[Pythonmac-SIG] [OT] To upgrade Mac OSX or not?

[Skip Montanaro]

This is probably a bit off-topic for this list, but is the only Mac-specific
mailing list I subscribe to, and Mac OSX versioning seems to affect
MacPython and many apps built with it.  I was prompted to write after seeing
Brian Lenihan's post about PySol for Mac OSX.  Visiting the page I saw "10.3
only".  *sigh* Yet another app I can't run on my laptop.

Here's the rub.  Apple seems to rather quickly drop support for what appear
(numerically) to be minor releases.  10.1 is long gone.  I have 10.3 on my
G5 and 10.2 on my laptop.  I'm loathe to buy 10.3 at this point for my
laptop because 10.4 is in beta (right?  Apple offered a preview version of
10.4 to me for $500 recently).  I figure as soon as I buy 10.3, 10.4 final
will be released.  10.3 will start to corrode and I'll be stuck again with
"old" software once again.  Only now I have two Macs, so the costs are
double.

It seems that Apple's upgrade policy almost forces me to buy new versions as
soon as they are released.  If I snooze when new releases come out I quickly
get left in the dust and wind up either skipping a version or upgrading
right before the next release.  (This has happened to me in the past.)  I
really hate to say this, but in this respect backward compatibility in
Windows seems to be much better.  Am I missing something?

Thx,

-- 
Skip Montanaro
skip at mojam.com
http://www.mojam.com/