“The release Friday of Mac OS 10.4, the operating system also known as Tiger, by Apple Computer Inc. should be noted ruefully by the Windows majority,” James Coates writes for The Chicago Tribune. “It is impossible not to look longingly at the Macintosh minority because they confront far fewer pop-up ads, viruses, worms, browser hijackers and other such Windows ills. Based on rock solid Unix instead of Microsoft’s vulnerable Windows, Tiger extends the Mac platform to talk to Windows networks and deflect hacker attacks.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Tiger extends the Mac platform to talk to Windows networks and deflect hacker attacks?” Mac OS X has been “talking” to Windows networks for years before Tiger, and Mac OS X, since it’s beta version in 2000, has always “deflected hacker attacks.”
Coates continues, “Another temptation for Windows users is the Mac’s overstated but basically warranted reputation for being immune to crashes and easier to use than Windows. Immune? Hardly. I have had my share of lockups with OS 10’s iMovie software, GarageBand and even iPhoto. Macs, too, have glitches, but Windows has had far more.”
MacDailyNews Take: Coates doesn’t mention how much RAM his Mac has that has “lockups” with iLife apps, but it sounds like he probably doesn’t have enough. Note the curious use of the word “immune,” which is normally associated with viruses, not whatever Coates means by “lockups.” Does he mean “crashes,” “slow response,’ or something else? We’re not saying his use of “immune” means anything, it’s just a somewhat strange use of what some might consider a loaded word. Followed by “hardly” and read quickly, the casual reader might come away from the article incorrectly thinking Macs have been and are affected by viruses. We would have used “susceptible” instead of “immune” in Coates’ sentence for clarity’s sake. We would, however, use the word “immune” to describe the fact that Mac OS X has never been affected by a single virus.
Coates continues, “And I remain irritated that the Mac operating system and software use print that is quite small and thus evermore difficult to read for American’s aging masses.”
MacDailyNews Take: Aging masses: in Finder choose View>Show View Options and adjust the text size for your comfort. Or use Zoom or adjust your screen resolution as “username” notes in the Reader Feedback below. [Added this last sentence at 11:36pm ET]
Coates continues, “Macs continue to generally cost more than comparable PCs, but Apple has made huge improvements in price, with things like the barebones $500 Mac Mini desktop and the truly elegant iMac (starting at $1,299), where the computer is built into a vertical screen only 3-inches thick.”
“Yet these rants don’t hold a proverbial candle to Microsoft Windows for the miseries, miscalculations and mayhem inflicted on your humble correspondent and, more to the point, on this column’s readers,” Coates writes. “Mac OS is just a whole lot better in key areas that growing numbers of people are sure to love. And so far, at least, the mischiefmakers have been kept at bay.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yup, “so far, at least.” That’s quite faint praise for such a major point.
Coates covers the rest of Tiger’s main feature without major incident in the full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Jupiter Research VP: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘runs rings around Microsoft Windows’ – May 04, 2005
Mac OS X Tiger review for a Windows PC audience finds Tiger’s ‘far, far better than Windows XP’ – May 03, 2005
Longhorn mentioned in nearly every Apple Mac OS X Tiger review to assuage Windows masses – May 02, 2005
Boston Herald: Mac OS X Tiger should compel Windows PC users to think about switching to Apple Mac – May 02, 2005
Mac OS X Tiger will likely improve performance of your Macintosh – April 30, 2005
PC World review gives Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger 4.5 stars out of 5 – April 30, 2005
Mac fans line up for new operating system as passberby asks ‘what is a tiger?’ – April 29, 2005
Forrester analysts: Apple should advertise Mac OS X Tiger on television and in movie theaters – April 29, 2005
Ars Technica: Mac OS X Tiger ‘at least twice as significant as any single past update’ – April 28, 2005
BusinessWeek: ‘Tiger bolsters Mac OS X’s edge as the best personal-computer operating system around’ – April 28, 2005
Associated Press: Mac OS X Tiger ‘provides another excellent incentive to switch from Windows’ – April 28, 2005
Mossberg: Apple’s Tiger ‘the best, most advanced personal computer operating system on the market’ – April 28, 2005
InformationWeek columnist: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘a compelling upgrade’ – April 28, 2005
NY Times: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger is the most secure, stable and satisfying OS on earth – April 28, 2005
Wired News: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘full of welcome surprises’ – April 27, 2005
Apple posts QuickTime movies of Mac OS X Tiger features in action – April 13, 2005
Ars’ Review is the best review of Tiger. Period.
Jim Coates writes with a double-edged sword, know what I mean? Yehessss. I mean, it’s kind of like getting a compliment from Rickles.
But seriously — the Chicago Tribune? Come onnnnnn. That rag’s only good for one thing: Fishwrap. No really, my former owners used to line my doggie box with that thing when I was still potty training. Yeh-hehessss. Which makes it good enough for me . . .
. . . TO POOP ON!!!
Small print? is this guy blind?
iMac 3″ thick? Okay, so he was only off by 50%. Whatever.
Guess he doesn’t know what Text Size is.
These guys must have failed math. Since when does zero viruses equal fewer viruses.
And after yet another positive review concerning Tiger, we should start seeing the lunatic ravings in this thread.
“BUT MICROSOFT IS NUMBER ONE…BY A LOT! AND THEY HAVE A TRUE 64BIT OPERATING SYSTEM, AND IT RUNS ON DUAL OPERTONS, AND IT’S FASTER…BY A LOT! AND THEY ARE TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERIOR…BY A LOT! AND I CAN PLAY HALFLIFE 2, AND IT’S FASTER…BY A LOT!. AND YOU MAC ZEALOTS DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT…BY A LOT!”
MDN: System pref, universal access, zoom on.
or system pref, displays, set the resolution as needed
Also, you’re wasting time preaching to the quior with your takes. Could you make it routine to put them in the commentts section (if there is one)?
don’t talk to me about crashes
i installed Tiger last night and stuff crashes every couple hours
Might need to do a Clean Install to get rid of 3rd-party customizations and bad prefs files. It’s rare but it can happen.
Essefgy,
If you would care to post the issues you have, perhaps someone can offer assistance. Even better would be to go to http://www.apple.com/support and click on the Discussions section. Then go to the Tiger discussions & see if anyone else is experiencing what you are. Typically it’s not one of those “it’s only me” type of things. I had a minor problem with my accounts after installation. I resolved it in about 15 minutes & posted the answer for the other folks that were experiencing it. Since then (Friday), no problems AT ALL!!!
I’d like to make a suggestion to MDN: When quoting and putting in your own take – are you able to perhaps make one block of text different – say italicised or a different typeface, or even a different size (perhaps smaller to annoy Coates)
Would make it easier to read the original quoted bits, and your amusing comments as well.
thanks.
Or maybe even indent your comments.
First Windows users who switch can’t understand what Apple means by “Replace”, which, of course, is Microsoft’s fault for subjecting its users to it’s own proprietory dictionary.
http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/replace
Now Coates, a so-called expert, doesn’t realize you can “Configure” a Mac without having to use the word ‘configure’ ??
Go figure.
I agree with “notatotal..etc” …
How about color coded commentary! ???? One color for FYIs, another color for Sarcasm, yet a 3rd for We_Can’t_Believe_They_Printed_This_Propaganda…
and so on.
Essfgy:
Be careful of any ‘enhancements’ you bought over from Panther or prior.
Most mail plug-ins are going to cause problems and I wouldn’t be surprised if some Safari plug-ins and other system hacks cause issues.
Today’s Trivia: Do you know why the font sizes are different between Macs and Windows?
From the beginning, Macs used the publishing industry standard of 72 points per inch. Basing it on this, Apple used 72 dots per inch as the basis for display and printing. Monitors, regardless of size, could easily be calibrated to be WYSIWYG; 1 inch on the monitor was 1 inch on paper, and images were nicely proportioned to the text size. The publishing industry quickly fell in love with the Mac.
Microsoft, on the other hand, used an arbitrary 96 dots per inch. This brought serious confusion in the beginning. On a Mac (and the rest of the publishing industry) a 72 point font was as high as a 1 inch photo, but on windows, a 72 point font was 75% of the size of a 1 inch (96 point) photo.
To this day, Windows stubbornly sticks with their unusual 96 dots per inch. So, when a Mac-usin’ web master creates a web page using a normal 14 point font, to the Windows user it looks more like an 11 point font.
On a side note:
In the very early days of the internet, when the World Wide Web Consortium (http://www.w3.org) was trying to decide upon a standard for web pages, the publishing industry existing standard file format of PDF was heavily favored because it offered the highest quality. PDF files have their font embedded within the file so the reader sees exactly what was designed in exactly the same size and style regardless of the computing platform used.
Unfortunately, PDF files were too large to be quickly downloaded on the more common dial-up modems of the time. So, HTML was chosen as the smaller and quicker solution with little regard for page layout fidelity. Info was more important than design. So today, we struggle with trying to make all manners of HTML, XHTML, etc. to try to emulate what PDF already has had for decades. And as long as we avoid the publishing industry standard of PDF, Microsoft will continue to march to the beat of its own psycho inner voices of “we control the entire computing world”.
So can we actually cut and paste files now in the Finder?
In the finder, i can cut and paste files in 10.3
for QMAN…. two words only…..
bite me!
You do realize, MIke D’L B Simoni, that the web is older than the PDF format, as is therefore HTML?
G5mac, are you saying “bite me” because you think I am extolling the virtues of the Wintel World?
I’m being sarcastic to the Sputnik’s, Sammy’s, and Bisbuelo’s who write how great their Window’s XP’s are. They think because Microsoft has a huge share of the market, that makes everything related to them the BEST.
What I put in quotes is what they write in some of the recent MDN threads.
Yeah, about 90% of what “Mike D*B L Simoni” says above is misleading or BS. He’s right about points per inch on each platform, but Mac browsers have had options to render web pages in 96 dpi for a while, negating this problem for the most part.
“The early days of the Internet” were the ’70s, or the pre-web ftp/irc/MUDD/e-mail ’90s, perhaps. That’s probably just a mis-speak, but I really want to know where he got the misinformation about PDF vs. HTML. WTF?
Yes, and as they see their wallets drain, they decide to buy another windows machine
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