Why Can't They Leave Things Alone?

I suffer from having been brought up in a time when things were built to last. Not any more.

I'm told my iMac, which I bought exactly FOUR YEARS AGO, is out of date. And it looks it because the blue screen has vertical pale streaks down it.

When I bought it I think it ran on an operating system called Panther (or was it Hellcat?) Then They updated it to Leopard and again to Snow Leopard. Every time I downloaded the new OS something else went out of date.

The first thing I lost was a wonderful software suite called MS Works which had a particularly useful database function. Then, with Snow Leopard, Photoshop CS which I paid a lot for went belly up with no updates available within a year of my buying it. And another superb piece of Apple's OWN software stared to play up - Appleworks - its 'draw' function was outstanding and I was still able to use parts of it until I download the latest OS - Lion.

The Lion download was cheap; less than $40.00, but those unconscionable bastards at Apple knew that it would force me to spend even more money. I had been using Photoshop Elements 4, a program that had come with my Canon Scanner. At a stroke it was rendered obsolete and I've just had to pay $200 odd for Elements 10 which I find so foreign that I've had to send off to Amazon for a manual - another  $50 or so.

Today my iMac keyboard lost all of its number pad functions so I had to buy a new one for $82.00 - and so it goes on. I wonder what will happen when They bring out Mountain Lion? More agony, I guess.

We all love our computers but what I don't love is the sheer greed of Apple which has become one of the richest  companies on the planet out of planned short-term obsolescence.

Interestingly we have an old manual typewriter on the desk. It's nearly 100 years old. It still works. It has no software and there isn't an Apple trademark on it anywhere!

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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