Later this afternoon, I'm planning on upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4. That isn't a typo, I am still running 10.3 here. I can never remember which cat any release is and I don't really care. I can tell without thinking about it that 10.4 is newer than 10.2 but it takes a lot of work to remember if Tiger is newer than Bobcat.

When 10.4 first came out, this iBook was what I was using all day every day for my full-time contracting gig. I didn't have an external drive to back up to and I thought that even if there was a 1% chance of some problem occurring, it wasn't worth the risk to disrupt my livelihood. That went on for a while until it got to the point where it seemed silly to buy 10.4 when 10.5 was close to coming out. However, now that 10.5 is on the streets it seems like people have a higher level of dissatisfaction than is typical for an OS X release.

However, what the release of 10.5 did do was drop to nearly zero the value of 10.4 install disks. I asked on Twitter if people had a copy they would sell me cheap and several people replied that they had copies they would just give me. That's an interesting point where it actually has value to me but not to anyone that has already upgraded. For my part, I'm just getting tired of finding apps that I want to run but can't because they required 10.4 at a minimum. I'm typing this in Ecto, but I can't upgrade to the newest version. I can't run the Levelator or Rogue Amoeba's Fission. The list goes on. I don't care about having the latest and greatest, just enough to do what I want to get done. If I lag far enough behind to get that for free, I'm cool with that.