My father gave me an older iBook of his a few weeks back so I could learn a bit about OSX. I wasn't about to spend the hefty Apple premium just to satisfy some curiosity.
Having used it for the past few weeks, I'm flabbergasted trying to understand why artists love these things. I suppose if you come from a family wealthy enough to support the arts, they don't care about you throwing money away on one of these.
I'll admit I'm working on an older model and an older version of the OS (version 10.3.9, named "Panther"). In terms of the software I use, I may as well be using Windows 98 (except there's still a lot more software out there to run on Windows 98). The latest Firefox that Panther runs is version 2, same as Windows 98. OSX 10.4 (Tiger) will run Firefox 3.6.3, just like Windows 2000.
Microsoft Office 2004 is available for Panther, but to run MS Office 2008, you'll need Tiger. In fairness here, Microsoft did abandon Windows 98 for MS Office 2003, requiring at least Windows 2000 SP3.
OpenOffice.org 3 requires Tiger or Windows 2000 SP2, while OpenOffice.org 2 would run on Windows 98. To get OpenOffice.org on Panther, you are stuck with the significantly older version 1.1.
This is hardly the last time Apple has left an OS behind. 10.6 (Snow Leopard) has effectively abandoned all the PowerPC users. I guess people throw money at this company because they think they're buying the Jaguar of computer systems (maybe that's why Apple chose the big cat names). Too bad their Jaguars turn into Yugos every few releases.
