El Capitan OS X

El Capitan and the luddite

Okay, I am far from a luddite. I love my Apple machines very much. But I love my wooden fiber tools even more. Those wood and metal tools constitute much of the range of my post-apocalyptic survival skills.

I am committed to pushing my machines as far as I can. The iPhone 4 lasted four whole years. Apps started dropping off about a year ago. They were simply unusable and unable to be updated. Who needs Facebook on your phone anyway? It is more interesting to talk to the eccentric lady with the poodle in a bag in the post office line than scroll. But when my bank app was unable to be updated, that was the last straw. A new iPhone was in order. Fortunately when you go years beyond your last contract, it doesn't cost that much to get a new one.

The results of waiting did become apparent fairly quickly when I brought the new phone home and tried to load the information from the old one from iTunes. Because my computer is also four years old and I hadn't updated the operating system, well, ever... my MacBook couldn't talk to the new phone.

So overnight, Lion was replaced with El Capitan. That is a four generation jump in operating systems for the Mac (Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan). It has challenged my brain--remembering all the different passwords you need to update everything, hoping against hope that it all wouldn't go up in an ephemeral cloud of 0s and 1s. So far so good. A few programs are still stumping me, but I'm returning to some baseline function here. I'm just proud that I realized the initial problem was my operating system and not some unknowable electronic mystery... and that I could fix it myself.

Isn't that what we do when we create things out of fiber with wooden tools? Figure out how to do things ourselves? The electronic gadgets are fun and very useful, but I'd give them all up to keep my Schacht Ladybug spinning wheel or Harrisville Rug Loom. After all, in the apocalypse, I won't be able to charge that iPhone anyway.
Turkish spindle or iPhone? Or both?