The Independent: Apple’s ‘faster, smarter, simpler’ Mac OS X Tiger ‘a must-have’

“The arrival of ‘Tiger,’ the fifth iteration of Apple Computer’s OS X operating system, released on Friday, has been eagerly awaited for months – even by some people who don’t use Apple machines. That’s because it’s seen as what Microsoft would like to achieve with the next version of Windows, codenamed ‘Longhorn.’ Except that won’t appear until the end of next year – and Tiger is here now,” Charles Arthur writes for The Independent.

Arthur looks at the main features of Mac OS X Tiger and writes, “For Windows users, [Tiger] is a sort of shop-window of what Longhorn might be like in 18 months’ time, providing your computer is fast enough by then for the next-generation product. For Apple users, it’s faster, smarter, simpler – and, what’s more, it’s here right now. At the price, it’s a must-have.”

Full article here.

Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple unveils new faster iMac G5 line with built-in AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth, 512MB base RAM, more – May 03, 2005

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
Why doesn’t Apple advertise Mac OS X on TV? – April 12, 2005

16 Comments

  1. Having pre-ordered Tiger from Apple I was anticipating a Friday arrival. When I called to inquire about not having received it Apple offerred a free iWorks. Yesterday both arrived. Tiger is all I hoped it would be. So far spotlight is amazing but I have lots to explore before I decide what is the greatest. Back to Tiger features. MDN Magic Word is further – fitting.

  2. On the surface, Tiger seems to be just like Panther, but after using it a few days, Tiger is much faster on my 876MHz 12″ PowerBook even without all of CoreImage. There are few bouts of hesitation. It seems multitasking is better. Spotlight is nice, but it can’t figure out what you are looking for if you aren’t specific. Mail is a bit awkward, but much better. The HTML engine seems to actually use WebKit now. Safari is fast and smooth.

    There seems to be a few irregularities I can’t quite put my finger on, but all in all, it would be painful to go back. I use Win2k at work also because I write on proprietary windows software and even though the computer is spec’d much faster, in reality it is quite a bit slower at most things and terribly clumsy.

    From what I’ve read of Tiger, it was written with developers in mind, like every other OS X release, but now it’s quite polished. The next version should be for the users. Hopefully Apple will concentrate on getting a unified interface look and feel. It seems every Apple app is “thinking different”. Mail looks more like a Windows app than any Apple app should for instance.

  3. I just had to post the following and I will ask you fellow Mac Zealots to please use the following new terminoligy:

    MS software will from now on be referred to as “Cattleware”, Why, well one reason is obvious, and the other is… well, because MS is fulll of bull.

    Apple software will be “Catware”, once again because of the obvious, and because “CAT”, as in the bulldozer is what Apple is doing to the competition

    MW – “Now”, as in “Now is the winter of their discontent”

  4. I just received and installed mine last night. Still wrapping my head around all the new stimuli, but I can say that Spotlight truly is significant, and might actually change the way I use a computer (for the better), which is something I can’t really say of any software released in a very long time (a decade+?). This is sounding cliche now, but I am rediscovering things from as long as ten years ago that are really quite useful. Haven’t even got to the smart folders yet.

    LOVE the contextual dictionary/thesaurus feature; polished, slick, and the entries come up almost instantly. Dashboard isn’t a big deal for me, but it too is beautifully done and it could become very interesting as more and more people develop for it. Preview seems to have some of the CoreImage functionality built into it, and can crop, resize, do colour alterations and more, and is still a very lightweight, extremely fast application (my favourite kind!).

    I’d love to hear other peoples’ favourite new features, especially the less talked about and hyped stuff….

  5. Most journalists seem to think that Spotlight is the greatest feature but I really haven’t used it much yet. From what I’ve seen it’s very impressive but I have a very organized file system so maybe I just won’t get as much use out of it as some people. What I really love is all the little changes that weren’t advertised. Mail is a million times better, there are nice little additions in the contextual menus throughout the OS, and it’s much faster. The only thing I don’t like is, I have an annoying little beep that, from what I read, is the power supply. Turning the Processor Performance in Energy Saver to automatic helped some but it’s still there.

    As for Foghorn Leghorn, maybe it’ll come with a search feature similar to Spotlight, and maybe it will have some of the features we enjoy today, but it’s still gonna be Windows. No thanks.

  6. Mail – more responsive
    Safari – just quicker generally and more informative about what it’s trying to do
    Spotlight – Truly incredible. Indexed my main hard drive within a couple of hours of installation, saves me around 15 minutes/day when I get queries
    Dashboard – a bit ho-hum so far, largely because some of the more innovative widgets are useful in England. Bound to change – especially if some British/European companies begin to understand the value of web services.
    Quartz Compositor – reminds me of a 70’s analog synthesizer, but for visuals rather than sound.
    Dictionary/Thesaurus – MS couldn’t do something that elegant if they had ten times as many monkeys working for them as they do now. Except at least they now have something to copy.
    Preferences/Accounts – so now you can have multiple admins on a machine easily, and you have a neat password generator.
    Keychain Access – easier to understand than before
    Grapher – something I’ll never use: cheaper than Mathematica (!), and an extremely elegant demonstration of the Power of Mac.

    So to sum-up: faster, smarter, simpler, superior and – most importantly – shipping.

  7. I think I just found a something interesting. If you have multiple users you can use spotlight to search the contents of their user folders (at least if you are the administrator) – thereby defeating any security. I just did it.

  8. Here’s my opinions on Tiger after 5 days:

    Faster, buggier (expected though).

    Mail is faster but whats with the icons? What happened to HIG apple?

    Spotlight is fantastic although it doesn’t always update until I log out.

    Still figuring out Automator. I know it will be useful, just haven’t found it yet.

    I could live without Dashboard. Is there a way to disable it?

    Quicktime 7 and H.264 are amazing.

    Haven’t done much with iChat although I’m glad its got Jabber support now.

    Safari is much improved and I like the RSS feed although I would like it to be more like Firefox’s RSS in that I can scan the headlines in my bookmarks menu and not actually open them up in a window.

    Good news is Fink still works fine in it. I reinstalled my subversion server today.

    Disappointments:

    Apache 1.3.33 is still the web server. Why didn’t Apple switch to Apache 2?

    Perl’s been updated as well as python although python has been compiled with gcc 3.3 instead of gcc 4.0. Thats ok, I installed python 2.4.1 via fink and compiled it with gcc 4.0.

    Can’t wait for the first update.

  9. Jeff:

    Hey Dashboard isn’t activated until you bring it up the first time. On a fresh login notice in Activity monitor how much memory you have free, then hit F12 or whatever you key is and watch each active widget take 5MB or so for itself. Just turn off the hotkey in your prefs (Make it the dash) and it’s “disabled”.

    As for Automator, I’ve been using it to update my Quicktime movie comments. Found out QT has a memory leak when opening multiple movies in a row from Automator, I gotta quit it after about a dozen movies. Sent in a bug report, hopefully it’s taken care of in QT 7.1 ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> Still much better than before!

  10. “This is correct. Tiger is faster, smarter, and simpler… for me to POOP ON!!!
    Yeh-heh-hessss!!!!”

    Yo, we LIKE the real Triumph when he posts- but you’re a juvenile punk who has zero sense of humor, jackoff. Piss off, toady.

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