Rosetta and Lion: Get Over It? Uh-Uh
TidBits’ Michael E. Cohen laments the rumored impending demise of Rosetta support for PowerPC Mac application software coming with OS X 10.7 Lion, noting that a friend says he should just “Get over it,” a glib dismissal of his concerns that he says rankled at the time and still does, but unfortunately he hears the same sentiment popping up a lot, and not just regarding Apple’s rumored abandonment of Rosetta, but in all sorts of contexts, about all sorts of transitions, and says that every time he sees it, even when he understands, and even when he agrees with the necessity of moving on, he gets angry.
I understand where he’s coming from, being something of a an instinctive Luddite myself, and usually taking a lot of convincing that change really amounts to improvement rather than just change for change’s sake.
Cohen says he accepts th necessity of change, but the “get over it” trope angers him because he perceives it as is not being meant as advice, but rather in aid of, at least subconsciously, elevating the speaker’s own self-image and dismissing the addressee’s feelings with smug advice and in many cases, bad advice.
Bad in this instance, because the Rosetta abandonment’s disabling of application software like Quicken 2007, Photoshop CS1, FileMaker Pro 8, Microsoft Word 2004, and many others is not a trivial matter and has real potential to cause substantial inconvenience and expense
Cohen says he won’t be able to get over it, and there is no rational reason he should, observing that coping with a change doesn’t necessarily mean wholeheartedly embracing change that has real, unpleasant consequences, that the emotional consequences of this change are also estimable on top of the financial and logistical ones, and to glibly advise: “just get over it” denies the validity and the reality of what he feels; denies him as a person.
He accepts that change happens, but no, he won’t just “get over it.” Nor will I, and I applaud Cohen for striking back at superciliousness.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://tidbits.com/article/12191