely on the upcoming iPad that seems almost certain to drop in March, I felt pretty blindsided by Apple popping up and going “Hey! New version of the Mac OS is here! Guess what comes after Lion? Mountain Lion. Bwa ha ha ha.”

So, 10.6.8 is on the horizon, and in time honored traditions, it adds Stuff to the operating system and Opinions to the Mac nerds out there. Of which I am one. So I have Opinions, and I get to Share! I love capitalizing things.

Mountain Lion continues, not surprisingly, what Lion started: merging what you find on the iPad and iPhone (iOS) into the Mac (Mac OS). I’ve started putting the various OS’s in parentheses so people can ignore them, as I’ve found the minute I utter a phrase like Mac OS eyes begin to glaze. Acronyms are the most powerful eye glazing material known to man.

Aaat any rate, there are a bunch of new features, like moving notes out of Mail and into it’s own application (thank goodness), renaming iCal into Calendar (bittersweet but obvious) and making it be a little less lame at the same time.

I’m going to hit the top 3 points for me:

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Maintaining Your Mac: a Boring Guide

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Recently, I had to buy a new car. Well, a car, as it’s only new if the first ten years of something’s life don’t count. In which case, huzzah! I’m still in my twenties.

Outside of that though, it wasn’t a new car, it wasn’t all that expensive, and boy, was it in great shape. In such great shape, in fact, that my trusty old VW Golf – which had been making horrible sounds that universally caused new passengers about five minutes of alarm and asking ‘No, really, are you sure it’s okay?’ – seemed to rise up, Jacob Marley like, from the metal grave to which it had been consigned to shame me for its ill treatment. It was nearly the same age, after all, and the only reason for the discrepancy (outside of the fact that I drive an absolutely insane amount, I suppose) is that I was much more of the school that as long as I could squeeze the last remaining, clanking, staggering miles out of the vehicle, well then, why take it in for repair?

We don’t really need to go into why that’s dumb. It is. Very. When you own a car, you factor in more than just the cost of purchasing it, but of gas, insurance, tires, and if you’re not a moron, maintenance. Thank you Captain Obvious, yes I know.

But it made me think about similar Total Cost of Ownership considerations for a computer. The obvious ones are there, of course – computer, internet connection, printer, and so on. Then the not-so-obvious but even more critical backups. What about maintenance? Smart people ask me about what they can do for their computers all the time.

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Should I upgrade to Lion?

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It’s not so surprising that I get a lot of questions about whether or not one should upgrade their computer to Lion, Apple’s latest offering for folks with a qualifying Mac. Presumably, one of my very reasons for existence would be answer questions like that. But it is interesting (to me, at least, and I’ll admit to being easily interested) how many clients ask that question with a sense of excitement in their voice. This includes a pleading undercurrent that over the years I’ve learned to recognize as needing the subtitle of: I really really really want this shiny new toy, please please please?

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