As the P.R. woman in the Mac commercials put it, “By downgrading he means upgrading to an older and more familiar computing experience.”  I have to say, I’m happy to have Tiger back on my machine.  Tiger is ten times (10x) the operating system XP is and infinitely better than Leopard -- well it didn’t work.  For all my skepticism, Time Machine’s frequent backups sure did come in handy.  It really was great to have such thorough backups around when rolling back.

But, I can see you now... yes I can!  You’re a Mac Fan.  You’re not going to just take my word for it that Leopard is seriously lacking.  You think I just had an isolated bad experience.  Nope, wake up and google for yourself - search on ‘Firewire Leopard Problem’ and read the complaints with your own eyes.  Stop, no, you can’t dismiss me as some inept newb who can’t do anything if it’s not in a GUI.  I’m a security and web specialist for a fortune 100 company.  I’m a UNIX systems administrator by trade.  I have 18 years of professional computer experience.  I have been known to build my own computers, compile my own kernels, and install my own base operating systems from scratch.

Before I could even try the ‘easy’ upgrade path I had to figure out what was wrong with my external firewire chain of disks.  Which is funny, three of the disks are home made jobs -- old PATA drives I had laying around that I slapped into external firewire cases.  The three home made drives worked fine.  The 750G Seagate drive that I had bought from Best Buy was the drive that Leopard puked on.  I can see Apple not testing what I made, since there are only three like them in existence, but Seagate manufactured hundreds of thousands of these drives.  Why weren’t they tested?

After figuring out the trouble with the firewire driver in Leopard, I imaged and backed up everything, and ‘upgraded’ from my current setup. The ‘easy’ upgrade path.  I wanted to be impressed, “Oh, look! It brought over all my files and settings, nice!”  But I soon found out that I was in driver hell.  I spent two days searching the net finding answers to really obscure problems, resetting my PRAM and NVRAM, and recycling my drives after Leopard booted to reset the firewire chains.  I tried almost everything there was to try before I just had to say goodbye to all those months of personalization's and start from scratch.

Many users on the net swore up and down that they had done a clean install and everything worked fine.  So, I took more backups and did an “erase and install” on the internal drive.  After getting the base system online, I went right to my driver and firewire issues.  Same trouble.  I even tried upgrading from a pristine install of Tiger.  Nothing new, no luck. 

Now I found myself facing a fast approaching deadline.  I needed to scan in some material to FAX to the company that handles my medical reimbursement spending account.  If I missed the deadline, I would lose many hundreds of dollars.  Leopard had officially pissed me off.  I was completely non-productive for three days messing with this crap.  It was exactly why I left XP for OS X, except for the one caveat that I could get XP to work in three days or less of working out it’s issues.

I made a disk image of the new clean install of Tiger that I had installed in my upgrade testing frenzy.  I opened up disk utilities, reformatted the drive, installed that image (saving me an hour or more at least over another DVD install), and began reinstalling all of my programs from scratch.  I figured I went through all this trouble, I might as well have something to show for it.  That something?  My consolation prize for seven days of frustrating work.  A well configured OS with only the programs I use on it, streamlined and efficient. No fluff, no junk.

You ask, “So, are you done with Apple?”  Which is a fair question.  Am I done with them?  No, I do still love my iMac running Tiger.  The Apple-euphoria for a computer company that could do no wrong and always did things right is gone however.  Will I upgrade to Leopard?  Yes, most likely, in a year or so when they are on 10.5.7 and have all the bugs worked out.

In the past year I have seen Apple continually screwed their early adopters.  What they did with the marketing of the iPhone is an excellent example.  I’m also inclined to think that the stunt they pulled moving developers from Leopard to the iPhone, delaying Leopard, has something to do with Leopard’s poor testing and buggy first release.  I’m definitely going to fall back to the rear of the apple pack and watch those early adopters get screwed, work out the bugs, and make my life easier. 

I had this conversation with a co-worker who is a Mac fan-boy.  I told him that I downgraded from Leopard to Tiger as he was walking past my cube and he literally stumbled, stopped, and stared at me.  I told him my woes, the turmoil I went through, the device driver issues, pointing out my painful scanner problems, and the week of downtime.  His reply?  “Why don’t you just buy a new scanner?”  The sad part was he was 100% serious. 

It made me nauseous.  Throw away a perfectly functional piece of equipment because it doesn’t work with the newest junk OS code that Apple has released?  I think not.  Not only because I’ve got better things to do with my money (like feed and clothe my children who are growing like weeds) but because I care about what impact our consumer culture has on the environment.