Interesting week, I had some troubleshooting to do on an iBook G4, a good "old" Apple laptop (6 years old) - the little bugger has around 1 hour autonomy on battery (not too bad), run 10.4.11 and has a powerpc processor (it was before the big switch from Apple to intel processor).
The complaint the owner had was that the wacom tablet wouldn't work properly ... I couldn't fix the problem on the phone and decided to go there directly - after some testing it appears that the tablet was working perfectly for Photoshop but not for Gimp - that's where my "spider sense" started to tingle a bit ...
Remember I said, the iBook G4 was running 10.4 - well, to run Gimp on this you need to have x11 installed, and the owner had it installed just fine from the original install DVD - the issue was that when in Gimp you tried to setup the wacom - it simply reported that there was "no extended input devices found" - even though the tablet was plugged and running fine for other application - Gimp would recognized it though somehow, but without the pen pressure.
At this stage we had gathered a good amount of information and I returned home - found out that x11.app for 10.4 can only be upgrade up to 1.1.3 and that the tablet support was only available after x11.app release 2.x (that would be available for 10.5 and 10.6)... I explained that to the owner, he was a bit disappointed and told me he would not upgrade (because the iBook G4 wouldn't probably be able to handle the upgrade (his words)), but he was used to this kind of behavior from Apple, and was planning to buy a new one anyway...
Apple customers are the best!
The complaint the owner had was that the wacom tablet wouldn't work properly ... I couldn't fix the problem on the phone and decided to go there directly - after some testing it appears that the tablet was working perfectly for Photoshop but not for Gimp - that's where my "spider sense" started to tingle a bit ...
Remember I said, the iBook G4 was running 10.4 - well, to run Gimp on this you need to have x11 installed, and the owner had it installed just fine from the original install DVD - the issue was that when in Gimp you tried to setup the wacom - it simply reported that there was "no extended input devices found" - even though the tablet was plugged and running fine for other application - Gimp would recognized it though somehow, but without the pen pressure.
At this stage we had gathered a good amount of information and I returned home - found out that x11.app for 10.4 can only be upgrade up to 1.1.3 and that the tablet support was only available after x11.app release 2.x (that would be available for 10.5 and 10.6)... I explained that to the owner, he was a bit disappointed and told me he would not upgrade (because the iBook G4 wouldn't probably be able to handle the upgrade (his words)), but he was used to this kind of behavior from Apple, and was planning to buy a new one anyway...
Apple customers are the best!
You have to remember that back in 2001, most of the Apple computer were running Mac os 9 and Apple was pushing really hard his customer to move to the brand new Mac os X - while in the same time, promoting the fact that the PowerMac G4 was better than other PC because it was powered by a powerPC processor (with the altivec ...). That was one huge switch, then later PowerPC were replaced by Intel Processor - there was another huge step forward, but each time it means all the software would need some sort of emulator (you had to run "Classic" to run your old Os 9 application in OS X) and all the new intel based application can't run on PPC powered Apple computer... which means you have to buy a new one...
You really have to be pro-Apple to accept all these without complaining, I mean their machine are well designed, but they get obsolete quite soon (matter of 3-4 years).
Now the conclusion to all this is ... it's good for the business.
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