The Expensive Upgrade

Hearing there'd be another new version of the Macintosh system software this year too got a few things unstuck in my mind. I'd made a few visits to Apple Stores just to accustom myself to the new appearance and system font of system 10.10 "Yosemite," but by the time I might have started really telling myself that if I was going to fixate on that sort of thing I might as well have just stuck with the black-and-white, 32-by-32 icons and Chicago system font of System 6 back in the 68000 days, the "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" injected into comment threads about "things breaking" had become ferocious. That just reminded me of how I'd never upgraded to system 10.7 "Lion," even if I had worked up the courage to jump straight to system 10.8 "Mountain Lion" and then moved on to system 10.9 "Mavericks." As I weighed "if it works, you don't need to fiddle with it" against certain programs and potentials I knew my current system couldn't do and worried about what would amount to "surrendering to complete paralysis at last," I also happened to replace the burnt-out hard drive in an old black plastic-cased Macbook with a solid-state drive, installed system 10.6 "Snow Leopard" on it because I didn't have the single more advanced system it could run, and then partitioned the drive to install a newer version of Mint Linux on it than the one I'd installed on my old plastic-cased iMac just as a hedge against some troubling unspeakable future. With that particular computer, the open-source operating system did manage to activate the wireless networking, but I did still have the distinct feeling that even with the customizability I could work out how to add it still had a bland, Windows-like look at heart.
( Jumping in at a deep end )