dailyeatings

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Apple and their products. After a protracted period of furtive longing, I finally switched three years ago and have never regretted it. I run PCs at both work and home, my test and production servers run Linux, and I use Ubuntu part-time at work in conjuction with my MacBook. Out of all these computers, the ones I prefer most are my Macs. If my relationship with Apple and their computers has been until now a blissful union, today’s experiences could be best described as our First Big Fight.

I purchased MacOS 10.5 “Leopard” the day it was released but delayed installing it for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do not wanting to deal with the potential downtime to my work-critical machines. I dug up an older box that I wasn’t using any more, a G4 Mac mini, and decided to give upgrading a try. The installer failed at 97%, citing faulty media. Okay, I took the disc out, wiped it off with a microfiber lens cloth and tried again. Again it failed, this time at 90% and citing a faulty Korean Language installation package failure. Problem is, I specifically unchecked all non-English localization options earlier during the install process, so it should have completely ignored the Korean package entirely. Well, Sunday’s a lazy day any way, so once again I rebooted and this time let the installer go with all default options enabled. 2 hours later, it fails again, this time during the Speech package. Really annoyed at this point, I scoured the internet for an explanation, whereupon I discover that this is something of a ‘known issue’ and it involves third-party RAM.

A little digression: One of the more… um, idiosyncratic parts of owning a Mac is the ‘Apple RAM tax‘. That is, Apple charges a rather hefty premium for RAM upgrades, such that most experienced Apple purchasers tend to buy stock configurations and outfit their machines with third-party RAM from NewEgg, etc. Part of the many common criticisms/trolls levied against Apple and the Mac community in general is what is commonly perceived as the onerous cost of entry, particularly when one compares prices between Apple products and roughly analogous hardware sold by discount PC manufacturers. There are many flaws to this comparison which I will not go into here–there’s at least one huge flamewar about this very subject every day on digg, if you are so inclined– but however spurious this line of criticism may actually be, Apple’s very real and very high markup on RAM makes it hard to dismiss outright.

Returning to my story, my Mac mini came with a ridiculously low 256MB of RAM when I first purchased it. I opted to go the third party route and upgraded its memory to 1GB thanks to a great sale posted on slickdeals. Unfortunately, I found out today, three years later, that third party memory is known to cause show-stopping bugs in the Leopard install process, and that it is highly recommended that one use stock RAM when upgrading. Gee, I wish I knew that before I formatted my hard drive to install Leopard. Or it would have been nice to know this, oh, three years ago when I threw away the essentially useless 256MB stick, thinking I’d never need it again.

Suffice it to say, I’m kind of upset right now. Despite my best efforts, I’ve been defeated by a bug that has no workaround except for something I am physically unable to produce. Now I have a blank and essentially dead Mac mini sitting on my desk, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it. I might swap some of its RAM with that in my old PC, which Leopard may or may not like better. If this doesn’t work, I might be forced to install Ubuntu on it, which would sort of turn this Big Fight into something resembling a Breakup.

Update: It’s just not going to happen, it appears. I’ve reverted back to a clean install of 10.4. Annoying.