I made The Switch this month. Well, no, not that switch; I’m not ready for OS X yet. But as our publisher recommended a few months ago, I decided it was indeed time to upgrade from 9.1 to 9.2. Having done it yourselves, you know it was no big deal. I didn’t know that myself, so I was relieved to see how painless it all was.

I recently bought an iPod for a friend, but as I had not paid attention to all the details I ended up buying one furbished for Windows instead of one designed to work with a Macintosh. I called Apple for help, and the technician said I’d have no problem using iTunes to Restore Factory Settings, which would replace the Windows iPod software with the Mac software. The only snag was that I needed a particular version of the iPod updater to do this, and this updater requires Mac OS 9.2.

So, I took the plunge and downloaded the necessary installers, which took about 20 minutes on a cable connection. Then I updated to 9.2, which took about six minutes. Then I got the iPod updater and installed that, and restored the factory settings on the iPod. The whole process took no longer than half an hour, and was as painless as I’ve come to expect from Apple.

I spent a few seconds after the restart, deleting a couple of things from the Apple menu, but everything else was pretty much the way I’d left it. The Launcher had picked up an extra menu item, but the Help program always makes fixing stuff like that easy. Besides, that’s what I get for using the Launcher anyway, right?

I have to say this experience has better prepared me for taking the real next step: OS X. I’d have done so already except I have another user to train, and we’ve gotten him so comfortable in OS 9 that I’m not sure how he’ll feel about X. A few years ago, though, he couldn’t have turned on the machine by himself. He’s learned OS 9 from scratch; I suppose learning X won’t be as big a leap as that.

The real question is do I upgrade my Blue-and-White G3, or bite the bullet and buy a new machine? I hate to dispose of a machine that works just fine and has all the gadgets I need on it, and I really don’t want to get something new just for the sake of it being new. It’s tempting now and then to think about watching a DVD movie on a cross-country flight, and if I made more flights like that I think it’d be an easy sell. One flight every couple of months isn’t enough though to justify spending $1500 on a laptop, no matter how cool and shiny it is. If I got one, there’d be the AirPort expense as well, although the coolness factor of that is just about impossible to quantify.

I tell you what. When we get to a point where I can take a laptop to the park—or anywhere—and use an affordable satellite Internet connection, with no wires or anything, I’ll get an iBook. Deal?

Are we there yet?

Copyright © 2003 Ellyn Ritterskamp, eritterskamp@atpm.com.