I use a quad-processor Mac G5, 2.5 Gb memory, Quadro 4500 Video Card driving two Cinema 30 inch monitors. The machine has 750 Gb internal disk, plus 4 Tb of external disks. Not a low end system, not one that can “barely run” the OS. Further, with OS X 10.4 the machine was a screamer, running Aperture with thousand of pictures of 20 Mb each, and at the same time flying through three or four other simultaneous heavy-load programs like Photoshop.

So, one day Safari breaks. Of course, it breaks at the precise wrong time: hours before I need to deliver a Web conference, already preset to be held on Microsoft’s web conferencing service. Unfortunately, from a Mac I could only run the conference on Safari, so I needed to solve the problem *really fast*…

The problem is, *there is no way to just re-install Safari on 10.4*. The “geniuses” (not my choice of title) at the local Newport Beach Apple store suggested that I (a) downloaded Safari from Apple — twenty minutes until I showed them that I had already tried but there is no such thing as Safari download, (b) fixed disk permissions — which I had already attempted and hadn’t worked, (b) re-installed the OS (???) or (b) upgraded to 10.5. (???)

First red alert – This is the company and OS that is supposed to be the easiest to use and best supported. After decades of using Mac, I could probably get a better answer from the likes of Fry’s “customer service” personnel.

Time ticking, decided to upgrade to 10.5; somehow, an “upgrade” looked like less intrusive a move than a “reinstall”. Notice that somehow the “fix” had disappeared from the option list

Second red alert — Don’t trust a doctor who immediately suggests open heart procedures to eliminate a whart.

Call me stupid, I decided to ignore both red alerts. Hell started…

10.5 installed to a semi-hanged state, where I had windows from “Time Machine” asking me which drive to use to back up the 3.4 GB of content I had in-line at the time (of course, I had no disk with that capacity), and a couploe of windows that I opened by clicking around the dock. But no Finder (that is, no drive icons on the screen). None of the menus in the Finder worked (amongst them, shut down, restart, log out, and all the biggies) and nothing I did in the screen (except a few clicks in the browser, invoked from the Dock) worked. OF COURSE, re-launchiing the Finder from the “Kill Apps” menu didn’t work either!

Red alert 3 — Why have a menu to kill apps that, if the Finder id broken, won’t work? Ask the geniuses, or the marketeers who trump the virtues of the OS

After waiting for two hours, I decided to shut down the power. ZFour or five iterations of this process, and somehow I managed to boot to a working Finder.

You may say: “Hey, you called the problem on yourself by dinging around with the power button”.  But no, not really: a “user friendly” OS is not supposed toleave me with a non-operational mouse, a frozen screen and a spinning wheel where the mouse arrow is supposed to be, WITHOUT A SINGLE MESSAGE or indication of what is going on. I was kind enough to wait for a couple hours before pressing it…

In any case, 10.5.1 seemed to be finally working. As soon as it did, multiple apps starting reporting upgrades available, and for the next day or so I installed a few of them. Then, I installed Aperture 10.2, which in turn proceeded to tell me that it refused to work unless I installed 10.5.2.

Mea Culpa 1 – By now, I should’ve just given up on the whole thing. Too many red alerts, too intense feelings of being abused by Jobs and Co., too many stupid answers collected from forums (who treated me like crap just because I was having problems and I am not a hacker). But I felt like I was in a one-way street with no choices to go back: Aperture is one of the apps I constantly use, if I can’t (and going back to a previous release probably would render my whole library unuseable) I much rather not use the Mac any more…

So I ran the upgrade to 10.5.2. Same as with 10.5 (NO Finder), except that now, no matter what I do, the finder is gone. Went back to 10.5… Same thing, no Finder.

I can’t get to disks, any dialog that opens a file selection dialog freezes, no cleaning the trash, no log out or restart, no system preferences… etc. I have lost exactly three days with this problem, and I feel abused, once again, by Apple, who just needed to put something out to cool down the Vista renassaince… Somehow, Apple and Microsoft have become the same company: closed, abusive of their power, unconcerned about the user, glossy only in commercials and advertisements.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple OS X 10.5 – Welcome to hell