So, I decided to invest more time into my Mac.  It’s been pretty great so far, but I’ve also noticed that if I want to really use the Mac, I have to upgrade a bit.  Memory first, two gigs.. not that expensive these days… but the second upgrade I will need to have is the OS.

I’m upgrading from OS X Tiger (rawrrr) to OS X Snow Leopard. And I missed the cheap upgrade boat.  To go from Tiger (rawrrr), you’ve got to go to Lepoard, then to Snow Leopard.. If I had upgraded on schedule it would have cost me $29.00 for each of those, which comes out to $58.00.

I can no longer just upgrade to Leopard from Tiger (rawrrr), I have to make the leap to Snow Leopard… and that upgrade will cost me $169.

No surprise there, I use Adobe products on my PC machines and have found that if I get one upgrade behind, say I am at level 4, skip the level 5 upgrade, and want to go to the level 6 upgrade it costs me much much more. But there are times when the upgrade may not be needed… why upgrade at that point?

Well, because if you don’t stay on the upgrade train, it costs much more to get back on.

While this may be good for the software company, it sucks for small independent business people. I can’t afford to keep upgrading every time they put out a new version, and don’t like being punished later on for it. Punishing loyalty in a way… that’s what they are doing there.

What really stinks is there are few alternate choices for the type of software I use. And the other choices just don’t cut it for me.

Someday there will come a point when the software and hardware you have will do EVERYTHING you NEED it to.  At that point, there would be no reason to upgrade…. Funny thing, when I had a typewriter I never had to upgrade it… it did everything I needed at the time. Not that I would want to go back to just having a typewriter… Things were simpler in the past, but there were fewer things you could do. 

Well, I guess that is the price to pay for having all this computing power and flexibility right in my hands.