“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 agree with the recommendation to wait. I waited until 10.4.2 before jumping to Tiger on my five Macs, but have experienced problems (nothing major, but quite annoying). Next time I will wait until .3 or until everyone says it is really ready.
I had one issue with Tiger when it was first released, and found a quick solution. Since then, no problems, no crashes, nothing. The thing works perfectly.
Funny, but Safari has never crashed on me once since upgrading to 10.4.2. I guess YMMV…
Spotlight alone makes the upgrade worth it. Geez, I’ve been using Tiger without issues since its release. It makes my 1GHz iBook much “snappier.”
I installed Tiger on a fresh hard drive right when it came out. It locked up on me the first week with a kernel panic. Since then its been rock stable with the exception of iTunes. For some reason, iTunes tends to lock up on me quite frequently the first time I open it up. I actually have to go and kill the process.
Everything else works though.
This man is completely right. 10.4.2 is getting there, but had I not jumped at it on release day, I too would keep away. 10.3.9 is still a much more solid OS.
As mentioned above though, for anyone below Panther, upgrading to Tiger is almost obligatory.
I agree. I get a kernal panic once a week or more with Tiger and I never got one previous to this (I did a fresh install of Tiger too). Lots of Safari crashes and issues with my company’s proxyd that I didn’t have before. Sigh…..
I haven’t seen a crash on Safari or anything associated with Tiger and I installed it day one, sounds like I should count my blessings (although, I’ve had no problem on three different Macs).
Sometimes waking my PB from sleep takes a bit longer, or dashboard takes a minute to come up, but overall I really love Tiger from day 1 I installed it in May. Most of my problems should be solved when I expand my RAM.
izod (and others):
Try using OnyX. I was having big problems with Safari and other apps in Tiger before I ran OnyX on my Mac mini; everything has been fine since.
(I’m staying absolutely silent) – NO kernal panics, NO Safari issues (plays A1 with PithHelmet), NO complaints or issues – whatever. Just hours of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Safari, Entourage, Pages, Widgets, iView, Adobe Bridge, CameraRaw (10mb image files x,000’s), iTunes, iPhoto, NoteTaker and Epson printers and Airport etc.
Tiger IS THE business.
I moved to YASU when Onyx was not Tiger compatible (it is now). Yasu is simpler does the job just fine.
No major problems with Tiger here either (did an Archive and Install from Panther).
The Tiger installer did find a disk error it could not fix and refused to continue. Had to buy DiskWarrior to get Tiger installed. But I appreciate the strict installation (including the lengthy DVD verification process as well) — I bet it prevents problems in the long run.
After updating to 10.4.2, had a login freeze (just a blue background) and had to do a hard reset, but it came up fine the next time. Repaired permissions and everything seems to be running fine (including mail and safari)
Only 3 real complaints:
1. Spotlight should NEVER hang up your typing while it starts getting results. EVER.
2. The dashboard widgets sometimes take 5 seconds or so to “wake up,” even with 1.25 GB of RAM installed. I thought these were supposed to be quick and at your fingertips.
3. When I double-click a component (like a .mdimporter Spotlight plugin), I should NOT get a message that an application to open it could not be found. Offer to INSTALL THE @$^#$^ THING. (Dashboard gets this right).
I love Spotlight, like dashboard, but DAVE and 3iVX don’t work anymore, so I had to go back to 10.3.9. The machines (G4’s) seem a bit slower, but I could have lived with that.
whatever you do, don’t use the FAX features in Tiger. So many bugs its amazing….and i can’t even receive faxes because they are so blurry. Send is fine, but other than that….ick.
most of Tiger is good, but bugs abound.
I mostly feel for Jeff. =) If my iTunes was screwing up that would be enough to drive me back to classic. My experience has been a little rosier than most I guess. Everything is humming along on my alBook but the one thing that’s slightly annoying is the Cisco VPN client sometimes doesn’t work. If I try it 2 or 3 times it fires up. That has to be frustrating for the programmers involved. I notice when I have a problem it’s easier to solve if it’s completely broken, and not sporadically working. I can’t recall any safari crashes, and I adopted this new version waayyy too early. Last time I had a kernel panic was when I borrowed a friends mbox when I was back on Panther.
I just hope that by simply typing thiis my good fotune will not evaporate….
As a rule, I do not upgrade OSX on my main work machines until the new version of OSX has been upgraded/bug fixed four times or so — when switching from 10.1.5 to 10.2, did not upgrade until Apple released 10.2.4 — same with 10.3 — Apple released 10.3.5 before I finally upgraded.
As a test, I have installed Tiger 10.4.2 on my G3 800 MHz iBook w/640 MB RAM — it is a bit snappier, but Tiger is a RAM pig and I get the spinning beach ball far too often. Also, because of Tiger’s voracious RAM appetite, I can only have four or five applications open at once, before the Tiger OS starts paging memory to/from my SLOW 4200 RPM iBook hard disk. Tiger NEEDS at least 1 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard disk to function well, IMHO. Interestingly enough, the G3 800 MHz CPU is quite capable under Tiger, and very usable for email, web and standard office type tasks and applications — even Photoshop CS runs fairly well when editing a 30 MB image file — G3 iBook simply needs MORE RAM and a faster internal hard disk to properly handle Tiger.
On my several DP G4 tower Macs, I am happily running an extremely stable and robust OSX 10.3.9 — never crashes, always works, no uneccessary spinning beach balls or delays in executing or operating — 10.3.9 is just too good — useful, dependable and predictable — to chance upgrading to Tiger, at this point.
Niffy
Here are my complaints about Tiger:
1. Safari is very slow with some specific websites, for example, ESPN.com is just atrocious. It crashes as frequently as it did when first launched a couple of years ago.
2. Java is still incompatible with some websites. This is annoying.
3. Mail has become almost useless. It is very slow in getting and displaying new messages, it sometimes shows deleted messages as new, and syncing with .mac has become a hit and miss effort. I’m almost returning to Entourage.
4. iSync is a disaster. It is no better than Panther’s iSync, and in many ways is worse. .mac, iPod and Palm syncing have been separated for now apparent reason. Getting consistent syncs with some devices is impossible. To get a decent sync most people have to purchase a third party program such as Missing Sync.
5. Waking from sleep is problematic at times. Every few days, my iMac’s (I have two) decide to give the spinning wheel of death, instead of bringing up the login window.
6. iCal and Address Book haven’t been updated in years, and they are no longer state-of-the-art.
Tiger IS faster and better. I updated on Day 1, I am not afraid of upgrades. Few of you remember the switch from OS 7 to OS 8. That nearly caused me to move to Windows.
i upgraded an emac and a 12″ pb 1.5 ghz to tiger. currently at 10.4.2 with the resent security updat, not patched update, and every thing runs like buttah!!! i also repair permission before and after any update. i think a lots of users problems stem from not repairing permission before and after. i’m also really good at doing maintenance on my machine to check for directory error. if only other mac users did this i suspect their tiger issues would go away.
I installed Tiger on my PB but I’m still running Panther on my other two Macs.
I have had some issues with Airport connections prior to 10.4.2, but everything is copacetic now. I had 54 days uptime with 10.4.0, 56 days uptime with 10.4.1 before updating to 10.4.2 now.
Man am I glad I’m not the only one. I put it on my 1.25GHz PB and have had nothing but trouble. It’s actually quite a disappointment.
With the previous release, my PB locked up maybe once or twice; with Tiger, it’s locked up more times than I can remember.
This is crap — I feel like I’m on Microsoft again 🙁
“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.” – macnut222
Your copy of Safari may have become corrupted during one of your upgrades. When I was running Panther, Safari was giving problems with sudden crashes and eating my bookmarks – not a fun thing when you have a rather large bookmark file. Fortunately I kept a backup of the file. I spoke with an employee at the genius bar and he said that Safari probably got corrupted during an upgrade. He burned a new copy of Safari for me, and since replacing Safari at home, it’s been running fine. Hope this helps.
I used to read this guy, but no more. He must be on the ‘take’ from Bill Gates because his advice on this is just plain wrong.
Tiger works very well. Is it perfect? No. Is it better than Panther? Yes. Improved in many ways; faster, more secure, more reliable, easier to use, better features, eye candy. What’s not to like?
What’s Dr. Bob’s problem? And where did he get his PhD? By email?
Bambi Hambi
Mac360
wow, what a bunch of whiny bitches