Virtual rig - OS X Snow Leopard, Lion or wait for the mountain animal?

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qube123 wrote:Wouldn't bother with Hackintosh, it's interesting but a nightmare for stability and hassle to get working, and that's before you start sticking software on it.
THIS!!!

and you should get Snow Leopard, as all older softs will work with it.
Can't say the same for Lion.
There will be a good legacy app to use in Lion soon, I'm sure.
Lion is fairly new, so it's probably not as stable as 10.6.
I'm not getting Lion for at least another year.
Got too many video games that won't run on Lion.

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My advice, Buy an old used intel core2duo mac mini or macbook that has snow leopard on it already , see if you like it if you dont like in a month or 2 it sell it , you won't lose or spend much money on it that way .

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i'm not offering argument, just responses :)
Compyfox wrote:At least Microsoft doesn't screw you all over every half to full year for a dot update with certain tools running sometimes worse than before or more and more "iOS" like features.
Version numbers don't mean much to marketing. Apple uses a .1 increment as a major revision & a .0.1 increment as a minor. It's purely to avoid losing the brand of "X." Apple going from 10.5 to 10.6 is equal to Microsoft going from Win XP to Win Vista. Version numbers have a 15+ year history of meaning little on a marketing standpoint (since Microsoft Windows 95, in fact!). Windows 7 is the first version since Win 3 to have a version number in the name. How about Sonar 8 to 8.5 to "X1"? :P

As for value, i've never felt Windows revisions (excluding the change between Win 3.x & Win95) were enough to merit the cost, which has been increasing (while Apple has been driving software prices down). Win95 cost me $89 (Microsoft needed to establish it & there was serious competition). It cost me $159 to go from XP to Vista. It'll cost me $200 to upgrade from Vista to Win7. The bugs from new versions, not fixed in subsequent versions, the leftovers from the Win3.x/95 APIs, & general architectural nonsense (the cesspools of the registry, systray, explorer extensions & system services) continue to compound & i feel the whole thing is a pile of garbage at this point. It's the best Microsoft garbage to date, though (i was totally neutral to MS around the Win95 era, though appreciated the "C:\ONGRTLNS.W95" Apple advert). i don't get the compounded garbage feeling on the iPhone (though i felt abandoned at iOS3 with severe Mail crash bugs, after a lovely iOS 2, on the original model - those are full point numbers & often free) & Mac OS X 10.5 through 10.6 has been a pleasure (though i viciously HATED Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.3 and i often refused to accept it as Mac OS because that system of sheer simplicity clearly died with OS9).

As for OS X becoming more like iOS: i've been very pleased with the appliance-like functionality of my iPhones during the time i was without any computers. i was then very pleased with the reduced complexity of OS X (compared to Windows) when i ended up on a MacBook. Now i have my PC back & have returned to screaming at my computers. i'm actually looking forward to Apple's integration of OS X & iOS. i don't even mind the idea of the file system eventually being off limits. i see the new systems being put in place are functional on an end-user basis and i am an end user. It's contrary to my old ideals of efficient design, but the end result works smoothly (as opposed to the sloppy Linux world where the "very code efficient" geeks still have their shared library hell, unmanageable package management, dependence on CLI & text configs (still!), severe split personality GUIs/APIs, no system-wide clipboard, etc). It's rough to put a new paradigm in place, & people hate change, but i'm open to what Apple's doing. Microsoft is following suit (of course i view their methods as "more of the same from them," as i view Linux's reptilian crawl toward modernity as tasteless heavy makeup).

Don't fear change: http://johntopley.com/2011/02/ ;)
Compyfox wrote:And you're not forced to be online (which seems to the the future: for videogames, studio software, video editing, regular computer usage, etc, etc, etc). :shrug:
You just said it: it seems inevitable. Windows activation requires being online, unless you buy into the even more expensive multi-license (useful for large organizations). Plus, Microsoft is doing their own app store & cloud stuff. It's a lost cause, this whole "no internet on my music machine" rule. i don't like the anti-user "piracy protection" BS & wish it would stop, but access to info is too valuable to me to isolate my machines. Even with an iPad (which i don't have) sitting at my workstation for info access, i'd still want to download sounds, updates, etc. i've never exposed myself to malware &, since i share drives between my own computers, i might as well have internet access (it's barely extra resources since the more convoluted networking is running already).
Compyfox wrote:You still don't need to hack anything one way or another. To my knowledge, the Tonymac bootloader basically is a bootdisk that cuts away terminal codes. See it as installer like Windows - plug it in, start away. Or like 3rd party bundle packs with system updates. It's as legal as boot disks for videogame consoles to run international versions (at least back in the day - nowadays, region codes are a non issue on certain systems). I've even seen install videos on YT with full versions of OSX where there was no bootdisk needed - just the right commands and it was running flawlessly in virtual machines.
i know nothing of the current boot issues & really don't care about the legality (i mentioned legality just in terms of indicating how crazy Apple is about limiting what runs their OS). i do know there's a need for drivers for hardware not present in Apple's own machines. That's one of the weaknesses of Windows itself: the diversity of hardware. i swore never to build another PC & i mean it. It's voodoo (i've a thread about that topic). If you're using a virtual machine, i have no idea how that works out, driver-wise.
Compyfox wrote:I don't expect a miracle. But I'm kind of sick of Apple's additude. Especially with the "we're better in everything we do".
i don't like the arrogance but i do prefer the majority of their products over alternatives. i was a major BeOS fan (can you tell?) and while Mac OS X hasn't managed to include the same neat stuff, it has managed to make me feel like i'm running a more reliable & stress-free environment compared to Windows, which was what i really wanted anyway. In Windows, there are countless (seriously) annoying niggles & outright flaws that lead me to quick rage with basic tasks. i don't get that on OS X. i accept that OS X is a pretty shell on top of a Unix, but it no longer feels that way. It feels uniform & smooth, with intended behavior. i don't want to get touchy feely on it; it's not mystical. It's a ton of little things & several very big ones. It matters to me, so i tolerate the arrogance of Apple's marketing. Some of the claims are earned, though.
Compyfox wrote: Yet I have severe issues in just getting a darn upgrade disk, or the whole "iApp store" thing.
Well, that's part of the complexity, IMO, that i think of with a hackintosh. Not just the computer tech; the political technicalities. Apple doesn't want to sell Snow Leopard to anyone because they want to sell Lion. Microsoft is no different & only capitulates to avoid losing ground in big institutions. Apple don't believe it necessary to have an upgrade path to Lion from anything other than Snow Leopard because that's what they've been selling for some time (all machines bought in x amount of time shipped with Snow Leopard & they expect everyone else upgraded by now). They have no standalone license because they expect all potential Lion users are already Snow Leopard users. Your situation is outside their normal operating expectations. i can't fault them for that. As far as the App Store, eh, i dunno. i don't use the Mac App Store for anything yet.
Compyfox wrote: Or I have to shell out a fortune for just a simple hardware add on/upgrade. Innovative or not, but Apple is not the center of the universe.
Apple hasn't been about hardware upgrades since they abandoned the Apple II line. USB, Firewire & Thunderbolt add-ons, sure, but they don't even make any of their own. The less hardware options, the easier it is to do QA. i expect the plan is to eliminate Mac Pros (or at least stop offering it with PCI slots). 3rd party internal upgrades have so far suffered from market scale (not enough customers = higher price). As for Apple being the center of the universe, well, they're the center of THEIR universe & that's mostly all that matters to them. They have a very robust & uniform ecosystem of hardware, software & development. We do benefit from an era at Apple where they felt it important to play well with other file systems (varieties of FAT, NTFS, Unix, ISO), other networks (Microsoft, Unix), & even other operating systems (Windows via Bootcamp). Microsoft never gave us foreign file system support (something i curse to this day, since NTFS is so underutilized & Windows assumes foreign file systems are unformatted volumes & offers to destroy them for you). In fact, while MS finally added Alternate Data Streams to NTFS in WinXP (for compatibility with Mac networking!), they took it away from the end user in the very next revision of the OS. MS didn't really utilize it nor make it very visible, but it was there & now it's gone (this irks me because, in XP, you can put notes on any file as a file attribute, but in Vista/7, they removed the interface for that & went back to sniffing file contents for indexing, icons, metadata, etc, which is slower, inconsistent from file to file & only supports specific file types made accessible via yet more explorer plug-ins). Microsoft chooses the most roundabout & complicated way to provide features that Mac OS historically provided at its core (granted, OS X's early development attempted to eliminate the forked file system & other core Mac ideals; luckily 3rd party developers won that argument). When Microsoft does the right thing & then retracts it & re-Microsoftifizes it, well, i shake my head. Granted, Apple has turned around & Microsoftized file type handling in OS X Snow Leopard (creator codes are now utterly ignored & file extensions rule). :x (the best system i've seen was in BeOS, same with file system queries).

What does any of this have to do with making music? i dunno. The more i have to fight & manage my Windows machine, the less music i make (& the more frustrating it is to even do basic tasks). So, i guess it all comes together on some level. i'm not trying to convert you. i'm just blabbering about what bugs me. Annoyances are what "converted" me (i didn't start as an "ignorant Mac user" as there are many obnoxious Apple zealots out there like that & they annoy the piss out of me).
Compyfox wrote:Then again, I don't want to shell out a fortune just to get to know that thing better in order to work better at other studios or the environments of my clients.
If it's not a cost-effective thing to do, by all means don't do it. Don't worry, the jury is still out on whether Apple is going to piss off the pro market enough that the pro market walks away. Maybe you won't have to worry about studios using Macs for much longer. Heh. That's something i AM concerned about with Apple's current trends. i DO want them to continue being attractive to hard core professionals, but Apple are very heavily focused on consumers now. It's a hugely profitable market & there now seems to be a lack of courting professional markets. The iOS-ification of OS X has nothing to do with it. The software and the hardware does. If they don't maintain Logic Studio (& do some deep re-engineering), Final Cut (we saw the PR bloody nose they gave themselves with FCX) & Mac Pro's storage/memory/CPU raw power (compared to portables), professionals will go elsewhere when they need a room full of machines for a render farm, or sheer speed in batch processing of huge photos or scientific data, or a studio of interconnected 200-track, 300-plug-in audio projects, etc. Why do i care? i'm a pro user & i'd rather not be driven back to Windows.
Compyfox wrote: Like I said it before - I think I'll just drop this topic and do my own tests.

Thanks anyway.
i don't think anyone here was trying to put you off. i'm not. At worst, i project my fear of technical annoyances :oops: i think we're just trying to advise the least problematic setup possible. If other Mac users are at all like me, they have a low threshold for dealing with the stuff most of us were indoctrinated to expect as normal from computers thus far. i hate computers! :P :lol:
- dysamoria.com
my music @ SoundCloud

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