1. Keep the hackintosh and MBP running as long as possible. MBP on Lion, hack on Snow Leopard, mostly, Lion sometimes on the other drive, past that to Mountain Lion and beyond never, unless Apple improves upon Slow Leopard, instead of the reverse. That's a good plan so far. Like you, I'm waiting for OS X to improve instead of degrade with each new version. It probably won't happen though, no matter how much we complain to Apple. I use Lion currently, and though I'm used to it, don't like it as much as Snow Leopard. Mountain Lion is even more of a nightmare. I can't change the default font in Safari 6? Excuse me? Pfffft!
2. Upgrade to W7 from XP on the virtual side of thangs, via emulation. That should be a dream to do. I've run W7 in Bootcamp and not in emulation yet, but I believe it works exceedingly well with Parallels. W7 is quite nice -- if you can call anything in Windows "nice."
3. Get used to running biz in that virtual W7 environment which - as much as I despise it - is likely to be supported a LOT longer than SL. A very sad truth. Apple is dumping support for older versions of OS X quickly these days, since new versions are coming out so fast. One thing you might be able to do is continue to run the hack in Lion or Mountain Lion when the time comes, and run the Snow Leopard virtualized as we've talked about before, in private. That way you can stick with SL for the business side.
4. Eventually - years from now, hopefully not sooner, fingers crossed, knocking on wood - move to W8.9, when forced by dead OS X to do so. That is a nightmare I hope never comes to pass. Since Microsoft and Apple have both started crapping on us all with their latest OS releases, I have my doubts that Windows will be any better than a dying or dead OS X. W7 is the equivalent of Snow Leopard for the Windows crowd -- the best OS they've ever put out. I have strong doubts that W8.5 or W9 will turn that boat around either.
It's a crying shame that we're even discussing this. I can't think of a worse computing world than one in which OS X is dead and we all have to use whatever the latest craptastic version of Windows is. As Mac users, we've always worried that Microsoft would win and crush us into paste. Who would have thought Apple would help them do it? |
