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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!
Apple was founded on an April Fools Day, so this would really be an anniversary event.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Is there any word about whether they'll offer cheap updates to people who recently bought a Mac? I've heard that they've done so in the past, and I hope that they do again, because I just got my iBook yesterday.
-- $SIGNATURE
When will new computers ship with this preinstalled? I am considering getting a Powerbook soon, so I hope there will not be a long wait.
The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either, so it swells up and eventually explodes. --Anonymous Coward
I've just been looking at the Tiger preview stuff on Apple's website. it's been there for ages but I never bothered with it until now.
I knew the features were cool but there were a few extra surprises, like in Dashboard there's a language translator that translates your words as you're typing. it looked really cool - he was typing "French fries" which was dynamically translated frenc->francais->pommes frites as more letters were typed. I didn't notice a USA ("Freedom fries") option in the language list though.
Automator looked far cooler than I'd imagined too.
I must say I don't like the new look of the email app though. I love the current skin.
How about puma, cougar, mountain lion, panther, catamount, and painted cat?
(For the link-checking impaired mods: the links are all to the same article, on purpose.)
actually, apple's been really good with supporting old hardware provided you stuff it with enough ram.
my G4-450 tower is over 6 years old, and works great with the latest version of OS X Panther -- everything is just as snappy as it is on my fairly new powerbook (as far as the os is concerned...). I've been using the latest release of final cut pro on it without a problem for the past few weeks.
can you say that you can use a 6-year old PC without any siginificant upgrades and still run the latest OS and software and be productive with it? Paying $2000 for a machine that will last 6 years is definitely justifiable compared to paying $1000 for a mediocre machine that lasts 2.5 years.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
...acccording to Amazon. It's the top Amazon software and electronics item, which is pretty amazing considering it's outselling TurboTax and the iPod.
I ordered mine already, of course...
If it's true that Tiger has gone golden just to meet an April 1st deadline, how many significant bugs do you suppose Apple let slide to meet the deadline?
OTOH, I've had 'wait until Tiger' in the back of my head when thinking about getting a Mac.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Automator has to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a gui.. ever.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html
It looks like Apple has finally found an elegant way to make a GUI accomplish tasks like these faster than I could at a bash prompt.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
That was my experience, exactly. A couple of colleagues and me managed to stave off a Windows-only mandate my college had adopted with a similar message. We stuck our collective necks out to challenge this policy by saying we could upgrade from 9.2 to Panther, plus 21 sticks of 256 MB modules and save a ton of money on our Replace-A-Lab-Every-Three-Years(TM) plan.
These boxes (five-year-old G4 466s/30MB) cost a pretty penny in their day, but there was really nothing wrong with them, save one or two failed HDDs. They are used for introductory graphics courses and Photoshop labs, and even compared to today's blazers, they are perfect for a teaching environment.
The lab, which is utilized about 26 hours a week, is well into its second semester with nary a hiccup and ZERO maintenance.
I don't know if it will change the mind of our 'Doze-centric admin in the long run, but I admit I chuckle when a two-month old Dell lab box gets pwn3d or upchucks on its own hardware far more frequently than it should.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet
So for the final release of an OS X variant, you think Apple will say screw it, and decide to call it... OX?
10.3.9 after 10.4?
If I remember correctly, Apple intended to ship GCC 4.0 with Tiger. Currently the 4.0.0 branch of GCC is in phase 3 (the final phase before release). Is Tiger going to have a custom GCC build with some of the 4.0 features (some recent snapshot of the 4.0 branch) like SSA and auto-vectorization, or have they fallen back to the 3.4.x series?
OS XI - 30th anniversary, fully 64 bit, tuned IPv6, new filesystem, complete reworking of emulation of OS9 technologies, completely rewritten kernel, GCC 5.0, new developer tools/GUI builder, The Son of Dock... it's going to be a very different animal (pun intended)... think somewhere along the lines of the jump from System 7.0 to 8.5 in terms of functionality and revision.
moox. for a new generation.
Hmm, I haven't seen any mini ads either, and I've only seen one or two iPod ads. Maybe I just don't watch the right shows/read the right magazines...
I have been pleasured to notice a sharp decline in Dell ads that have reached me, though. If that 'dude' guy or those dorky interns say one more think about Dell's superior service...
Moof.
Try clicking on the "play here now" link inside the image... (quicktime required)
It's extremly impressive, really looks like the gui version of Unix pipes. This one might be the last straw for me.
I'll also add to that line of people waiting for Tiger to get their Mini - and to fall into that 'slightly geeky on a budget' category. Enough that I still spend 80% of my working day in vi!
Not quite in the market for a full system upgrade, plus I'm the sort of person who buys their Hi-fi in components - I like the ability to upgrade my display without throwing the whole computer out - and vice versa. I'd actually pay for a headless G5 over a mini, even if it was the size of a pizzabox - I'm just not prepared to buy an all in one unit.
I think what you will get is a second generation of switchers once they've seen the first in use.
For instance, my wife knew what an iPod was (and had an MP3 player when they first came out), but wanted and bought an iPod after I got mine. I would wager now (if I wasn't an Anonymous Coward) that her next laptop will be an iBook once she's played with the Mini.
And to concur with a couple of posters above - I bought MS Office for my wife, as I was spending too much time coming home and supporting OpenOffice document compatibility issues - I have better things to be doing with my time. (Still peanuts compared to the nightly crashes and tri-monthly re-installation of Windows - although to be fair, we have another machine that is rock-solid, and Apple chuck out some duds too).
Firefox, on the other hand, has been a hit with everyone I've forced it on, and I've not had to explain the philosophy of open source to any of them.
Given the number of people who pirate their software, it's all 'free' anyway.
'It's the software, stupid' - and that's what will sell the Mini.
Like I said, if developers want Apple to give a shit about Java, they're going to need to start giving a shit about Apple.
.02.
I couldn't think of a more flawed statement. For the last 10 years developers have been hounding Apple to give them support that made them contenders. WWDC 1996 "Apple is going to be the #1 Java development platform..." followed by the slowest deployments and poor implementations. Apple blamed Sun, but the reality was the group was understaffed (not to mention staffed with newbs - I was recruited for the 1.2 port.)
In 1997 my company stopped using Mac as a development platform because we needed current JDK and working JDBC support.
Being in the sci-tech and engineering field, the biggest complaint since 1991 has been the lack of tools running on Macs. Java gave Apple an opportunity REGARDLESS of UI because sci-tech Java apps supposedly run anywhere, and its not a matter of reimplementing the application, as you Swing LAF is swappable (if you do it the way you're supposed to.) Making an argument that Apple users won't use software that isn't Mac-like is bunk when its the functionality thats important.
So, as I guy who hounded Apple for 10 years before giving up, I can honestly say that giving a shit about Apple and asking for current support and bug fixes did absolutely nothing.
And this whole "build it Mac-like and they'll come" is bullshit. Even Apple doesn't follow the once sacred UI guidelines anymore (think of the metal iWhatever interface.) This cliquey religious mentality is exactly the reason why Apple lost so much ground in sci-tech. Evangelism decided they'd only support "killer apps", and unfortunately in many verticals, there isn't such a thing. Why do I give a hoot about dnd support in an image processing app or a spreadsheet?
My
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