TidBITS' Matt Neuberg made an interesting and astute observation in a column last
Friday lamenting the iOSification of OS X 10.7 Lion, noting:
"Some people think of their computer as a Prius
hybrid; it's complicated under the hood, but in actual usage it just
works. I think of my computer more like an 1960s manual-shift VW
Beetle: it does what I tell it, and I can often repair it if things go
wrong. Lion makes me feel I'm being chucked out of the driver's
seat."
Exactly! My thus-far vicarious disaffection with Lion and the
direction Apple is obviously bent on going with OS X is being
reinforced by my underwhelmed-ness with the "magic" of the iOS on my
new iPad 2. I'm definitely a 1960s
manual-shift, manual everything, fix it yourself, control-freak kind of
guy. I don't have a Prius, but the nannying "features" in my Mercury
Grand Marquis, such as not being able to shift the automatic tranny
into gear without your foot on the brake, and then automatically
locking the doors when you shift into Drive, to name just two examples,
annoy me profoundly, although in general I'm quite fond of the car.
However, in terms of Lion, this may all be academic for the
foreseeable future, since my upgrading to OS X 10.7 anytime soon is
looking more and more remote as the reality of its manifold
incompatibilities with legacy software and technologies that are still
mission-critical to me sink in.
The proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" deal-breaker
looks like it may be Apple's not bothering to rewrite the driver for
its Apple USB Modem to support Lion. I'm no programmer, but my
inference is that doing so would have been a relatively minor and
trivial matter. As it's been explained to me, the Apple USB Modem that
was sold from 2005 to 2009 (it seems I just got mine under the
proverbial wire) was merely a simple telephone line interface with the
actual modem function emulated in the system software based on the
Motorola SM56 design. It's this emulator that Apple has deliberately
chosen not to support any longer - presumably out of contempt for what
it judges to be obsolete technologies and its monomania about pushing
us either into the iCloud or throwing us under the bus. Our choice,
take it or leave it.
Of course, telephone dial-up modems are obsolete technology,
but what Apple doggedly and obstinately refuses to acknowledge or
accommodate is that they're necessary and non-optional technologies for
literally millions (and probably billions) of Internet second-class
citizens worldwide.
The boilerplate throwaway riposte to complaints like this is to "get
with the 21st century" and upgrade your Internet service.
Unfortunately, that's not an option for a lot of users, and there are
large spaces of even North America where broadband service is simply
not available, save for in some cases via prohibitively expensive
satellite inks.
In my neck of the woods, we've had access to broadband via wireless
for less than two years. I signed up for the earliest possible
installer visit I could schedule, but the service, decently speedy
though it is, has proven far short of being 100% reliable, making it
necessary to retain dial-up as a back-up. The last major broadband
outage here lasted five days, and for someone like me who is a
Web-worker, that long a hiatus would be catastrophic without the
dial-up fallback.
Consequently, lack of telephone modem support in Lion makes it a
nonstarter for me, compounding the other major stumbling-block of my
primary production tool Tex-Edit Plus
being a Carbon application that won't run in Lion either. For me,
Apple's arbitrary termination of Rosetta PowerPC emulation in Lion
amounts to an act of gratuitous and supercilious vandalism.
However, while finding a satisfactory alternative to my
heavily-customized (with AppleScripts) Tex-Edit Plus, while painful,
might be doable, I simply can't risk trying to get along without
dial-up Internet support.
Which isn't a happy lookout for this consummate Mac OS fan of nearly
20 years standing. InfoWorld's Tom Yager, in his recent and
hyperbolically enthusiastic review of
OS X Lion, said that Apple is no longer afraid to tell users who
don't upgrade, "You're going to be left behind," and predicts that by
this time next year a preponderance of apps on the
Mac App Store will require Lion. I reluctantly agree, which
presents me with the potential choice of whether to opt for a bunch of
kludgy workarounds in order to stay in the Mac fold, or to move on to
Linux or even Windows as my main production platform.
Or, perhaps there's at least a possibility that it need not be that
dire. According to the Sustworks.com site,
full-fledged
telephone modems like the US Robotics USB modems or the Zoom V.92
USB Modem might be able to work with Lion,* but the imponderable,
as far as I've been able to discover at this writing, is whether
there's driver software compatible with Lion. If there is or will be,
that would be the solution.
I never thought I would be buying another telephone modem after
purchasing the Apple unit in 2009, but it's a funny old world.
* UPDATE: A reader has written that both USRobotics and Zoom
Telephonics have USB modems - the USRobotics
56K USB Faxmodem ($43 at Amazon.com)
and Zoom Model
3095 V.92 USB Mini External Modem ($46 at Amazon.com)
respectively - that explicitly support Lion. We'll have more details in
the next mailbag columns.
