I suppose there’s something wonderfully purgative about wiping your hard drive clean and installing a new operating system. It’s a feeling much like purchasing an entirely new computer, but with your current, used machine—you blast away, sometimes indiscriminately, all the cruft and poorly-managed files, the legacy of ad-hoc decisions, ill-advised choices and temporary, extemporized solutions that somehow grew into permanent fixtures, and get to start over again with a blank slate and a heart full of resolve on how this time, you’ll be fastidious and conscientious and planned and your computer will be an exemplar of organization. Until the next release of OSX, and you format again. In the meantime, the wholesale purge allows you to finally rid yourself of that which you’ve long suspected you never needed, but held onto out of habit or social pressure (eg. Microsoft Office), abandon reliable standbys for newer, better programs (iPhoto -> Lightroom), and finally install that one program you’ve been lusting after but never could justify the expense (Pixelmator). Hopefully, you’ve saved all your old files just in case, but lately I’ve come to enjoy the thrill of making cursory backups and then gleefully nuking it all, my eager anticipation for the New Shiny temporarily blinding my normally all-powerful digital packrat tendencies. Not to say I haven’t been burned by this—I once lost an entire summer’s worth of photos (‘Memories. You’re talking about memories!’) due to a lack of diligence and an overeager enthusiasm for novelty. I promised myself I’d be more careful next time, that I would check and double check and be perfectly sure, but once push came to shove and I had the OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD in hand—well, let’s just say, you really don’t want to ask me if I have my photos from this summer or not.

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.

Pros:

I still haven’t gotten over how amazing it is to be able to browse the web, search maps, find who you’re looking for and immediately interact with them via mail or phone, on the go, all in the same device. The experience is truly like the “Calamari” commercial, just ridiculously simple and ready anywhere, any time. I have completely eliminated the need for preprinted maps, calling my brother when I get lost*, or pretty much any kind of route planning—I just look it up when I need to and go. It’s totally revolutionized how I get around the city.

Seamless integration with Address Book has encouraged me to keep a more thorough and up-to-date contact list, complete with headshot photographs.

Typing is much easier than I expected. I’ve gotten much better, but I’m still not confident in writing long emails, though you could argue that writing long emails with such a small screen is a ridiculous idea to begin with.

The iPod functionality is excellent. It seems completely natural to navigate my music collection via a touch interface, perhaps even easier than the previous clickwheel method (which I hasten to add, was also a very intuitive interface). I love how music fades out upon an incoming call and automatically fades back in at the same point when the call is ended—a great touch.

It’s tiny, it eliminates the need for carrying up to four separate devices (phone, ipod, laptop [sort of], point-and-shoot camera), and does enough to wow me on a consistent basis.

Cons:

Safari crashes too often. Hell, even one crash is entirely too often.

The speakerphone is far too soft. My old Nokia 6600 had a speakerphone fit to be a guitar amp; the iPhone’s speaker is by comparison barely a whisper.

I can’t customize the SpringBoard (the main root-level interface screen) without jailbreaking the iPhone, which may or may not brick it. I have no use for a stock tracker. I would like it gone, but I can’t remove it.

Although its physical design is aesthetically pleasing, even while encased in a rubberized sleeve, I’ve started noticing how odd it is to place a perfectly smooth, highly reflective piece of flat, rounded black glass against your face. The iPhone doesn’t have the robust, workmanlike heft of my old Nokia, which I routinely dropped and carelessly threw around; rather it feels like I’m talking into a piece of art, and that I should handle it delicately, lest I somehow breathe on it wrong.

Lack of tactile controls means I can’t control playback blindly, as I could my previous iPods.

*My brother and I have this joke where we serve as each other’s OnStar—the odds are high at all times that one of us is near a computer, so we’ll call each other for quick Google Maps searches and driving directions.

I couldn’t help it. I told myself that I was going to get a clearance previous-generation iPod nano, preferably black, for my trip to Lousiana. Best Buy had tons left, all on sale, but right next to them was a display model iPod touch with a working wifi connection and it was so seductive and small and incredibly easy to use, the next thing I knew I was walking out the door three hundred dollars lighter and giddily asking my brother on the phone, “Guess what I just got?” He wants one now, too.