A few weeks ago I got an iPhone and was unable to use it with my computer. Last week I got Adobe Lightroom and then was unable to use it with my computer. The time had come to do something about that. So Friday I went to the Apple store and I got OS X Leopard.

I was unsure if Apple was still supporting G4 computers, but I was able to find that answer on their web site: they are. What I was not able to find, however, was any indication that I could upgrade. In other words, I was not prepared to do a clean install and wipe out my computer. The representative at the Apple store confirmed that I could do an upgrade.

The upgrade process took nearly three hours, and used almost all of the 10GB of free space on my hard drive. I hadn’t expected that. But I’ve found some ways to recover some space, so that’s not an issue. In fact, there really aren’t any issues. It just goes in and works. All of the upgraded software kept my settings and kept on working as I expected.

The only thing that stopped working was the driver for my Wacom tablet, but Wacom has provided almost a dozen driver upgrades on their web site in the three years since I first installed it, and after downloading and installing the new driver, my tablet worked like a charm.

The new features, going from 10.3 to 10.5 are amazing, and seem to run quite well on my iBook, even if it’s not a dual core Pentium. And yes, I took a few minutes to play with the new features of the OS, but only a few minutes, because what I really wanted to do was play with Lightroom… which is awesome.

And what about the iPhone? No dialogs popping up when I plug it in. No device listed in iTunes. I think something must have gotten set to ignore the iPhone when I tried it on 10.3.9 and it didn’t recognize it. Time to Google it.

Tags: Apple, OS X

Some people have already managed to get versions of Mac OS X running on their PCs.

Tags: Apple, OS X