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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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.