Tech Talk

by Luis Villazon A friend of mine was asking me about the RAM upgrade options for his 2009 iMac yesterday and, in passing, he happened to mention that this Mac had never been connected to the internet. I thought I had misheard him at first. “You mean you’ve never connected using an Ethernet cable?” “No, no, I’ve never connected that machine to the internet at all!” He’s an artist and has Manga Studio set up just how he wants it and doesn’t want to take the risk of “something downloading and messing it all up”. He has another, smaller iMac that’s allowed online for email and web

Computers are not designed to be hermits, any more

than people are

browsing but his big-screen, workhorse iMac is resolutely stuck on the 10.6 Snow Leopard it shipped with.

I can understand the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality behind this, but I think it is misplaced. Computers are not designed to be hermits, any more than people are. Keeping your Mac off the internet is like taking a vow of silence. Sure, it’s possible, but it’s a very extreme response to the perceived evils of the world. The people this appeals to are those who dislike change.

But sooner or later the hardware will fail. And when it does you’ll be forced to leapfrog several generations of software, exchanging a continuous learning curve for a series of cliff edges. I’m not sure how it would feel to go from Snow Leopard to Yosemite. But my friend is about to find out.