“While the third update to Mac OS X, Panther, was an essential upgrade for Mac users, the fourth has presented Apple’s marketeers with something of a challenge. The ritual that we call the annual OS upgrade is Apple’s best publicity showcase after January MacWorld – a chance to remind the world that it doesn’t just make iPods. And it’s a sensible occasion to introduce major system wide updates. It’s also an opportunity to charge rent – and a predictable revenue stream is something software vendors have longed for years. Microsoft, Oracle and Sun amongst them. But Microsoft’s Licensing 6.0 scheme has flopped even amongst business customers, not least because enterprises are sceptical that the company can deliver the goods within the lifetime of the subscription,” Andrew Orlowski reports for The Register.
“Apple has a different problem. As OS X improves, it becomes harder to convince OS X users to make the jump. If Microsoft had announced that the next version of Windows XP would sleep and wake up within three seconds with near 99.99 per cent reliability, would pick up a WiFi network within 10 seconds with similar consistency, and was now free of viruses, then users would flock to upgrade. But even the first, barely usable version of Mac OS X boasted this when it first appeared March 2001. The issue here isn’t tempting Windows switchers, but whether an annual $129 can be justified,” Orlowski reports.
Orlowski takes a “warts and all” look at Mac OS X Tiger in his full review here.
MacDailyNews Take: Orlowski’s criticisms of Dashboard as being all flash and no substance is quite a bit over the top. Exploring and installing the proper Widgets for your needs can make all the difference with Dashboard. Third-party additions like Amnesty Widegt Browser that let Widgets run free of Dashboard also add to the value. Orlowski’s Spotlight comments are good and well worth the read. Keep in mind that Spotlight and Dashboard are both version 1.0; they’ll only get better as Apple improves and developers integrate and develop for them over time. This is a thought-provoking review in spots and worth the read and in other spots it’s just pure tripe, for example where Orlowski asserts that Tiger “is a focus on the cosmetic and the superficial.” That statement is just not true, as technology like Spotlight and features like Automator promise to change the way people use personal computers for the better. You have to get used to using and actually routinely use them for the features and technologies to be valuable, of course. Spotlight alone, as it is right now, is obviously much, much more than “cosmetic and the superficial.”
The real “is it worth the upgrade” test is going back to Panther and seeing how much you miss Tiger. Tiger passes this test with flying colors and, for the speed improvement on unchanged hardware over Panther alone, is easily worth the upgrade price of US$129.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
TrustedReviews: After using Mac OS X Tiger ‘going back to Windows XP is something of a joke at best’ – May 18, 2005
Manually organize dinosaur Windows PCs while Mac users already have the future with Spotlight – May 18, 2005
The Butler Group: ‘Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger the best desktop operating system in the world to date’ – May 13, 2005
BBC News: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘the most stable and reliable OS, well ahead of Windows XP’ – May 10, 2005
Windows users show strong curiosity about Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger – May 09, 2005
Windows tech writer Thurrott: ‘In many ways, Mac OS X Tiger is simply better than Windows’ – May 07, 2005
EarthWeb: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger is a ‘serious enterprise operating system, a pivotal release’ – May 06, 2005
BusinessWeek: ‘Tiger bolsters Mac OS X’s edge as the best personal-computer operating system’ – May 06, 2005
The Guardian: Mac OS X Tiger a powerful solution while Microsoft’s Longhorn remains on drawing board – May 06, 2005
Chicago Sun-Times: Mac OS X Tiger shows ‘there’s never been a more compelling time to switch to Mac’ – May 05, 2005
Dan Gillmor: ‘With Mac OS X Tiger, Apple is plainly in the lead today’ – May 05, 2005
Jupiter Research VP: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘runs rings around Microsoft Windows’ – May 04, 2005
The Independent: Apple’s ‘faster, smarter, simpler’ Mac OS X Tiger ‘a must-have’ – 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
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
Windows is weak, Longhorn will be cosmetic upgrade; Apple can deliver killer blow to Microsoft – April 27, 2005
Thurrott: ‘Longhorn is in complete disarray and in danger of collapsing under its own weight’ – April 27, 2005
Wired News: Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger ‘full of welcome surprises’ – April 27, 2005
Thurrott: Longhorn ‘has the makings of a train wreck’ – April 26, 2005
Thurrott: Longhorn demos ‘unimpressive, fall short of graphical excellence found today in Mac OS X’ – April 26, 2005
Apple posts QuickTime movies of Mac OS X Tiger features in action – April 13, 2005
over 24hr late MDN!
His review is half full and half empty. The items he covered about some GUI features were pathetic and sad; however, he has some good point about Apple recent restriction on its OS X. We don’t want to find ourselves in the same situation we were in while using OS 9. If restriction were to go further, then apple will never hit the corporate world with its OS.
MDN bases its reply on his dashboard criticism of course which in fact should simply be ignored. What MDN doesn’t comment on is all of the remaining points that should be taken into account. MDN’s comments are as weak as they’ve always been.
Peace
What MDN hasn’t published yet. an in depth review:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/27/review_macosx_tiger/
His review is all empty in my opinion. Windows is not nor ever will be 99% reliable. Boy is that a dream fantasy. On the contrary however OSX is almost there easily. These anual updates as he puts it was to bring OSX up to speed as it is still very new. But obviously everyone has forgotten the fact that OSX is just the newbie on the block. That’s probably because OSX has been so reliable right out of the box that you don’t think of it as something new. Especially compared with Microsofts Windows. Insecure, full of spyware, viruses, and trojans. Hacked every which way you can think of. Blue screen ville and system crashes to many to count. Tiger is just another addition of polish on a already great operating system. Apple is giving what users are asking for and more. Apple is doing much more than adding flash like dashboard. It’s adding services that work with other operating systems. Making it a seemless transition so it can interoperate with the world. Making it 64 bit and also 32 bit backwards compatible.
the price to me.
The criticisms of spotlight and the general look of the UI are fair. Despite that, the ability to search content makes spotlight a couple orders of magnitude better than previous find functions. For my purposes, it’s worth the cost of the upgrade by itself. However, I can see for the typical e-mail/internet/basic word processing person that it may not be necessary.
“Roxio’s Toast no longer burns songs purchased from Apple’s Music Store.” One thing – why does this matter? Are there reasons to use Toast instead of iTunes?
Tiger is worth the upgrade if you can afford to be adventurous. It’s fun to experiment. But unless you can also afford to put up with all of its bugs too, you can afford to wait. Other than the first iteration of OS X, it’s the worst OS X upgrade released by Apple that I can remember. It’s full of problems that, while not catastrophic in nature, are really annoying. I’m especially annoyed by the Finder’s erratic behavior. And it has a lot of little things that, after Panther, you’d expect to work but don’t – like rotating desktop images pulled from an album in iPhoto; icons in the Dock that ‘stick’; program icons in the Menu Bar that don’t ‘reload’ after a restart; the Finder constantly apparently ‘crashing’; and other ‘odd’ behavior in Mail and Safari. These are ‘behaviors’ that, to me, are surprising in a 4th edition of an operating system that bills itself as the best – and I’ve been a dedicated Mac user since 1988! I have to say that, as cool as much of Tiger is, overall I’m disappointed mostly because it seems to have been released with a lower standard of quality and acceptable performance than has been characteristic of Apple and contradicts in terms of real world experience what Apple claims in its PR campaign. And that causes me to worry. The worst change in Tiger for me is the way you now burn a CD. It’s the least intuitive thing I can remember ever being produced by Apple and is exactly how you perform the operation in Windows XP. Now THAT’S something to worry about! I hope Apple fixes this stuff.
cosmetic and superficial ???
arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
According to my Mac’s dictionary:
rant |rønt| verb [ intrans. ]
speak or shout at length in a wild, impassioned way.
cynic |sɪnɪk| noun
1. a person who believes that people are motivated purely by self-interest rather than acting for honorable or unselfish reasons.
2. a person who questions whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile.
Orlowski’s article is one of the longest rants I have read in ages. He spouts seemingly endlessly about how Tiger is imperfect for his ego-centric universe. Most of the things he points out as being poorly designed don’t even exist in Windows XP.
He is the type of cynic you’d find standing in the grassy field, waiting with hundreds of others, for the very first powered flight in a world were no other planes exist, and pointing out “I hate the color they choose. It’ll never fly!”
In a world filled with computers, a world filled with dictionaries, and a world filled with dictionaries on computers, did it ever occur to anyone to make the dictionary (not to mention a spell-checker) a PART of the computer so it is a unified system-wide function? Apple brought the two together for the first time. It seems obvious now, but no one had done it before. Sometimes the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. This is the point that Orlowski is missing. He drones on and on about this bit is wrong or how he would have done it better, which is easy enough to do if you are lazy enough to wait for someone else to put forth the effort to produce a product, and then stand on the side and critique its individual parts. But the extraordinary amount of vision and effort to produce something like Tiger is monumental compared to the knit-picking topics Orlowski attempts to magnify.
Orlowski’s pointless rant doesn’t enlighten others, but merely induces others to pity him; which I do. Perhaps, that was his true intentions.
I read Thurrott saying that OSX was more for tech experts, and normal folks should stick with Windows.
So what I want is for a decent write up of how switching to OSX will mean you no longer have to call on the family technical guru every other week to sort things out. Putting Thurrott back into his pram and showing people that OSX is for scientists and dummies equally.
While I haven’t RTFA, I’m here to put my $.02 in.
I love Tiger. I work on Panther everyday at my office and get to go home to Tiger every night. Bamboozled: I haven’t had any of the issues that you speak of with frequent crashing or icons behaving badly and I burn CD’s the same way on both versions so I don’t understand what issues you are dealing with.
Spotlight is the best thing that’s happened to my computing experience since internal hard drives (man, I hated those 5.25″ floppies!!).
I’ve also become an RSS addict thanks to Safari and iCal is a major improvement from the version on my office Mac (although I still have some qualms with it).
I agree that Dashboard does leave a little to be desired but in Apple’s defense, I think my problems are with the widget developers moreso than Apple’s version 1.0 Dashboard.
But knowing that there are many under-the-hood updates that have made my upgrade treat me so nice with faster operations and smoother functionality makes me give Tiger two thumbs up and a recommended upgrade for anyone that uses a computer.
As Tony would say, “It’s Grrrrrrrrrreat!!!”
Maybe Apple can introduce new “themes” with each new OS upgrade.
Aqua is awesome when you see it for the first couple times, but that new feeling wears away with repeated use.
Tiger “looks” and “feels” exactly like Panther. Some superficial additions may help to augment the “new and improved” marketing message Apple wants to convey.
Being such a great design company, why not flex with each new OS?
“Black” Aqua
“Purple” Aqua (ala Avid)
Blue Mist
Orange Mist
Black Mist
China Mist
Pacific Mist
—
Search technology doesn’t exactly make you go… Ooooh WOW!
Maybe Apple can introduce new “themes” with each new OS upgrade.
Aqua is awesome when you see it for the first couple times, but that new feeling wears away with repeated use.
Tiger “looks” and “feels” exactly like Panther. Some superficial additions may help to augment the “new and improved” marketing message Apple wants to convey.
Being such a great design company, why not flex with each new OS?
“Black” Aqua
“Purple” Aqua (ala Avid)
Blue Mist
Orange Mist
Black Mist
China Mist
Pacific Mist
—
Search technology doesn’t exactly make you go… Ooooh WOW!
Maybe Apple can introduce new “themes” with each new OS upgrade.
Aqua is awesome when you see it for the first couple times, but that new feeling wears away with repeated use.
Tiger “looks” and “feels” exactly like Panther. Some superficial additions may help to augment the “new and improved” marketing message Apple wants to convey.
Being such a great design company, why not flex with each new OS?
“Black” Aqua
“Purple” Aqua (ala Avid)
Blue Mist
Orange Mist
Black Mist
China Mist
Pacific Mist
—
Search technology doesn’t exactly make you go… Ooooh WOW!
Crouching Tiger/Hidden Longhorn:
Cute!
Just out of curiosity, because I truly am disappointed by all the little “glitches” I’ve been experiencing in Tiger, did you do a ‘clean install’ or did you do an upgrade from Panther when you first installed Tiger? I just did the upgrade installation and, if you did a clean, brand new install and are not experiencing any of these problems, perhaps that will solve my glitches as well?
Thanks.
I agree with the writer, I simply don’t feel compelled to upgrade this time, I like Panther, which to me feels like the first version of osX that is a slick, finished product. Apple obviously needs to keep upgrading the system to stay ahead of the game, but I don’t think you need to upgrade.
The author does have a point about QuickTime. The first time I noticed that you could no longer save a movie file being played in your web browser without paying $29 to upgrade to QuickTime Pro, I was not happy, to say the least.
From the article:
“Apple claims to have made over 200 improvements in Tiger. But on closer examinations these include such essentials as “Buy Printing Supplies”, a graphics equalizer for the DVD Player, and “Export Bookmarks” from Safari, giving the impression that Apple was stumped as to how to sell the Tiger upgrade. Each bundled Dashboard widget is listed as a separate improvement.
We counted over 20 new desktop backgrounds in Tiger – why aren’t these listed as new features, too?!
I agree with the author that Tiger isn’t as compelling as I thought it would be. I have actually found quite a few instances that I think the UI has regressed in a bad way. Here are a few irritations I have with 10.4:
Mail:
There is no feedback about when I am getting new mail (no status bar).
I have to put my folders in a certain order.
I can’t change the priority of mail in the inbox.
Apple-i always opens the information about the accounts – I expect it to open info about the smart folders like it does in iTunes.
I can’t specify to search for a message from someone containing some other text. I am limited to searching only in one field unless I make a smart folder. Why not have the ‘+’ next to the ‘save’ button like the Finder smart folders have.
Why am I limited to only two sizes of Mailboxes.
Why must all of the folders have the same column descriptions.
Spotlight:
I can’t specify my own time ranges. I am limited to what they have already in there.
The predefined “this week” and “this month” are very frustrating. On Sunday, May 1st, I had to look at all of the messages to find anything useful since both those time frames consisted of 1 day. The “past 7 days” and “the past month” would be much more useful search queries. Again, this should be customizable. Safari does it right with RSS feeds – why aren’t these two consistent? They look almost exactly the same, but behave quite differently.
Where does the Spotlight window reside? It’s an abandoned window.
The date Spotlight sorts by is the last viewed date in real time. That is annoying since it rearranged things as you are looking at them.
Automator:
I haven’t been able to get it to do anything that I want to. The interface is nice, but the functions I want aren’t there. It can’t close a window or “Find Finder Items” where Date created is NOT within the last XXX days.
General:
The smart folders are not folders – I can’t use the Terminal to CD into them. They are a single file. Apple is really starting to blur the lines between what they call a folder and a single file. Anything ending with a .app appears as a single file, but it is really a folder with many items inside of it.
The smart folders in everything (i.e. iTunes, Mail, Finder, etc.) really need to be able to have searches that are composed of both “any” and “all” criteria. I want to be able to do a search in Mail for {(messages more than 10 days old AND low priority) OR (more than 5 days old AND high priority)}.
Safari:
There are a few inconsistencies – In the RSS preference, the “Remove Articles” is in increasing order while the “Check for update” is in decreasing order.
When I open a folder of RSS feeds, it closes all my other tabs and opens them in one tab. The RSS feeds are only taking one tab, why is it closing the others? I understand why it does this with a normal folder of websites – they open in separate tabs, but the RSS feeds all open in one tab.
Give me an option to make Safari RSS stop asking if it is okay to unzip and mount an image.
Finder:
FTP client with write access.
Fleet street quality reporting. Orlowski? Isn’t he the idiot that tried to paint Apple as an oppressive company that promotes stealing music with that Superbowl ad in 2004? They guy is the master of hyperbole, ofuscation and a priori attacks.
he’s not worth reading.
Orlowski should give up Mac based reporting. He should stick to his first love: free music and free software for everyone. He ended his article by saying he paid $15 for the Tiger upgrade. He just promoted software piracy, which is where his roots are…
>Bamboozled:
“Just out of curiosity, because I truly am disappointed by all the little “glitches” I’ve been experiencing in Tiger, did you do a ‘clean install’ or did you do an upgrade from Panther when you first installed Tiger? I just did the upgrade installation and, if you did a clean, brand new install and are not experiencing any of these problems, perhaps that will solve my glitches as well?”
I don’t know about CTHL but I choose to archive and install and haven’t had any of the issues that you see here and elsewhere in mac forums. My only complaint so far has been safari acting a bit erratic, especially in tab browsing.
Good Luck!
The only REALLY compelling reason I can find for upgrading is the fact that Apple has FINALLY introduced on-the-fly Finder list updating (how long has it taken the company to match OS 7, 8, 9’s basic functionality here – 4 YEARS!?!)
I have a well organised file hierarchy so can see little use for a Search feature beyond a basic one to locate my stuff – and from this article it sounds as if Spotlight actually hampers the basic searches most people do.
I am getting seriously worried about Apple’s control-freakery. Every new feature they introduce results in them unnecessarily stripping away its preceding software. In many cases this has been software on which people have developed preferred routines for working, perhaps over decades – Apple’s attitude to its loyal users in these situations (users, that is, who prefer to ‘think different’) is clearly Fsck You!
thanks panoctopi. i appreciate the info. i’m now giving serious consideration to reinstalling Tiger in that fashion myself.
[The author does have a point about QuickTime. The first time I noticed that you could no longer save a movie file being played in your web browser without paying $29 to upgrade to QuickTime Pro, I was not happy, to say the least.]
Can we still save the file – in 10.4 – using Firefox?
Does Apple ever consider that this ‘Nickel & Diming’ might actually hurt their ‘Switcher’ Campaign? If it seriously annoys the true-believers, then what of the sceptics?
Apple/Steve should Think Different about this bait-and-switch.