Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X Tiger Goes Gold
bonch writes "Following up yesterday's story, AppleInsider now reports that Tiger build 8A428 has been deemed the Gold Master for shipping. Sources expect an announcement of Tiger's completion sometime tomorrow." There are far better days to make a product announcement, should a company wish to be taken seriously, but it worked for Gmail!
An April 1 announcement from Apple actually sort of makes sense, because Apple was incorporated on April 1, 1976. That makes tomorrow Apple's 29th "birthday."
It's good to see that Apple is delivering Tiger on time. Some might even say it's early.
They only do that for people who make purchases the day of the announcement and after.
There's usually something available.... if memory serves, you only pay $25.
I could just be talking out of my ass on that value though.
In the past, when Apple has upgraded their OS versions, they have done the following:
(1) customers who purchased a new Mac 30 days (the exchange peroid) before the announcement get a free upgrade CD in the mail (or at an Apple Store perhaps?)
(2) new Macs being built come with the new OS on the hard drive image from the factory.
(3) computers in inventory get their boxes sliced open and a new OS upgrade CD (DVD?) dropped in. This disk requires the install drive to have an OS on it already, so it is not the same as what comes on the boxed OS CD.
I have also read other reports from people who got a free iLife upgrade because of (1) having that CD dropped in their Macs as a separate disk, not the OS and iLife on a single disk.
This may usher in the era of Mac OS missing iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie/iDVD/Garageband on the same CD - thus reinforcing the concept of iLife as an application suite and the OS as a standalone product. Don't look for these new iLife apps on the Tiger install CDs purchased from the store. (But as always, new Macs come with Mac OS and iLife as well as Quicken.)
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Seriously though, if you really want to preorder right now, you can do so through Amazon.com and get a $35 rebate too.
There are people that have been waiting for Tiger before ordering a mini. It seems that the Apple Store has caught up on the 1.25GHz mini orders (ships same business day), the 1.42GHz minis are still 5-7 days to shipping.
I think I can answer that for him...
.upgrades, things are looking a lot faster.
While this list may answer your questions, I seriously reccomend viewing the '05 Keynote from San Fransico
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf05/
1. Spotlight: I'm sure you probably know about it by now. Super-quick searching of everything evar!
2. Dashboard: Quick lookup-info and go thing. Try something remarkably similar at http://www.konfabulator.com/ but think of Dashboard as faster.
3. Automator: Like writing small shell scripts to replace you, but way better/gui'fied. Application developers can use AppleScripts to create more robust workflows. (Save your pr0n images faster than ever before!)
4. More optimization: Like most
Visit http://www.apple.com/macosx/ for more info
Oh, does Apple inform its ADC members of the bugs? I think not.
Interesting that your stupid comment got moderated up, but the original posting was left alone. Could it be that /. is just an advertising arm of Apple?
The machine I'm typing this on had one significant upgrade since I got it in high school. (I finished grad school a few months ago.) That was my 300MHz to 750MHz CPU upgrade. Man, I was livin' large back then, telling myself I'd just get a doubled CPU speed every year and a half. That kinda stopped when I didn't have the spare cash, and hasn't started up since.
Well, and that 20GB hard drive I splurged on. My root partition is still on the original 2GB, though.
I'd like to have a few new things, like USB 2.0 (though I could just get a card for that) or Serial ATA so I never have to see a fucking ribbon cable again. I may not play World of Warcraft on it, but it does the same thing it did years ago---runs Opera, runs my little perl programs, and runs gaim. Old gaim.
Though, because PCs are so modular, you get into a "best axe I ever had, three new handles, five new blades" thing. If you upgrade the RAM, the video card, the CPU and the disks, it's not really the same machine that it was. I doubt I'll buy an entirely new machine in the foreseeable future. So you could consider $2000 in parts spent over six years to be the cost of keeping the machine stocked with quality upgrades. I think it all works out evenly.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Just to clarify: 2000 was NT 5.0 and XP is 5.1. So 2000 -> XP and Panther -> Tiger are both +0.1 upgrades.
Yes, Apple's Tiger 10.4 will contain Sun's Tiger 1.5.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=523
Or you could just say that their first computer, the Apple 1, sold for $666.66.
I'm pretty sure it's possible to install on those machines with XPostFacto.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Apparently yes.
See http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=523
OS X Tiger will be the first OS to support JDK 1.6, which by the way will support .NET pcode natively. yet another reason to go with OS X!!!!
Sigh.
I'm currently typing this on a Pentium III @ 900 with 512 megs of ram and a 60 gig hard drive which is, hey, what do you know, SIX years old. Though I'm running Ubuntu at this instant, I was happily running Windows XP all day to run FrameMaker and Lotus Notes (along with Opera and Firefox) perfecly fine.
Look, I'm very fond of my Mac (and even older Blue and White G3), making silly statements isn't going to win any converts...
I'm basing some of this off of the fact I have seen zero Mac Mini commercials - most Mini buyers (in the eastern US anyway) probably heard about it by word of mouth (and internet) rather than a traditional media campaign - so they know at least a thing or two about OS X and what the releases mean.
Actually, 10.1 was free for everybody. All you had to do is ask for it. If you had to have it delivered by mail (hello, all those Apple customers in Outer Mongolia) they charged $19 for shipping.
Puma was used too. The names of the releases were Cheetah (marketed as 10.0), Puma (marketed as 10.1), Jaguar (marketed as 10.2), Panther (marketed as 10.3) and Tiger (marketed as 10.4).
Apple has registered the trademarks for Lynx, Cougar and Leopard.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
I am one of those people. OS X 10.4, new Quicken and new iLife, purchased separately, would cost almost as much as a Mac mini.
As soon as Mac mini's are shipping with OS X 10.4, I'm ordering one. And if they're shipping with a coupon, or OS X 10.3 on the HD with a 10.4 updater, even better! It will make it easier to install 10.4 on my other Macs.
I managed to pull that one off a few years ago when I bought my iMac G4 17". It had 10.1 on the HD with a 10.2 updater disc in the box.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/xcode.html
"At the heart of Xcode 2.0 is Apple's version of gcc 4.0, the next generation of the industry-standard gcc compiler. The new compiler helps you get more performance from your existing code by using a number of advanced optimization techniques. Auto-vectorization, a technique borrowed from the world of supercomputing, helps you to unlock the power of the Velocity Engine in every PowerPC G4 and G5 system without writing vectorized code. Other optimization tools include support for feedback-directed optimization and inter-module analysis."
If you purchased a computer within 14 days of the anouncement of release you are entitled to a $20 upgrade. This is how Apple has done it in the past.As far as buying Panther on its own there is no upgrade.
The build numbers don't work that way. Here's a little table with some examples:
MacOS X version Darwin kernel version Build
10.2.0 6.0.0 6Annn
10.2.1 6.1.0
10.3.0 7.0.0 7Annn
10.3.8 7.8.0 7U16 (what I'm running right now)
10.4.0 8.0.0 8A428
The first digit of the build number is always equal to the Darwin kernel's major version number. The next position is a single alpha character which Apple uses to distinguish different lines of development on that major revision of the OS. The first release will always be an 'A'. If the first branch they make is to add drivers for a new computer, that build series will get 'B', the next branch gets 'C' and so forth. The two major kinds of branch that I know about are for updates (10.3.0 -> 10.3.1 etc.) and for new hardware support.
Finally you get to the actual build number, which is simply a boring old decimal number.
So 8A428 actually means it's the first (and probably currently only) branch of 10.4 with 8.x.x series Darwin kernels, and it's at its 428th build.
Those are all great, but to me, I want to know if Tiger has another "new feature": Does it make my computer feel faster?
Pretty much every previous release of MacOS X has brought speed improvements, and I want to know if Tiger will continue that tradition. Not all of us can afford G5s at the moment, and a speed increase would really make it shelling out another 80 bucks or so (.edu discount) worth it.
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
The pre-release builds are including both gcc 3.3 and gcc 4.0 with 4.0 being the default.
You can switch between them using the
command.If you're on a Mac running Safari right now, you can right-click or ctrl-click on the "comment" field for slashdot submissions and tick "Spelling -> Check Spelling as you Type". The word "resurection" would be underlined in red and you could right-click or ctrl-click on it to correct it. I'm not nitpicking about spelling, but I actually think it's a neat feature that not many Mac users are aware of for posting on the net. It's a system-wide feature for text fields in OS X, just a neat little insight into the design quality of what goes on under the hood.
That seems to be what happens when you are low priority - Apple New Zealand sources from Apple Australia, which itself can't satisfy its own demand.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
This is a common mistake. Some Macs are assembled in Ireland, normally PowerMacs, but it's mostly a depot/warehouse. All Mac Minis are made in China.
Besides that, all the linux-geeks I know either want one, already have one or don't need one since they've gotten themselves an iBook. but that's not such a large part of the people we get in our store.
I am a Linux geek. I have an iBook (one of the new 12" G4s, bought just before they came out - thanks to the Apple store for automatically upgrading my order). I want a Mac mini so I can retire my Lintel box to be an oversized, loud gaming console. A dualboot setup lets me choose whether I want to be able to keep in touch with the rest of the world (as I don't want my emails spread out over two OSes) or be able to just fire up a game and have some fun - but it doesn't allow both, as I dislike Windows enough to not want do do anything except playing games on it.
The iBook is nice, but as my demands for desktops are radically different from those for a notebook it's not an option as a replacement desktop.
The Mini, especially as it now comes with Tiger, fits my needs just fine. Now I just need to get my hands on a few hundred bucks...
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Congratualtions. You just nailed it on the head. XP has functionality that most users never at all use. Apple on the other hand has added features like Expose (next time you're in an Apple Store or Fry's open a bunch of windows and hit F9 on the keyboard, that's expose) and the Side bar on Finder that actually is used on a daily basis by users.
As for Kernel versions, if I remember right 10.3 is on Darwin 6.0 and 10.2 is on Darwin 5.0. So if you want to pull up obscure version numbers that never get referenced there you go. It was a whole +1.0 more!!! Therefore it must be worth much more then your +0.10 upgrade on windows and just as much as your +1.1 upgrade from 95 to XP!
However most users don't see the Kernel, you can use the computer without ever knowing what the Kernel is. To most users going from Windows 95 to 98 they would see little to no difference. Going from Windows 95 to XP you'd see some changes in UI colors, some annoying preference changes and sorting on the taskbar. Which is about on par with the changes between Jaguar and Panther (10.2 and 10.3, for those unfamiliar with MacOS)
So yea, it is worth just about as much as a +1.1 upgrade. Fancy that.
See what happens when you try to think like a Windows fanatic?
Interesting. I would want the full version CDs, no doubt. You should do an "archive and install" when doing this update anyway, and, if you ever need to reinstall the OS to the machines in the future, you would have to first install 10.3, and then the updater again. With the full install you wouldn't have to do so.
No, having the full install is by far the better option IMO, but, that's just me...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Why do we "desperately need a successor to Objective-C?" Is Objective-C going somewhere?
In point of fact, most of those great new technologies that everybody is raving about would not be practical without Objective-C. Core Data, for instance, could not be implemented practically in either C or Java because of its dependence on features of the Objective-C runtime.
And we're kinda just starting to really take advantage of what Objective-C can bring to the party.
Bluetooth is beautiful - you will, I am sure, find BluePhoneElite and Salling Clicker amusing if not essential toys.
Thanks for the links. I was looking through some of the features of those tools. Doesn't OS X have some of the same features? I know that caller ID popup when a call comes in was built-in. I also heard once that "proximity monitoring" was built in, but I never confirmed that. Do you know? That was one of the big selling points for my wife: that her phone will be synced without her even taking it out of her purse.
I installed iTunes on a friend's Windows XP machine the other day, and she was almost bowled over (she has rather poor balance) by the simplicity of iTunes.
I had this exact experience 2 days ago. My friend and I heard this funny/stupid song at a bar last weekend. I had iTunes installed on my laptop already, but had never used the store, or the burn feature. I wanted to get this song and put it on a CD for humor's sake, but we were leaving soon and I was afraid I wouldn't have time. I already set up my account (5 free songs with PayPal sign up). Once I found the song, I think it was 5 clicks before I had it burned on a CD. Maybe this is possible with other software, I don't know. But I was impressed, and it makes me think there are more good things to come.
The installer knew that I wasn't installing on a Mini though, so it refused to install.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
AFAIK, Apple has never shipped "just an updater" for a paid update (of course my memory gets fuzzy when you get back before System 7). Its always been the full OS (which comes on DVD these days). That was always a nice touch as apposed to the install DOS-install Win 3.1-Upgrade to Win 95... process involved with a certain other company.
Even with the "free" ($20) upgrades some have gotten in the past, Apple has shipped the entire OS on the CD(s). Its just that the installer checked to make sure you have the previous version before starting the installation process (you could still do a full archive and install). In fact, it didn't take long for people to figure out the trick and image the upgrade CD to disk, remove the bit that checked for the previous system, then burn the "fixed" image to another CD.