“When Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger shipped in April, the rest of the media fawned over its hot new features and made you feel that Tiger was a must-have upgrade,” Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus writes for The Houston Chronicle. “While I was impressed with many of its features, I suggested waiting for the inevitable bug-fix releases. My last words were, ‘I’ll let you know as soon as I feel that Tiger is ‘safe and sane’ for the average user. Until then, you’re probably better off without it.'”
“Four months and two minor updates later — the current release is version 10.4.2 — it’s time to take another look,” Levitus writes. So, is it safe yet? The answer is a qualified ‘maybe.’ …While the trend is moving in the right direction, I still don’t like your odds. So, if you haven’t already upgraded to Tiger, you might want to consider waiting just a little bit longer.”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Dr. Mac: ‘Mighty Mouse is the finest mouse Apple has ever produced’ – August 09, 2005
Dr. Mac: ‘Tiger is the most significant upgrade to Mac OS X since version 10.0’ – April 19, 2005
I think he’s on target with his recommendation. I’ve been using Tiger since day one and it does gets unruly from time to time. More so than it should IMO.
Should you upgrade? If you’re using Puma, Cheetah, or Jaguar hell yes. If you’re using Panther? Ehhhh…
What the Hell is he waiting for?
My biggest problem with Tiger has been with Safari. It crashes more often than I’ve ever dealt with. I think it’s more buggy than the public beta. If anyone has any clues to fix this, I’d be grateful.
My one and only beaf with Tiger was the performance hit that Safari seemed to take – does anyone else get this?
I have this feeling it might be Java related, but it does bother me – I don’t like getting the spinning beach ball… especially when it was so fast in 10.3.9!
and the slow down doesn’t occur in FireFox…
Anyone?
Well, it is an extremely major update, and it definitely contains more than just spotlight and dashboard. A lot of stuff was changed under the hood, like metadata cataloguing, resource-fork compatibility for unix commands, etc. Quite a few of these new features broke compatibility with pervious apps only because they hadn’t yet been optimized to take advantage of the new goodies. It’s a bit like a small version of the first OS X plunge we took–hairy at first while the bugs were ironed out, but then fantastic when everything began to click into place.
Safari is way faster for me. 1Ghz Tibook.
Tiger has been a bit buggy, but after doing an archive and install, then updating to current, things are much smoother overall. Shouldn’t have had to do that, though, I guess…
“My biggest problem with Tiger has been with Safari. It crashes more often than I’ve ever dealt with. I think it’s more buggy than the public beta. If anyone has any clues to fix this, I’d be grateful.”
Have you tried resetting Safari, I use it all day every day and only have it crash maybe one every 2 weeks.
Anyone having trouble with Mail? Seems like I’ve lost some messages from my inbox…don’t know exactly how or why. I’ve checked a number of forum sites (including Apple support) and can’t find anything similar…
since the security update – Mail and Safari crashes that I could not force quit – that were only slightly decreased with the next version of it. Tiger Cache Cleaner seems to have helped. Although, 10.4.2 was pretty stable, there were some random spinning beach balls that I didn’t get with 10.3.9
why wait? life is too short. tiger is more than worth it.
Safari and Mail crash a whole lot more than they used to, but not exceedingly so. On average, I am getting one crash per day (or two days) while in the past I used to get a crash every week.
I also have some older carbon apps that crash now but never crashed before, but I think thats just improper coding.
I had my office hold off until 10.4.2, but now almost everyone is using Tiger.
I upgraded to Tiger on day one and the only thing I ever noticed was that Mail 2.0 seemed to crash frequently at first, but now it’s fine. I’ve never had any problem with Safari or anything else. I think Bob is being a little over cautious here.
I totally disagree. Once it hit 10.4.2 back in July, it became stable enough to go forward with for basically everyone. I’ve not had any real issues with Tiger at all since the .2 update came out.
it was released too early, plain and simply. microsoft style.
I love Tiger. Spotlight is worth the upgrade alone in my opinion. And since I use Mail, the upgrade is a big improvement. Plus, there are so many improvements that are smaller that really are helpful that I am still discovering.
I bought Tiger when it first came out and finally removed it and went back to Panther. I did not like the the bugginess that I found. I’ll wait to re installed when the bugs have been minimized
What a bunch of pissers & moaners. Why don’t you try Dell.
loginwindow ALWAYS crashes every single time I try to Sleep, Restart or Shut Down my Mac (PowerMac G5 Dual 1.8 with 2 GB RAM)
Mail crashes randomly, there are all kinds of strange folders in my ~/Library/Preferences (although I think Quark 6.5 has something to do with this) and every now and then my entire system slows to a halt and I have to restart, which brings me right back to loginwindow refusing to quit.
It IS still very, very buggy. I’m the only one with Tiger on my Mac in our studio (I’m the Guinea Pig, since I used to be an Apple Genius), and I’m glad it’s that way. Panther is much more stable, especially 10.3.9. If things don’t improve with 10.4.3 then I will have to revert back to Panther, because we all know time is money…
My personal standard policy is to wait until the Dr Bobs and the Walt Mossbergs give it the all clear. And until I can save up $129.
My new PB came with Tiger installed, and it works gloriously. Every now and then, howerver, my dock freezes, forcing me to reset it. Aside from that, it’s great, but I can understand how some people who may not be as into computers as the rest of us are holding true to Panther — that was a fine version of OS X as well.
Sounds like the only ones that are still having problems with Tiger 10.4.2 are those that have crappy third party apps (like Quark) or haxies that may not be completely compatible. Either that or they never maintain their systems (or both of the above issues). I’ve certainly not had any out of the ordinary issues with Tiger on my Mac, and I’d definitely never go back to Panther now.
Ok here’s the facts about Tiger.
Most Mac’s you install Tiger on will see a speed improvement, some CPU speed increase, most all get a User interface speed increase.
The User Interface speed increase is mostly due to 10.3.9’s slowness, so installing Tiger seems faster.
Now if you have a portable Mac or a slightly slower machine like a G4, Spotlight and Dashboard is going to slow your machine and drain laptop batteries more. So it would be best for some slower machines to disable Spotlight and/or Dashboard and get the most speed from Tiger.
10.4.2 Apple did something to Safari to make it blazing fast web redraws, but it was choke full of security issues that have been fixed in the latest security patch.
Still Mac OS X and Safari is about a 1,000 miles ahead of M$ Windows and IE. But I feel Apple programmers are feeling the strain of so much change.
Steve has really got them running hard, but it will be worth it if Steve can get a really big jump on M$, especially running most Win software natively when the MacTels are released.
Apple has always been good about integrating all the lastest technology into their machines.
not impressed with tiger , panther was amazing
unstable , buggy and dashboard is lame
search is also useless
It´s not just some crappy 3rd party apps which don´t work well. Most problems are caused by Safari which crashes quite often (I find one in every two weeks quite often on a Mac) and its Mail to a certain extent and iCal which still is not able to publish Calendars on a WebDAV server under Tiger. Spotlight and Dashboard are certainly nice but after all I should have stayed with Panther but, I didn´t take the effort of downgrading.