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Windows Journalist Takes On Tiger
BRSQUIRRL writes "Paul Thurrott has posted a review of Mac OS X 'Tiger' on his SuperSite for Windows. He gives it a score of 4 out of 5. Interesting to get a Microsoft Windows journalist's take on Tiger, especially one as hardcore as Thurrott. In the article, he actually confesses that he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past."
Apple fans are like Cubs fans. Everyone is routing for them at one point, and pretty much hates them the rest of the time.
You always hurt the ones you love =)
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
"Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes, in my opinion, only two major new features, Spotlight and Dashboard, and both were clearly influenced by other existing products and services"
Bullshit! What about Automator? What about Core Image/Core Data? What about VoiceOver?
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... This isn't just a review of Tiger (because there are a zillion of those) but a review of Tiger by a Windows advocate man who dislikes Apple.
... he doesn't dislike Apple.
Which would at least have novelty value.
Except
So it's just another review of Tiger.
Stuff that matter, my arse.
Wake me up when the next story arrives, please.
I mean come on. Why the hell does anyone who runs a site called Supersite for Windows think that they have to review OSX? I've seen stuff like this before, but usually, they're hoaxes. This is just moronic.
Well Paul has all the time in the world to have a look at an other OS,since his pet project is way overdue..
I wonder if the Tiger release will get a special Box for switchers, with quotes on it from Thurrot: "Apple Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is the strongest OS X release yet" and "Tiger is one impressive cat"
...except on versions of their operating system below 10.0 that weren't AUX...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Peter Drucker, the creator of management science study, noted people don't buy "products". They buy "value".
Apple is finally being recognized by more and more people as offering high value, compared to the competition.
Ease of use and stability with a wide range of capabilities (arguably widest of personal computers...maybe) is starting to make a consumer impact.
I obviously read that one wrong, images of a Microsoft employees being mauled popped into my head. And for a second I thought about smiling.......
that some of Apple's greatest critics are also it's biggest fans.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
bred for its skills in eyecandy.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
I don't mean to sound obtuse, but from what I've read of Spotlight and Microsoft's efforts in file indexing, the goals and results are the same: every file indexed so you can do instant searches (much like what BeOS could do, only a bit faster I believe).
So how is Microsoft's service "father reaching"? Is he including possible network indexing so you can find every file on the network as well (perhaps something for Windows Longhorn Server) - and is this ability to be used in OS X Tiger Server?
I just found it an odd statement, and perhaps someone could clarify. Otherwise, interesting read - Tiger is looking like a good upgrade. $129 worth? Undecided yet, but interesting.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
"My history with Mac" - ugg... skip to the end.
and skim-reading, wtf is this?
"Apple touts the ease with which you can upgrade your existing Mac OS X installation to Tiger, or perform a clean install. But if you're not really paying attention during Setup, you can quite easily do the wrong thing, especially if you want to do a clean install."
if you're not fucking paying attention when installing a new OS you can make a mistake!?!?! oh noes, what were Apple THINKING!!!???
According to this guy, every Mac OS system since 10.0 has been an update. And by that reasoning every earlier system revision from 1.0 to 9.0 was an "update."
But he's used to the system changes being more dramatic like in the P.C. world:
1) DOS (command line)
1.5) Windows 1.0, 2.0 (aborted)
2) Windows 3.0 (whoops kinda shitty, do over)
2.5) Windows 3.1 (works!)
3) Windows 95 (Now like MacOS!)
4) Windows 98 (Now with a web-browser built-in!)
5) Windows ME (What is the diff here again?)
Notice 1.5)-5) are all nothing but DOS running a new graphical shell. And other than "service-pack" level changes, I'm hard-pressed to describe how Win 95/98/ME differ at all.
6) Windows 2000 (Now using NT instead of DOS!)
7) Windows XP
Because XP came out about the same time OSX did (you didn't think the "X" in "XP" was an original marketing idea, did you?) this guy assumes OSX can't have progressed any faster than XP has.
But the truth is OSX has had to progress much faster because it was a brand-new OS to the PowerPC. Windows XP by comparison, had already been out in the market for nearly a decade as "Windows NT," before it got the Windows 95 "Finder" slapped on top of it to be rebranded "Windows XP."
So the best way to think of OSX vs XP is that OSX is a generation ahead of XP in many ways, but it was pretty much brand-new in its 10.0 incarnation. By comparison, XP was not a new OS, and Longhorn will not be a new OS either. "Longhorn," such as it is will be a series of system updates to various XP subsystems.
Additionally, the current thinking on the Longhorn update is to allow people with XP to update these subsystems themselves with special installers, effectively making this a piecemeal update cycle and hardly a whole new unified OS rollout at all. Now who's trying to pass off a series of subsystem updates as a new OS?
Of course he's been a "Mac fan" all his life.
That's true of nearly all Windows advocates. Windows has a long history of trying to be as much like the current Macintosh OS as at all possible, given their need for backwards compatibility with thier VMS-based MS-DOS roots. Even Bill Gates used a Powerbook as his primary computer for a lot of years.
Criticism of the Mac from the Windows crowd has always been:
1. You can't run the most popular business software on it. (True, to varying degrees from one year to the next.)
2. Macs are more expensive. (Also generally true.)
3. You are locked in to one hardware vendor. (This has not really been any more true for Apple motherboards than for Intel or AMD motherboards in a long time. ATI and nVidia need to flash their video cards slightly differently for Macs, but otherwise the Mac is made up almost entirely of industry-standard, interchangable hardware.)
The criticism of Macs from Windows advocates has never been about the OS, because the Macintosh OS has been, during most of the modern history of the GUI, a few years ahead on the road Windows wants to go down.
Does this actually come as news to anybody?
Apple's share price tumbles over 5% this week !
whatever they are doing the market doesnt seem to like it
IMHO the market doesnt see anything revolutionary from computer operating systems anymore, you can't keep re-inventing the wheeel (coughMSWordcough) so growth is seen as nonexistant, especially compared to new PC sales (up 9% this year)
It's the sign of changing times - Mac lovers no longer have to hide their feelings for fear of being ridiculed and discriminated against by society.
Expect to see more examples of Mac pride across the country, as more people come to terms with who they are, and stand up for their rights.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
An interesting previous tidbit from Thurrott:
...in December 2004.
And since announcing its Longhorn desktop search intentions, Microsoft's worst fears were realized. Other companies began copying the Microsoft desktop search strategy, knowing that the never-ending Longhorn delays would help them get to market sooner and appear to be nimbler and even more innovative, though it's sort of astonishing how transparent that latter claim is. Chief among these competitors are Apple and Google.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced in June 2004 that the next version of Mac OS X, due sometime in 2005, will include a desktop search feature called Spotlight. The Spotlight feature set is a rough subset of the desktop search features Gates discussed in late 2003, but presented to the user with Apple's standard graphical excellence. Spotlight, according to Apple, is a "radically new and lightning fast way to find anything saved on your personal computer. Email messages, contacts and calendars, along with files and folders, all show up in Spotlight results." Spotlight's biggest claims to fame, presumably, are its near-instant search results and support for document meta data, both of which are, again, planned features of Longhorn. But no matter. While Apple has been busy copping Windows features since Jobs returned to Apple in late 1996, the company's tiny market share ensures that very few people will benefit from Spotlight, despite Apple claims that it will deliver on desktop search a year before Microsoft ships Longhorn.
Then in February 2005, he started to change his tune:
I'd like to highlight some of the features that I feel set MSN Search apart from its competitors, chiefly Google [...]
What happened to Apple?
And in today's review:
Apple decided to adopt a similar approach in various places throughout OS X Tiger--including the Finder, Mail 2, and elsewhere--providing Mac OS X users, for the first time, with true instant search functionality. Similar in execution to the instant desktop search feature Microsoft plans to ship in Longhorn next year, and to third party Windows products like MSN Toolbar Suite and Google Desktop Search, Spotlight works as advertised. It delivers near-instantaneous search results from the places you'd most often need to find files or other information.
[...]
Now, this kind of functionality is exceeding cool, because it's the first step toward divorcing ourselves from worrying about the hard-coded locations of files and other data stored on the computer's file system. If you think about it, it's kind of silly that we have to even worry about such a thing, and though recent file system niceties like the My Documents folder in Windows (simply called Documents in OS X) try to simplify matters, the truth is, computers should be good at finding the information we need. We shouldn't have to do all the work.
Not coincidentally, Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn. Apple's solution, however, is here right now and it appears to work quite well. Score one for Apple.
Why the about face?
and exqactly why would he care?
It's not surprising at all that Mac fans would be critical of Apple. You're critical about things you care about. Yes, there are a bunch of braindead Mac-Macs, but they're not what I truly call the Mac Fanatics. I stopped counting the number of Macs I've owned when it hit 13. I've been invited to Cupertino three times already. You better believe that I bitched directly to VPs and product managers when I was there. The upside is that Apple finally started to listen to all the bitching, usually providing exactly what we were asking for.
So, don't be surprised that Mac fans are vocal and hard on Apple. They just want the Mac to get better...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Alas, despite the wait, Tiger is a minor revision, like all previous OS X updates.
I have some quips with this statement (its a favorite of Thurott's too.) Windows 2000 to XP was a minor revision (5.0 to 5.1 I believe.) So was, arguably, Windows 95 to 98. And 98SE to ME.
Also, since it seems Microsoft is releasing most of the cool Longhorn features to Windows XP... XP to Longhorn may very well be a "minor revision" as well.
I posted a negative comment earlier about this article, but the idiocy gets worse and worse as you go on.
"Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world"
What Windows service packs have come with major new features? A firewall in SP2? Please. Hell, what Windows OS releases have come with major new features?
"It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984"
Err...yeah. Sorry, the telepathic mind-reader is coming in 10.5.
"Don't get me wrong, please: Again, Tiger is a solid release. It's just not a major upgrade. And it's certainly not worth $129."
Right. Tiger is not worth $129, but Windows XP is worth $250 or whatever over Windows 2000.
"nor does it include the iWork '05 productivity applications, which include Pages (a weird word processing/page publishing hybrid)"
Weird? Pages is weird?! What the hell is Word, then? Certainly not a word processing/page publishing hybrid, oh no.
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It's nice that he's finally come out of the closet.
However, this will probably impact on all those free Microsoft pens, cups, and beta operating systems he's been receiving for the past few years, will it not?
Nothing costs nothing
Seems that if someone who dedicated his site ( life ) to one Operation system ( and for that reason also one software corporation ) suddenly admits that he likes the other!
:O
Oh noes! How is the world going to end?! Are we going to see off topic stuff on every page now?!
Like mathematics on porn sites?
What a horrible world!
Clicked pie.
After the iPod, now its Macs turn to pop on 70% of the MS employee's desks.
:p
Sorry bill, this time you can't ban your employees from using Mac at home
fuvoo: watch something
They're not mutually exclusive. I am a fan of Linux, but that doesn't stop me from issuing criticism when it's warranted.
As a Windows user and fan, I have to take exception to the "XP service packs are more substantial than the OS X upgrade".
This is far from the truth. In my experience, Windows XP is just a facelift of Windows 2000. Sure, the default colors are different and the buttons look different, but it's all the same stuff - just a minor upgrade to colors and a bunch of bug/feature fixes.
XP service packs are just that - they fix stuff that is totally broken or flawed, or worse, they layer in new software that I don't want or that break my older apps.
So although I agree with him that Windows XP is a good and solid OS, touting the transition from Windows 2000 to XPsp2 as multiple "major upgrades" looks just like fantasy. I consider them all to be in the "minor bug/feature/UI fix" category.
This comes up every Apple discussion and the answers are as pointless and inconclusive as before.
Personally I'm glad that Apple is finally getting Tiger. As a fan of both MacOS X and Java 1.5, it's about damn time.
I know it's hard for zealots to wrap their tiny little heads around, but you can be critical of something and support it at the same time.
As a matter of fact, good criticism is the best kind of support. Ass kissing doesn't improve the product.
I'm a linux fan, I've been with it since the start. I'm also constantly criticizing it. It needs criticism, not fanboys. It will never get better, more usable, and gain more hardware and software support if we keep sitting there going "Good job Linus, make sure that ABI is constantly changing! Stable interfaces are gay M$ dumb stupid stuff!"
Likewise, I can like some Apple products like OSX, while at the same time think that iPod and iTunes are complete POS's targetted at the hipster doofus demographic, and that the G5 machines look like complete ass.
I can think the PS2, in general, is a piece of junk, while at the same time think that Ape Escape is the greatest game ever.
They're called opinions. Maybe one day you'll learn to form your own based on what you see and experience, and not just inherit them from whatever fan club of forums you frequent.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Wow... I don't think I would quite say they got it together in 95. Maybe you could say that about 2000 or XP... but 95? That had to be one of the buggiest operating systems I ever used.
I didn't find many complaints about this article. Unlike his usual rants, the writer was even-handed mostly in giving praise where praise was due.
However, the writer proves he's still too enamored with the Microsoft software release philosophy in comparison to what Linux and Mac users enjoy.
Consider: When a new Mac OS update is imminent, users are practically enthusiastic on installing on their computer and seeing what new tricks have come from Apple. Generally speaking, these users expect goodness in each update. That's less of the case now in the OS X days than the old OS 9 days, but Mac users don't generally fear their computer or the company that makes it. We like evolution and strive to keep our computers one-up with the others. While a lot more propellerhead and not as intuitive, the power users of the Linux camp also enjoy the fun flavors they get from the latest bug fix of SAMBA or whatever. Using Linux and Mac OS X, to take two common examples of the UNIX families, are fun to tinker with.
A Microsoft Windows user is besieged. And I mean not just with spyware and worms, but also with Windows Updates. They're doing the same thing as Apple's updates (make no mistake--both companies are giving you bug fixes), but there are so many updates for this mysterious vulnerability or that compromise that a typical home user is overwhelmed by not only by the OS prompting them to the point of annoyance that you have new Windows Updates as well as the number of patches and attacks. And Windows can be so finicky and problematic that most users don't WANT to rock the boat by applying some update. This situation has improved a bit with Windows XP, but there's still too much information.
Microsoft's marketing expects you to find a revolution in every box they sell. I don't know about you, but revolutions as a whole are a bitch to endure, no matter what form they take. Evolution, on the other hand, gives you change without making you feel swept up by it.
You'll know what I mean when the Windows Longhorn project is finished. It may be new and powerful, but most of us just want to write a letter, not launch and land a Space Shuttle. Simple is good.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
His current protestations aside, Thurrott has a long history of bashing on the Mac. My thinking is that he's starting to realize that the Mac platform is moving ahead more rapidly than Windows, and may be close to achieving what he considers to be parity with Windows.
So if you make your living writing about Windows, it doesn't really do to talk about how far Apple has come with the Mac, or how it may in fact be better than Windows. You focus instead on a different opponent altogether. Microsoft has told the world that it has its sights set on Google. Everyone knows Google is the reigning champ of the consumer Internet application, and that they're trying to route around Microsoft's client OS dominance.
If you're Thurrott, you talk about how nice Apple is on the client end, giving it just enough kudos so as to not lose your credibility entirely, but you also demean the importance of Apple by focusing on Microsoft's war with Google.
Thurrott has always been a difficult guy to figure out, so my guess may be completely off. But it's the only one I can come up with that makes any sense.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Let's have a holy war. Tiger vs Service Pack 2.
Wow! An Apple topic with 66 posts in it so far and no-ones mentioned they own an iPod yet.
I think maybe Thurrot, while being a self-described "Mac fan", does not know quite as much about the inner workings of Mac OS X than he ought to before attempting such a review.
Mac OS X 10.4 is certainly much more than a "minor upgrade with few major new features", especially when you look past the somewhat superficial nature of the "gee-whiz" features like Spotlight and Dashboard. The improtant changes are under the hood, in the form of Core Data, Core Image, better SMP support, etc.
I certainly do, however, agree with him in chiding Apple for their frequent UI experimentation that seems to throw one usability concept after another out with the bath water, so to speak.
But as far as likening Tiger to "what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world", consider the contents of the Slashdot story that appears on the front page along with this article, Survey Shows Admins Avoiding SP2.
While Apple may indeed find that "Tiger's retail success is far more important to Apple than Windows' retail success is to Microsoft", my prediction is that Apple, on the day of Tiger's release (or very, very shortly thereafter), will have sold enough copies of Tiger at $129 or $199 to cover 24% of their installed Mac OS X user base, while Microsoft, having given away Windows XP Service Pack 2 for free eight months ago, still can't seem to convince enough of their users to adopt it to even hit the one-quarter mark.
I have already ordered the upgrades for my three compatible Macs, how about you?
I must say "super" is a pretty pathetic word
to use to describe your own site. Especially when there's no irony involved.
Could this be the George Michael of the Windows world?
realkiwi
"...he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past."
I always find it amusing that Apple diehards consider even an Apple loyalist to be traitorous if he/she expresses the slightest criticism of Apple. Of course this guy is not a loyalist, but the submitter seems unwilling to accept him as a fan simply because he's (gasp) been critical of Apple. If Apple fanatics truly want their company to succeed they need to realize that (constructive) criticism will help Apple improve their already great products. For example, I think much of the criticism of the iPod shuffle is completely justified. If any other company had put something like that out, Apple fans would be laughing their asses off. But instead they're calling the lack of features and display innovative. Whatever. Reminds me of how some conservatives instantly call someone critical of the U.S.'s policies anti-American, or how they embrace anything Bush does, even if it isn't conservative.
"Simply select the search box, start typing, and iTunes will dynamically limit the song list in the player to match your search text. The iTunes search feature was so well-done, in fact, that Apple decided to adopt a similar approach in various places throughout OS X Tiger"
The author thinks that this is the cool thing about Spotlight? Come on! gimme a break. Winamp offered a similar search God knows from when. This is not what is cool about spotlight.
What is really cool is that the OS is always aware of the files and the information about the files. Since it is integrated with the OS it is much more efficient than the tools like Google Desktop Search which is at the application layer over the OS.
What is really cool is that developers can use APIs to use the features of spotlight.
These are the things that are cool and not some GUI gimmicks
fuvoo: watch something
FTFA: "Dashboard, a controversial new feature that owes more than a little to a third party application called Konfabulator."
I fail to see how it's "controversial". Unless the author as something against little widgets on his screen.
Widget hater...
But who's your money on in a twelve round rumble between a Tiger and something that goes "Moo"?
Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits
From TFA's "Conclusions" section: ... [Tiger] adds a few major new features, and applies a nice spit polish to hundreds of other small features.
Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world.
Is this not a contradiction? The Windows XP SP1 (and SP1a) and SP2 feature lists look a lot to me like the Mac OS X updates such as the most recent 10.3.8 (incidentally, also free like MS's Service Packs).
If OS X Tiger has just a few new features, (the two TFA discusses as most important are Spotlight and Dashboard), then what is Longhorn? [hint: Microsoft doesn't even know]
in closing, the review gives props to Apple for OS X but in the end, TFA's author is unable to keep himself from borg-like Apple bashing.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
If Tiger is merely a "Service Pack," and Microsoft just released this "amazing" XPSP2, then how come the majority of the features in Tiger, namely Dashboard and Spotlight, won't be available until the next MAJOR release of Windows?
These features are not Service Pack level features, and if they were, God bless em, Microsoft would have ripped them off and crammed them into XP by now.
As far as I'm concerned, we aren't truly living in a tolerant and enlightened society until ABBA-fans openly can admit that they are fans and still feel safe and respected.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
- I couldn't get an Apple case for it on the day or weeks later.
- I can't buy the remote without paying for another set of headphones which, if I wanted, I'd buy seperately.
- The only Apple alternative to a case is the socks, yet I have to pay more for 5 of which i'll only use 1 (maybe 2)
So based on this experience alone (and remember, this will be the experience of most buyers of Apple items - ie. they've never seen or used OSX before):- Recently released products that require what are almost universally considered essential accessories simply aren't there when you come to buy your product.
- Some accessories contain more items than you require and so you end up paying a premium for things that you'll never need or want to use (4 ipod socks, another set of crappy Apple headphones)
Sure, I know I'm wrong, I know that I still want a Mac Mini but for the uninformed first time buyer of Apple's products, their iPod experience might not be as good as Apple would like.(ps. it's now months later and you still cannot get an Apple branded 60 gig case, although some other branded ones are starting to arrive)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
After seeing numerous screenshots of OS X (especially Panther and Tiger) there seems to be an inconsistensy problem with the way applications look and feel. I understand Mac users want all applications to look "native" - that is, to look like the OS itself. But if I look at iTunes, Safari, Finder, QuickTime,... Almost every native OS X application looks different. There's the "all white look", then "brushed metal", then again a variant of "brished metal",... Some system settings are in brushed metal other aren't,...
Mac users often critisize that Windows applications look to different from each other, but as far as I can see from the screenshots, OS X isn't that much better.
I don't like people who think they know a lot but really they are only getting paid to write good stuff about something. I think it is lame. It is not objective. To get $10K for writting an arcticle about windows and I answer "difficult" questions to ignorant people is lame. Oh yeah you are my hero.
and gets mauled.
It's a shame that Mac fanatics give him such a hard time for making just observations.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Well bust my buttons. I didn't know there were "niceties" in the XP UI that make it more "appealing" to new users. Colors? Whiz-bang? Buttons the size of Delaware? Conversely, is he purporting that OS X is better for the power user -- to "get your job done?"
I always thought it was the other way around. My bad, dude.
It's OpenSTEP, formerly NextSTEP. Circa mid-1980s. It's a very mature platform, with one of the better application frameworks around.
But, yeah, it's hard to argue that Apple hasn't been putting serious new capability with each new revision. It's certainly not "updates." It's "upgrade" type work.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
In the past, it could be argued, John Dvorak tried to drive viewers to his column by lambasting Apple up one side and down the other for things which people who knew what they were talking about called minor, niggling, or debatable. So who reads John Dvorak's column any more? Here's another journalist, also squarely in the Windows camp, posting a review of Apple stuff in almost glowing terms, and even admitting that he is a "fan." We've seen John Dvorak's stick lose its effectiveness. Obviously the carrot is working, for now...
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Meh. I don't think this is the greatest analogy.
The best way to summarize my attitude about Apple (as an owner of almost 8 Macs now, starting with the LC) is "love the product, hate the company". Namely, service and support- which are the worst in the industry, and always have been. They're advanced machines, a great operating system. The company itself though, clearly does not subscribe to the "don't be evil" philosophy Google's PR department has been expousing.
My PB 1400 kept crashing while sleeping. I sent it in for repair to TEXAS, the only place you can get it repaired. Each time it came back, the HD was wiped, and on the second trip, they broke the 3rd party ethernet card's jack. On my third attempt to get it serviced, the Apple "customer relations" agent who was supposed to hear out my side of the story...started screaming at me.
My Powerbook Lombard had a screen clutch fail. Like many other Lombards, this causes the video screen cable to get chewed up. Before this, a thick white line suddenly appeared down one side. Apple wouldn't fix any of it.
My Powerbook 17" makes crackling and squealing noises with CPU activity. The hinges loosened up during the warranty period, and when I went into the apple store, the guy said "oh, well, ours in the store does it too." How does a retail demo unit's condition become acceptable...wait a sec, how does "ours fails the same way" suddenly not make it "normal" and not covered by warranty? Then I found out the little power plug on the A/C adapter, called a "duckbill", isn't covered by Apple. "We don't cover that part." "My warranty covers everything. It doesn't say, 'does not cover the power adapter'." "We DO NOT cover THAT PART. They break a lot." "On a three grand laptop you're going to tell me a $10 part isn't covered because it wasn't designed properly and breaks?" Then there was getting the little rubber feet replaced(those are covered, yay!)- I spent 20 minutes waiting for the guy to finish doing PAPERWORK to replace $2 in parts, and I had to initial and sign 5 different "invoices" and statements that I had -actually- received the service in question.
I had a friend who couldn't return her powerbook after 12 days because, despite clear proof on the Apple Store homepage, the customer service reps claimed shipping time was included in the 14 day evaluation period. Slimy. Needlessly so. Guess what? She hates Apple with a passion now, and tells everyone who will listen about how they're a bunch of crooks and liars. She's right.
Please help metamoderate.
Very few people can dispute that Apple has made some of the sexiest, most interesting systems that have come down the pike. The Mac was a masterful bit of design at introduction, and even though it was looking a bit long in the tooth as MacOS 8 and MacOS 9 were coming along, you couldn't argue that the environment set the tone for making GUI's useable as a primary interface.
OSX is a FANTASTIC piece of software, jumping the Mac platform squarely into Unix land (where we all knew desktop systems should have been all along, right?) while also providing a wonderful desktop experience.
On the other hand, Apple the corporation has made truly painful decisions that have alienated a lot of the 'apple fans'. The one that comes to mind was the decision to cancel the Newton, just when it was showing promise. Apple has a history of driving new technologies through to maturity, and with the Newton 2100, the platform had just gotten to the point of usefulness when it was cancelled. Did this make me less of a Mac fan? No. Did it make me less of an Apple fan? Absolutely.
I have on my desk a Mac Mini (for my mom), an old iMac (to test Safari pages), a Shuttle box running Windows XP, and my primary platform, an IBM T40 running Debian Linux. Of the 4, the most pleasant to work on is the Mac Mini. The most productive is the Linux Laptop. The best for game playing is the XP machine. The iMac is just there to look cool (as cool as purple gumdrops get).
I'm still a fan of Macs. I'm an okay fan of Apple. The OSX decision was masterful. Will I use it as my primary platform? Probably not, the price point on their proprietary hardware is still too high (Thinkpad T40 used: $800. Powerbook of similar power used: $1800, plus OSX licenses).
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
I don't get this guy; he obviously owns current Macs, but he must not spend a lot of time using them. It is the long list of detailed little feature upgrades that make new versions of Mac OS X so great, not just the new new thing like Spotlight. It's the little things that make getting through the day and getting your work done easier. As I look down the new features list I see feature after feature that I will get real use out of. It also shows that Apple, as always, pays attention to the details. Contrast that with Windows, where after 10 years (!) the various folders in the Start menu still don't stay automatically alphabetized, so when you install something new you have to remember to scroll to the bottom of the list.
Think of all the external third party devices or PCI cards that are used in Macs. And Apple does not have the world of hardware developers trying quite as hard to make sure it works with all the Macs when doing development...
Apple actually has a worse time of hardware support than Microsoft if you think about it!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While there are a number of different clustering tools for MS Windows IFAIK MS doesn't have a standardized version distributed with XP. The parent posting is right in pointing this out.
Xgrid prefs panel
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
I feel the logic of this guy is strange, his brain has been splitted by his experience on Tiger and his pay check from M$. He need to see a doctor immediately.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I don't consider Rhapsody and "Yellow Box" missteps. What we have now in OS X, Cocoa, that's what it comes from. The problem wasn't anything to do with Rhapsody, it was with Adobe. Adobe refused to port their apps to what became Cocoa, forcing Apple to make this huge unweildy sidestep through Carbon that kept the abysmal OS 9 alive for years longer than it deserved, and where we ended up now is EXACTLY where we'd be if Apple had been able to convince Adobe and a few other key developers to stick with the program... except years later *and* most of the key apps that Apple bent over for ended up getting dropped anyway.
Spotlight is a HUGE step forward. It's killer functionality, and needs OS support to work right, but just a touch. OS X provides that support... without creating a new "search-based" file system.
Because you don't (despite what Be and Microsoft say) need a new file system to manage metadata, you just need a mechanism for applications to talk about it... WHEREVER it's stored. That's why Find on palm OS already exists, and has existed since 1996, despite Palm OS having a file system that's hardly worthy of the name. And that's why Spotlight works and Microsoft's dithering on WinFS.
And if I hadn't bought a Mac Mini I would have skipped Panther altogether because Panther *is* a relatively minor release. Tiger, with Spotlight, is a different kind of cat altogether.
In the article, he actually confesses that he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past.
He says he is a fan, not a zealot (like many here). I like Debian, Ubuntu, Windows XP (gasp!), and OSX but I know neither of them is perfect. Anyway, how can there be improvement without criticism?
I can see where people like Thurrot only look at the consumer advances of Tiger that come with the package. Spotlight, Automator, etc are all aimed at the user. The real power of Tiger is in the new frameworks. Get ready for some absolutely incredible apps to built on top of Tiger. I am becoming a believer in Cocoa and Obj-C, and think there is an opportunity for small groups of programmers to accomplish amazing things with Tiger. See Delicious Library for an example of what a small team can do now. In addition to the additions of CoreImage, CoreVideo, CoreData, and finally Quicktime frameworks for Cocoa, xCode 2 is looking very cool. Hey VB guys, take a look. And everyone else too, because it will come free with your Tiger disk.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
In the article, he actually confesses that he has 'been a Mac fan [his] entire life.' Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past."
Why is this interesting?
Is it possible that there are 2 people in this world who don't lie?
I'm sick of the lies.
One of the biggest problems with this world are the lies told to us repeatedly on a daily basis. Every day I get 100 emails telling me lies, I turn on the TV and for 20 min of every hour I am lied to, I pick up a newspaper and it is full of half truths and innuendo. After 50 years of this my bullshit detector is pretty much overloaded.
How do you separate the lies from the truth?
Maybe he is lying about liking Tiger?
Rick B.
Interesting, considering some of his criticism of Apple's work in the past.
I know that many on slashdot might not understand this, but being a fan of something doesn't mean you cannot criticize it.
Hard to grasp, I know.
Since you can only run MacOS X on machines that can't be bought without a copy of MacOS, that $129 is the upgrade price.
The Windows XP upgrade goes for $100 ($80 with a pain-in-the-ass rebate).
OS X + iWork = $208
XP + Works = $150 (or $130 with rebate)
People who cuss macs need to look at their crap old looking virus prone OS thats only good for games a bit more closely. It has looked crappy compared to OS X for years. Er, where is Longhorn again? Oh yeah, its in my pants while typing this in Tiger build 8A425...
I don't get it, the title says "Journalist...", but then the link to TFA points to Paul Thurrott. This was a very misleading title. It should've read something along the lines of "Microsoft FUD guzzler burped up some meaningless thoughts on Tiger". Really, this guy is totally whacked. I would give far more credit as a journalist to the guy who lives in the storm drain down the street over Paul Thurrott.
... Tiger is _not_ a trivial release. There's so much stuff in there (updated CoreVideo, CoreImage, CoreData frameworks) that from a developer point of view it's somewhat of a revelation. Mr. Thurrott also doesn't really go in depth when it comes to the integration of apps like iSync, iCal, Address Book. A Mac-only workgroup can pretty much do everything you would need Exchange for out of the box, with only a single WebDAV/IMAP server, perfect for small Mac/Linux shops.
I have a feeling that we'll start to see plenty of Tiger-only apps that rely on the new frameworks and APIs.
This guy writes like a car reviewer that has never seen under the hood of a car.
"Ah, still using four tires, I see. And there's a steering wheel, too. Still, the color is nice, and the radio looks expensive."
I prefer reviews that do more than comment on the styling and goo-gahs. I expect him to drive the damn thing, pop the hood and see what has changed. Offer an explanation of why and how these changes improve the user's day-to-day work experience.
I propose that the reason he's discounted the other 198 claimed features is that he has not the foggiest idea what they do or how they fit into the future of Mac OS X.
-Hope
Come on, Apple has had innovative products throughout the past couple decades. They still toil with low market share. So great products aren't the whole story.
Strange how El Stevo can't seem to match his marketting to his products. That's the reason Thurrott criticizes Apple.
Paul Thurrott fired from Microsoft for favourable review of OS X Tiger.
That guy is a god damn idiot. I can't stand when people review something they know little about. I'm sure he was too busy jacking Gates off to actually go do some research on what Tiger has to offer. I'd pay 130 bucks just to tell Thurrot he's an idiot.
Dashboard
Um, right. Since PCs and Macs have had tiny utility applications since the early 1980's, it's unclear why Dashboard widgets can't simply work on the normal Mac desktop (which is how Konfabulator works, incidentally). Having to move into and out of the Dashboard to perform these tasks seems a bit unnecessary. Why segregate them like that?
I guess in the Mac world not everything belongs on the desktop. Apple likes to keep system utilities organized with other system utilities. In the Windows world, you can put shortcuts everywhere: Desktop, Quicklaunch, Menu Bar, etc. It's a style change if you are used to Windows.
Apple's Mail application (sometimes referred to as Mail.app because of it NeXTStep heritage) has been significantly updated in Tiger, though I'm a little unexcited about yet another user interface style being introduced in OS X. . . The toolbar buttons, however, are bizarre looking and unlike the icons found in any other Mac OS X applications, another case of Apple trouncing all over its own user interface conventions. It's astonishing to me that Mac fanatics let the company get away with that.
This is downright inflammatory. MS changes the UI in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. XP's color scheme is vastly different from the 98/2000.
Apple touts the ease with which you can upgrade your existing Mac OS X installation to Tiger, or perform a clean install. But if you're not really paying attention during Setup, you can quite easily do the wrong thing, especially if you want to do a clean install.
Anytime you do an system upgrade, you have to be careful in any OS whether it's Linux, Windows, OS X. SP2 isn't even an upgrade but a service pack, and it might crash your system.
Apple's success has hinged largely on its ability to keep its product plans secret and then use "event marketing" to pump each release as the be-all, end-all solution to whatever problems you may be having.
Every new software markets itself as the solution to all your problems. Win 95 was supposed to the holy grail. No wait, it still uses DOS in the background. It'll be 98. Nope. 2000. Nope. ME. God no. XP. Okay we're getting there. Longhorn will have all these features. Well, maybe not this feature or that one. Overpromising isn't unique to Apple or MS. At least Apple doesn't tease with all the features it said it would build but then withdraws them later.
But Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality.
SP2 fixed a lot of the things wrong with Windows security. Upgrading the firewall, adding a spyware tool, etc. is not an OS upgrade. It's a patch. Tiger adds new features and tools. According to MS marketing, Linux is slow and isn't ready for the enterprise and no company really uses it. Especially when they don't mention Google, Amazon, etc.
Apple also offers a 5-Mac "Family Pack" for $199 that lets you install the system on up to 5 Macintosh systems, though there is no copy protection or activation scheme in the single Mac version that would prevent you from installing a single copy on multiple machines.
So, Apple will rely on the honor system instead of putting up obstacles and Gestapo-like enforcement tactics (i.e. Ernie Ball). It might cost them sales but it won't piss off their customers.
My sources on the beta tell me that testers were shocked Apple decided to finalize the software when they did. Apparently a lot of problems still exist in the final code.
This is not new. Every new software isn't 100% perfect. I'm sure all Windows versions were not 100% ready either.
Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world.
Maybe the problem here is that the author is thinking in terms of Windows. MS always trumps the changes no matter how small. Apple's style is to be minimalist and doesn't mention anything that the enduser may not see.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
When was the last time Microsoft added new features as part of a service pack they released? Windows service packs typically include fixes of issues and maybe make features work the way they should have in the first place. The way this guy at the end of his article tries to say Tiger is just a glorified service pack is absolutely idiotic. Tiger does a lot more than make old features work right or fix bugs from old versions.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
"Alas, despite the wait, Tiger is a minor revision, like all previous OS X updates."
That's according to the MS hardware scale, where a major revision requires new hardware to make it run at a reasonable speed. So Thurrot is right - we're still waiting for the first major revision of OSX.
"Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3."
Yeah righ!!
To quote:
"In the previous version of Mac OS X, version 10.3, Apple introduced a feature for power users called Exposé that seeks to help manage the multiple applications and windows one typically opens in the course of using a Mac. But Exposé is a weird solution, requiring you to hit various "hot keys" (read: A function keys) in order to trigger its display, kind of a throwback of sorts to the early days of DOS-based applications. "
Presumable this "I-have-loved-Macs-all-my-life-power-user" has not realised Exposé can be triggered just with a mouse movement, but what would he have preferred? Alt-Ctrl-E ? Or is he looking forward to the days when we can trigger Exposé with a blink, a nod of the head or a spit at the screen?
Windows reviewers are so vapid. Great, the guy gives a nice review of 10.4, but misses what is great about Apple's upgrades. Sure the interface tweaks are nice, the cute little tools make some day-to-day tasks easier -- but what is the best about OS X version iterations is their overall improvements to stability / operation, and dedication to their *NIX roots. With each OS X version it gets a bit more nimble, a bit more efficent (anybody remember loading 10.0 PR 1 on an iMac G3 600mhz?). Note that the guy makes no reference to Apple's continued dedication to improving their *NIX underpinnings in terms of it's vast functionality (can anybody say spot-light command utilities?). Maybe he ignores the UNIX(like) under-pinnings, and the vast revamp they get every upgrade, because he is a windows guy ("yay for the impotent win32 cmd prompt") so he only knows a GUI. OS X get's my support through and through because they are always able to make a OS that supports everybodies needs -- from a GUI friendly enough to make your grandmother feel comfortable, and the command line environment to make programmers and systems administrators alike happy. This makes for a fast, efficent, and fully-usable OS. OS X gets extreme points for being heavy into interoperability from their server OS down to the client (their OS X server handles mixed networks of Windows, OS X, linux, bsd, etc. VERY well -- so that the capable admin should never have to worry about what client platform he is dealing with). If microsoft could create anything nearly as full-featured as that I might give them the time of day -- but the unrelenting dedication to a buggy interface and the worthless win32 platform is what will leave "die-hard" windows users in the dark forever. Sure they will come over one at a time and buy an iPod or 'mini, but they will likely always let the really wonderful nuances pass by without any attention paid.
The perverse thing is that if MS tried that model there would be riots in the streets.
Tiger is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Longhorn is a great solid update over the board, with lots of new smaller features everywhere, new technologies for developers to play with and a few, but not many, "end user" headline features.
Why is Tiger being reckoned a small update, a revision, when the guy spends half the site hyping how big of a release Longhorn will be? Do you have to break bonds with ten year old APIs to be a major new version?
From the article: "Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is, in fact, a minor upgrade to an already well-designed and rock-solid operating system. It will not change the way you use your computer at all, and instead uses the exact same mouse and windows interface we've had since the first Mac debuted in 1984. That isn't a complaint about Tiger, per se: It's a high-quality release. But Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was arguably a bigger advance over the initial release of XP than Tiger is over Mac OS X 10.3. My issue here is with marketing, not with reality."
First, a sidebar, the "change the way we use computers" ditty has been used to contrast searching (with Spotlight) as opposed to digging through folders (with Finder) as a way to organize stuff. Thurrott seems to misattribute the quote. I can only recall two previous mentions of similar phrases by Jobs - "change the way we use computers" (again) when Exposé was introduced and "change the way we listen to music" about the Shuffle feature (which I'm the first to admit isn't unique to Apple at all), first in a magazine article and then in a keynote. These three things all do pretty much the same thing, in essence: bring order into chaos by taking away choice temporarily; rearranging your windows, files and songs for the moment, to make it easier to deal with.
Back to the quote... How many under-the-hood changes did SP2 have? How many reworkings of the whole how-drawing-works wiring did SP2 go through? SP2 was designed to improve on a few key points, such as the wireless network support, filling of some security holes and consolidating all bug fixes and patches (the last point is common to all SP releases). This is nowhere near Tiger, even if the effect it has on daily use might be more prominent for the user going from XP/XPSP1 to SP2 than the user going from Panther to Tiger. He had better not have any issues with reality, because it seems he's having trouble grasping bits of it in the first place.
"Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we'd call a service pack in the Windows world."
Doesn't seem that way. Its got new features, which is the point of the release. Do service packs typically add significant features?
Well, criticizing stuff that you're a fan of on /. gets comments like "MOD PARENT DOWN!" and "TROLL! HYPOCRITE!". I personally think Paul's analysis is really shallow and misses a lot of points, but he is at least being straight as he sees it.
Automator is not an API, but a VERY user centric (and useful) feature!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One service pack added IE 6.
Another service pack added the security center and a firewall.
Another (way back when) Embedded IE into the OS.
It's a fair comparison.
So given Tiger doesn't actually ship till the 29th, is anyone curious as to where Mr Thurrot got his "review copy"....
Apple Computer is a profitable hardware and software manufacturer for the Power-PC platform. It's a business model that works whether you understand it or not.
Unavailable for comment. Whoops, wrong forum.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
"What about Automator?"
Most users probably won't use it. It's not like Mac OS didn't have AppleScript before.
Have you seen the demonstration video? It shows just one example (bulk renaming files) that I have seen COUNTLESS people ask how to do on photography forums. And it makes it really, really easy... I'd say that if any system is ever going to get people scripting who have not before, this is it.
Yes there was AppleScript before. But that still involved writing code - very simple code, but code anyway. With Automator you are selecting a sample set to work against and then just modifying a few dialogues as to what you want to do. For many bulk file operations alone, a whole bunch of people are going to be using Automator that never touched Applescript before.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
[quote]
My Powerbook 17" makes crackling and squealing noises with CPU activity.
[quote]
This is the cpu going into/out of rapid sleep cycles in order to conserve power and stay cool. Annoying as heck sometimes.
You can solve it by installing the CHUD tools from the developer area on the Apple site.
CHUD installs a new preference pane called "CPU" under system preferences. Open that up, and UNcheck the button marked "nap". Instance silence! Of course, your fan will come on more often --and stay on longer-- but that's sometimes worth it. Personally, I hop back and forth.
I agree about the feet, though. I've gone through three sets, and managed to get them replaced for free each time by being all-nice-like to the geniuses at the NYC SOHO store and Tekserve. YMMV, of course.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Microsoft is working on similar, if further-reaching, technology for Longhorn.
What's further-reaching about what they're putting in Longhorn? WinFS? *cough*
Is that actually going to be in there? They seem to be having problems with it.
I rather expect Tiger will be the same way, particularly after hearing reports from people who have had the development versions.
My biggest gripe is the lack of a "Force unmount even if it will leave the system unstable" option. That should absolutely be in there by default, and I've considered seeing if I can hack such a thing up for my own use.
If something (possibly a runaway process that's trying to make thumbnails out of files that aren't even remotely graphical in nature or keep track of filesystem changes changes or whatever) is locked up, then you simply have to axe the process first- which is still a pain that you shouldn't *have* to put up with (especially if your next action is going to be to shutdown the system). lsof works ok for this, and fuser works as well.
So no, Linux isn't very good about this, and people even tend to have strong opinions on it.
With Spotlight, you get custom plugins to pull all kinds of metadata from common files (like EXIF data in pictures or strings in PDF).
You also get an API where a program saving a file can present custom metadata to the Spotlight engine (I think). Or at least help it interpret what metadata is in the file.
In addition to the general plugin ability to scan different types of files, WinFS (not in Longhorn anymore though) offers I believe is that a user can enter and control their own metadata - key/value pairs.
This is of course the wrong way to do things. People generally do not want to be, and are bad at, maintaining metadata. So I think that Spotlight represents a best case for accurate user searching without a lot of work on the part of the user.
And for most things that you might want custom metadata on (really pictures) the common formats generally already have the means of storing metadata that will be searched on (EXIF tags).
I'll expand just a little on "users do not want to generally enter metadata" as I know that will get some people riled up. There are cases (mostly pictures again) where you do care very much about metadata and even spend some work on it. But this is done through a speciailized interface dedicated to this task (like iPhoto or other media managemnet tools) and not some generic metadata tagger. I have yet to see a generic metadata tagger that people actualy liked to use and/or used heavily. So I think that an approach that presents a clean API to let a customized interface present the metadata to the user and the system in ways that make sense to each of them has a lot more value than a lot of key/value pair editing abilities.
In the end I think to the user WinFS and Spotlight will seem more similar than not - though the Spotlight UI is pretty good and we haven't really seen how search results will work with WinFS much.
I could be a bit off on details of either system, corrections appreciated.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can almost gurantee you are not going to be waiting that long.
Why? Because Core Image and Core Data (especially Core Data) are going to make a lot of interesting applications possible with a lot less work. So sooner rather than later you are going to see some cool stuff come out and you are going to have to upgrade.
With most other OS releases there were not that many compelling API changes and so few apps made you upgrade to the very latest version, almost always generally suppotring at least two releases. But I think many developers will break that rule for this release.
Another side reason is that with every update there has been a speed boost, which generally has been worthwhile as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Panther:
Expose, OK, though I prefer Peter Maurer's Witch.
Massively broken Finder, Jaguar's was much more practical and less "in the way".
Safari... uh, that came out in Jaguar.
Fast User Switching... a big disappointment, free UNIX has had virtual consoles for years before OS X existed... and they work better.
Preview... that came out in Jaguar as well.
I can't comment on iChat AV, Filevailt, or Inkwell... I don't use them.
Slight performance increase for some models.
Several free third-party tools that worked under Jaguar required shareware upgrades for Panther.
If it wasn't for the fact that Panther came along when I upgraded to a Mac mini I'd still be using Jaguar.
Tiger:
Spotlight... a killer new functionality that I'm truly hungry for.
20-50% improvement in GUI performance.
Just those two points alone make it worthwhile.
If such was the case, then SOMEONE would be able to tell me what hardware/software combination would yield Linux-like stability.While that is correct, it does not follow that Windows is unstable because it does not do that.
Windows is the way it is because Microsoft had OTHER goals and decided to achieve those goals.
Apple does not focus on monopoly maintenance or killing Netscape. Apple focuses on getting one set of hardware to work flawlessly with one OS.
Firstly, to get this out of the way, let me state that people who say Paul Thurrot's can be a fan and critical at the same time are right. That should be obvious to anyone who isn't waving their respective computer platform's flag. I would in fact argue that a review that isn't critical isn't a review, but mere company PR.
Good, that's out of the way. Now on to this review and why it irritates me intensely. Paul Thurrot might indeed be a closet Mac fan, although, from his previous articles, one would never guess it. The fact that he has numerous Macs, including a newish 12" Powerbook, and has in fact been running OSX since the 10.0 release indicate either someone who is obsessed with something he hates, a closet admirer, or, more to the point, someone who makes his money, aka his bread and butter, his moola, his bucks etc, by pumping out glorious reviews of Microsoft's software. I seriously doubt that the powers that be in Redmond would be happy to see Winsupersite (which is about as Microsoftish a name as one can come up with, but that's something for another post) offer scathing criticisms of Longhorn and general dissings for Microsoft's piss poor security record and abuse marketplace behaviour.
So, it might well be that he does like Macs and OSX in general, but can't afford to say so too loudly on a site that is mainly a mouthpiece for Microsoft OS betas.
I still find the review irritating, even in that light. The features he highlighted, such as Dashboard, Spotlight, Safari and Mail, are things one sees from a cursory 5 minute glance of the OS, but generally, one would expect a review to offer more depth than that. I am surprised (although maybe I shouldn't be, given his history) that he never mentioned Automator, XCode 2 or any of the new APIs, which, given that Micosoft has always aimed its OS squarely at developers, is a bit surprising.
You can argue till you're blue in the face about whether Dashboard is a Konfabulator ripoff or a Desk Accessory renewal, and you can argue that Windows has MSN search, Google Desktop etc, but the real new features in Tiger are under the hood and are aimed squarely at developers, just as Microsoft has always done, except that I think that Apple is doing it better (get to why in a sec)
The APIs, such as CoreImage/Video and CoreData make multimedia a breeze in development and embedded Database development incredibly easy (and you can't tell me that these two features are not needed by an enormous number of applications from media to business). XCode 2 offers automatic diagramming of class structures, pointing to the beginnings of a free CASE tool that comes with the OS, and I have yet to see Thurrot offer the tidbit that XCode comes free with the OS (he seesm to ignore this bit every time he does a review). So when will MS offer VS.Net for free? This is Apple's big hook with developers. The IDE is free and remains free, even when you're not a student anymore.
Add to that that Dashboard widgets are generally HTML/CSS/Javascript apps. There are literally millions of web developers who can make applications for Dashboard right off the bat, without learning a single new thing. And Automator for making a point and click batch processing app makes the OS very attracctive to those who need to automate daily tasks but can't code to save their lives.
Finally, I do find some of Thurrot's more superficial criticisms insightful. The new Look and Feel in Mail 2 now brings the total number of concurrent L&F's to 3 (White, Brushed Metal and Plastic). I feel this is terrible for consistency in the UI. His idea that this is some kind of service pack, however, is pure FUD. he KNOWS better than this, and if his reviews of Longhorn betas were anywhere near as critical as his reviews of OSX, I would take him more seriously.
Sadly, as is the case with Apple zealots, there are a lot of Windows zealots out there (generally the folk who feel hurt everytime an article about a new exploit for windows is published here on slashdot) who see Winsupersite and Thurrot as some kind of high priest, and they'll take him seriously.
it's unclear why Dashboard widgets can't simply work on the normal Mac desktop (which is how Konfabulator works, incidentally). Having to move into and out of the Dashboard to perform these tasks seems a bit unnecessary. Why segregate them like that?
Um, because the dashboard is convenient and reduces desktop clutter. Because you can also run widgets in your web browser if you want to.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
However, when you do shell the money for it and use it for bit, you can't bring yourself to used the previous version. At least that is the way I feel, I couldn't go back Jaguar after using Panther. Certainly, that would indicate that there is something there that justifies the upgrade expense.
Moreover, compared to Windows, the upgrade costs are pretty cheap. For one, you get a Family pack deal for 199 whereas with activation you have to buy upgrade cd for each computer. After 2 computers, you already pay more than with Mac OSX. Second, the $129 single cd is a full install CD. With Windows, an upgrade is $116* and the full CD is $200. In my experience, full cd's are better because you don't have to install old OS then upgrade to rebuild the system. So, I don't really understand why reporters insist on lambasting Apple for a measly $13 difference.* The upgrade can be had for $99 at Compusa. So, its 30 but you can still make the arguement
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
recent file system niceties like the My Documents folder in Windows
The article shows it too. The entire point of that article was to appeal as if he were a Mac fan, hype of some of the improvements that nobody will consider a big deal or that Windows already has or will have, and then make Tiger out to be no big deal. It's a well written, remove the hype piece from a Windows guy. Let's face it. He's covering features that nobody will really care about: 1. Searches everywhere 2. Widgets 3. Pinstripe look fading 4. Safari's great, too bad it's not on Windows Automater alone makes me want a Mac. In my mind that is the single most impressive new feature and he went out of his way not even to highlight it among the "minor" improvements.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
You are off on each item by an order of magnitude in usefullness to the user:
.NET)
Automator:
VB/VBScript/VBA (look up SendKeys)
Windows Scripting Host since Windows 2000
Windows Management Instrumentation since Windows XP
You just described Applescript. Not Automator which make Applescript accesible to the user who is not used to writing scripts at all. Imagine if you included a very lightweight version of VB in the OS by default and made it usable by non-programmers.
Core Data: Databinding (available in VB6, MFC,
Binding to... what exactly? Again it's not just data binding, but the actual DATABASE too! That's the whole point. When used apps get free undo capabilities, for example (since you can automatically record and unwind actions taken by the app).
Core Image: DirectX (but main shell doesn't use it, which is sort of good because it keeps base OS video requirements down, and sort bad because Tiger gets cooler graphics)
Avalon (Longhorn)
Not off by an order of magnitude per se, but I think you still have this a bit wrong... Core Image is at a lower level and mainly provides a nice library for quickly modifying images. It's not really like DirectX at all (that's why they have OpenGL). Nor is it like Avalon really, though it makes writing something like Avalon much easier.
Expose: definitely a plus for OSX simply because it looks cool, but Windows' taskbar is definitely HCI-wise superior (and renders an Expose-on-Windows unnecessary simply because it is _way_ more discoverable.
That is so wrong it's not even funny. I use the damn taskbar by day, and Expose by night. From an HCI standpoint it is FAR easier and quicker to find most windows visually than to play Shrunken Taskbar Icon Hunter. Folding the taskbar icons (grouping) helps you find windows easier but is way slow to use. Leaving them all out (which I prefer) makes them unreadable and still makes it hard sometimes to quickly get to what you want.
Expose is the first window finding sceme that took away my yearing for X-Windows style rooms.
There, that's enough counter-groupthink for one day. Bring on the flames.
No flames, just corrections to erroneous data. Really the HCI thing is the only one you have that can really be debated, you just got the others plain wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Many people have many given many excellent accurate reasons. But I will put it this way.
Why doesn't BMW come out with $15K sedan? Why can't you get a good hamburger in an exclusive French restaurant? Why won't Disney put out porn movies?
A: Its called branding & marketing. Apple is a boutique computer. Their marketers and engineers feel it is not enough to put out a cheap, functional computer. They want to attach a user experience to it, and then whore out your mother in order to afford it. Even if they could keep the same quality sense with Intel hardware for dirt cheap, they would not do so. (I think they could accomplish this with rigorous Intel product certification process.) They want to afford their luxury compounds, and make you whore out your mother to do it.
They probably will never go all software and market OSX. At least, not in this current state and time.
The following list of similarly functioning programs is in no particular order. Does anyone know the lineage?
m ba
BGInfo
Konfabulator
GKRealm
GKDesklets
Kara
Does it support adobe's XMP as well?
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Apple is a hardware company. Being a hardware company always gives you a better grip in the industry, a more permanent user base. Selling OSX ported to other platforms would mean people would undermine the neccessity of the Mac hardware, and probably hurt their sales. They don't want to fade into a struggling software company (kinda like what SEGA has done).
The OS itself is open-source, it's just the environment that's closed. It does suck that X86 users can't experience OSX, but what can I say.... Buy a Mac!
You state Macs are overpriced like it's some sort of fact.
I don't think they're overpriced. It's called value perception. I throughly enjoy what I pay for. Good for me and not for you?
excuse me if i'm mistaken, but as far as i know Apple hasn't shipped special copies of Tiger to any journalists or reviewers ...and i'd have to guess this guy wouldn't be on the list if they did.
so my question is: how did he get a final Tiger copy to review?
playing in Bill Gates' sandbox.
"I don't buy the argument that Apple will never release an x86 version of Mac OS X."
You can bet your ass they won't because it would waste their time competing for razor thin margins. You could forget about them ever being able to afford to do cool shit like OS X ever again.
Hell! Dell (whoever has taken over from Michael Dell,) is buying Intel chips and boards and other OEM shit because its simpler and cheaper to let Intel do the bleeding edge stuff, like laying tape, and then slapping XP in the box. He thinks that anybody who does any R&D is an idiot.
Its easy to put a cheap box together with Linux on it.
I've got one as my server, it works, all the time, and it cost me less than the Mac Mini.
But I'm still buying a Mac Mini because it works, its cool (literally as well as style-wise) and I can afford it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
http://www.linmodems.org/
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's a reference to the line from the movie "The matrix has you."
In true 'Soviet Russia' joke form it has been changed to "In Soviet Russia, YOU have the MATRIX!".
Way to read too much into it.
Couldn't even splurge on one last drink. Cheap bastard...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
He needs to exchange MS documents with other people
Windows has screen readers like Jaws which make it possible for him to use web browsers and other standard WIMP software
I'm constantly going over to his place and:
Installing or configuring software that doesn't work with his screen reader due to non-conformance with UI guide lines
Fixing stuff that breaks because of malware or the general fragility of Windows (and this is XP, SP2, folks, complete with automatic updates)
With VoiceOver as part of the OS, a Mac mini with VoiceOver will now be cheaper than a PC with a third-party screen reader.
Also, it will likely work a lot better for him, because Mac applications tend to conform to Mac UI guidelines and will thus mesh better with VoiceOver.
I'm going to encourage him to Switch the next time his Windows box hoses itself.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
While FreeBSD and bretheren aren't taking off like hotcakes the way Linux is, they're still doing quite well in their corner of the market.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I'm on the Apple site finding nothing about it. (I'm a stoont too. :)
But I'm at an eeevilll Microsoft supporting college. (MCNY) But I'm not the only Apple owning stoont.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I don't know which is more laughable....
Some of my best friends are apples....
Or his completely clueless review. This guy is a pundit, a mouthpiece and a tool. Not worthy of notice.
I really don't give a rat's ass as to what Paul Thurrott thinks. I am really not sure why this is even big news. The fact that Slashdot and MacNN carry this story is a shame to their own credibility.
Taken from the Daily Show, it is time that the centrist's act and get this garbage out of sight. Give me an informed article that is objective and informative. All this article does is to attract sensationalism by creating a flame war.
In this case my advice is DONT READ THE F*CKING ARTICLE!!!
Is this guy doing an actual hands-on, developer preview? Or is he just going on what information is available to us? I didn't see that mentioend in his article.
Second, and actually this IS clear, is that Apple SUCKS when it comes to upgrade terms! I bought a G5 in late March. Apple's window for a free upgrade? Any purchase after 4/12/05. 15 days before release. That's bullshit. So, what that means is that even though I'm a Mac tech, I'm not wasting $100 on another OS upgrade that I don't see any benefit to and something I don't think I should have to pay for.
How can it look like Perl if it's easy?
Yeah, when will Slashdot get back to its regular coverage of Apple shills and Apple Slashvertisements(TM)?
Imagine for a moment the situation on probably 90% or better of the machines out there. Every application that is used has an icon in the dock, and for most users this is completely possible since most users don't use more than a handful of apps on a regular basis. My wife and I share a login, the dock containing Finder, Mail, Safari, Quicken, Illustrator, Photoshop, iTunes, iPhoto, Terminal, System Preferences, Home, and Trash. This small set of apps (may have forgotten one) covers almost all time spent on the machine
It's my contention that whether the application is running is trivial from the point of view of the user. Click on the dock icon (app not running), it starts the application and switches to it. Click on the dock icon (app running) it switches to it. The only reason to even show people that it is running - really is to not remove that security blanket from people. If the damned thing doesn't crash all the time (it doesn't) who cares "what's running". The OS has never shown me any problems with multitasking
Well, first, WinFS will not make it into Longhorn. WinFS's network portion won't make it into the next Windows candidate. So, I'd say WinFS is just as much vapor as Cairo still is.
.NET to anything is spot on, as no one really knows what the vaporous .NET is anymore, including MS.
.NET VM and its associated languages. No one I know thinks anything else of .NET, including the .NET programmers I know. That's probably the most telling item.
Given that, I'd say your comparison of WinFS to Spotlight comparing
Is it a Server? A framework? A Service? A compiler? A language? A language concept? Quick, give me an answer. Hint, it's been all of those at any one time, although what most people relate it to now is the
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
With each OS X update, Apple introduces new APIs and "under the hood" functionality that does very cool things, thus providing a single, optimized solution to serve the functionality needs of all developers, as well as removing time-cost barriers to functionality implementation. And despite Mr. Thurrot's claims, these are no minor updates. Some of them drastically affect what a developer is capable of doing.
Examples of important changes from perious updates include:- webkit to integrate web interfaces
- cocoa bindings to ease UI development
In Tiger we have:If developers didn't use these APIs in their apps, you wouldn't need to upgrade to use their apps, but you'd also lose out on all that cool functionality. A good example of this is the Quicksilver app, which is a really great UI that uses searching and a keyboard interface to let you find, open and do other things with your files and apps. Now with Spotlight, Quicksilve will be able to do the things it does, much quicker and it will be a heck of a lot easy to manage and execute the development.
I personally know people who have software ideas, who are simply waiting to get Tiger to implement them, because it will be SO much easier to actually build their app.
So you can stick with Panther or whatever, you just don't get to use the stuff developers will be using to make the stuff you want. Get it?
What a bunch of horseshit. OS X has more in common with Longhorn than with Win XP. In fact that's where MSFT is stealing Longhorn features from, down to the frickin' analog clock. And Longhorn is what, 1.5 years away (which in reality probably means either 2 years or major feature cuts)?
Did anyone else notice the line in the story about 10.4 being sold on DVD only?
This will be a pain. I started with 10.1. I bought 10.2 (academic) at retail, and that had a dud disc in it. I ended up shipping it to Apple to get a replacement, waiting a couple of weeks.
I then had 10.3 through my college's program. 10.3 also had a dud disc - this one, though, I figured out, could be fixed by making a disc image of the disc and copying to a CD-R.
Let's just say that Apple's OS upgrades haven't had a great history of being shipped on usable discs.
If Tiger gets shipped on a DVD disc, I'm worried about that "burn" trick working. I know it won't work at all if the DVD disc is larger than 4.5 Gb...
But, obviously, PC Mag is a biased source written by a bunch of Mac cultists.
Quoth Consumer Reports
Raisinettes are my raison d'etre
Just so you know, I use many operating systems. And I'm not an OS X guru which could be part of the problem but it has some quirks that a multi-OS user finds difficult.
One is that OS X doesn't have native multiple desktops. So I installed a desktop manager to give me some (a must for my usage habbits). The problem with the OS X design is that damn panel at the top. When you open, say Finder on one desktop and then go to another desktop and a different app has focus you can't get another instance of the Finder. You have to go back to desktop that has the first Finder in it to give it focus or you have to find it through the Apple menu (way too many clicks when one would do it). What is wrong with lanching another instance of the app on demand from the icon, I wonder.
Another is (habbits from other OS's) that apps don't close completely when you click the red button in the window. It's icon says in the panel and needs to be closed again to get rid of it.
And the Finder as a file manager is just missing too many features I find convenient and useful. But that doesn't stop me from appreciating this OS.
The guy makes a living on pulling stuff out of his nose. He's to Apple what Maureen O'Gara is to Linux.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Check the code - the website was made using Microsoft Front Page.
Who do you really think has the worse job? Sure, most drivers are written for Windows. Then again, since the internals of Apple computers are incompatible with the internals of X86 computers, chances are pretty good if you are making hardware for a Mac, you will be writing drivers for a Mac. Since your product won't even work in a Windows computer, I have to wonder why you would bother writing drivers for it to do so.
You do realize that Mac's have standard PCI slots right? And standard Firewire and standard USB 2.0 ports, right? Lots of hardware makers (from printers to external drives to graphics cards to other PCI cards) work on both Mac and Windows.
As for architectures - yes Microsoft has to target several architectures. That's much easier than actually targeting a wide variety of real hardware - they are essentially supporting a few different API's for system interface, while Apple has to really make sure it's going to work on all the computers it's targeted for. Plenty of older MB's break with new Windows releases and then it's up to the MB maker to issue a firmware patch.
So it's at least about the same between the two companies in terms of levels of effort, it's just a bit difefrent what each one is writing to and testing for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have about thirty ABBA songs on my Mac. Where's the love!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OS/2 may have been worked on by Microsoft, but it was really IBM's baby - and the tool with whcih Microsoft tried to kill IBM.
I think you are right though about Windows actually being more evolutionary... so then the wierd thing is why each major Windows update feels like a revolution in terms of pain suffered by users.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have a TiBook that Apple replaced the screen on for free after the second trip back to fix some intermittent glitches. The first time the apple rep noticed the paint was flaking and had them replace some of the casing as well without my even asking.
Also I love how they will drop-ship user serviceable parts. I had an HD go out - they mailed one out, and I sent the old one back. No need to drag a G5 Powermac all the way to the store or ship it out.
And I've had pretty good experiences with the techs online who seem to know pretty well what they are doing and can understand the technical descriptions of problems I'm able to offer them due to knowing the UNIX toolset for more in-depth troubleshooting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The advent of consoles means that more than ever, there is no need to really have a computer that can play games for the majortiy of people.
More and more first runs are on consoles now. I think Half Life 2 and Doom 3 were the peak of the PC gaming market and things will trend to consoles more and more from now on, with fewer and fewer big releases coming to the PC first.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He scatters emotionally-charged words like 'weird', 'strangely', 'bizarre', 'miserable', 'segregated', and 'cheap' throughout his propaganda -- er, I mean, article -- as if putting those words in close proximity to the words 'Tiger' would magically make us all believe his claim that Tiger is a 'minor' upgrade.
The guy disgusts me. Go check out the complete list of 'minor' upgrades at http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/newfeature s.html and judge for yourself.
The Apple development program ships with current versions of the OS, and new versions that come out while you are signed up.
Unless you mean you didn't want to have to pay to be in the developer program? They do have a free component but you have to pay to get early access.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are indeed things you could point at with OS X and be rightfully annoyed. Like the complaint about the new Mail UI - I don't really mind that myself but I can understand how that can bother some people.
However when he starts venturing into being just plain wrong (like with there beign nothing interesting beyond Dashboard and Spotlight), it's no longer critism and starts to look more like counter-advocacy. That's when people get upset and rightfully critique the critique.
Isn't the official term "fisking" or something like that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just kidding. What I would like to add to this discussion is the following: The Apple web site claims there are 200 new features, as I understand it. And there are a hundred different ways you can navigate this site. If you want to use the word "Web Site", then Apple is the best example, as it truly is a web, and it's difficult to find the way around it.
Anyway, so I was on the Apple site trying to figure out what these 200 new features are that they're worth over 100 dollars to buy, and other than the ten features (automator, spotlight, dashboard, mail 2, ichat, and all those things), I couldn't for the life of me, find out what the other 190 new features are. What are they, 190 bug fixes deep in the code somewhere? 190 lines in total throughout the Darwin code that were modified in some way? A new function that is 190 lines long? Or are there really a bunch of new features that simply aren't wiz-bang enough for Apple to waste time listing them? I'd really like to know, because:
Spotlight will certainly make a lot of things better; Automator is something I'll probably use a lot. Dashboard is something I would bring up to impress my friends. But under all that, I use UNIX most of the time, and I spend most of my Mac-usage-time using their busted-ass X Window server that isn't quite that well integrated into the user interface, or in a Terminal window, or in Xcode, or something like that. So where the heck are the other 190 features at?
Ok, where the heck are the other 190 features at, asshole?... is a stable version of Safari. Have they updated it so it doesn't go glacial if left open for more than a day?
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
There are a number of things about Tiger that this guy fails to mention or glosses over. But one of the things that has often convinced me to upgrade my OS has been the continual performance improvements. Everybody knows 10.0 was horribly slow and that 10.1 was a big performance improvement. However, each release since has also seen significant performance improvement. Like the author, I bought a 500 MHz iBook in 2001 running 10.0. It runs 10.3 now and is so much faster that it's hard to believe. I'm not sure if I'll buy 10.4, just because I could go buy a Mac Mini and get 10.4 + iLife '05 + iWork for just a little more than if I bought all these seperately. However, it is really nice that new version of OSX allow one to prolong the usefulness of older hardware, unlike Windows (have you seen the hardware you'll need for Longhorn??)
Selling operating systems is a money-losing proposition, always has been. While Microsoft makes a little money on Windows just because of sheer economies of scale, even for them it's mostly a loss leader that draws people into Office, Exchange, and Server licenses on which they actually make serious money. (Think about the retail price difference between Windows ($100ish) and Office ($500ish). Even as vast and bloated as Office is, the development and support costs for an office suite are still miniscule compared to those for an operating system.)
So if macosx were Apple's primary product, they'd have the choice of either selling it for around $1k per copy (causing everyone to complain even more about expense, and encouraging widespread piracy), or constantly losing money without another profitable product line involved.
Here's a quick list of things just off the top of my head that excite me a lot:
1) TextEdit improvements, like table support and other things that make it usable for 99% of the documents most people would write.
2) Remappable modifyer keys - perhaps I can turn CAPS LOCK into control.
3) Slideshow direct from Finder (or Spotlight)
4) Dictionary service
5) RAW support
6) Envelope printing from Address Book
7) Safari Export Bookmarks
8) Spotlight command line tool for use with a shell
9) RSS screen saver
10) Buy print supplies directy from the OS (sounds wierd I know but I think it could help a lot of people more easily get the right thing for the printer they have).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
p.thurrott : microsoft ::
a) bill orielly : george bush
b) marion barry : crack
c) your mom : my dick
d) all of the above
Thurott is a "Mac fan" insofar as occassionally saying nice things about Apple makes him look like less of a shill than he actually is.
I don't mean to suggest he's paid by Microsoft, but certainly he stands out among "Windows journalists" as playing softball. This review of Tiger spends more time talking about Longhorn than anything else. Apparently Tiger offers nothing new at all to anyone, whereas Longhorn is going to be the second comming.
totally idiotic. This guy compares the tiger upgrade to service pack 2, while writing that dashboard is less extensive than what Microsoft is planning in Longhorn.
Then mentioning only two new features and then giving about 10 examples of what he found to be new.
First to the more extensive Longhorn stuff, technically spoken, Microsoft basically tries the same Apple does with Dashboard, Gnome does with beagle and BeOS had 10 years ago already, putting a half intelligent search on meta data. The more extensive argument came from early Microsoft Marketing papers which said they were going to build a filesystem on the SQL server. They already rowed back, because like Be Systems and others, that approach simply is to slow to be working, so Microsoft does exactly the same what others have done before. Second, service pack2 which you can get for free, is just a bugfix release, with no real new functionality not even under the hood, what Microsoft did, was to fix lots of holes and bugs, and add nice guis to already existing stuff (the integrated firewall), turn this stuff on per default and then add a lot of nag screens. Tiger has for the user at least, dashboard, the new mail app, the so called confabulator clone (which is not really a clone, there were similar things way before confabulator even in NeXTStep), XCode2 which adds some interesting stuff, the automator which seems to be the first really viable graphical automation solution, which even the end user might be able to handle. H264 which offers a lot for video buffs and myriads of other things.
For me from a developers point of view other things are much more interesting, basically what apple, did was to give the graphics a huge boost, add better compilers, add some CASE stuff to XCode, add lots of stuff which handles application data handling etc... the list is pretty long, especially in the graphics area. From a technical point core video is especially interesting because Apple managed to push some of the rendering into the domain of the SIMD extensions of the processor and into the shader engine of the graphics processor, which nobody ever has done before in an OS, to my knowledge. I expecte a major speed boost from that and probably even more in the long run. I am not even sure if Microsoft had plans for such stuff in Longhorn, because most of this shading accleration stuff is enabled transparently and automatically.
Overall after reading this article, I had the feeling this guy is a Microsoft whore who started to basically flame Tiger into the ground and saw a solid quality work, yet he had to find arguments just to make the usual Microsoft advertisement his publisher pays him for. So he tried to find a middle ground by using half lies and idiotic arguments.
Point taken about Automator. Although Office users would point to the Macro Recorder, which (from experience) is used extensively by non-geeks (financial types etc) -- and Win 3.1's late, lamented Macro Recorder.
:-)
It's not even really like Macro Recorder, since it's more like you use dialogues to develop an action against files, not that you are reocrding something you are doing right then - and you can preview what the action will do.
I do stand by what I said about the taskbar being more discoverable. Until you show a user the magic key for Expose, there's little chance he'll actually find the feature by himself (I guess that's where the close-knit Mac community helps).
That's very true that it's not as discoverable - though in those cases the Dock works OK since it brings all the windows to the front, or you can even alt-tab (which is also not discoverable but a well-learned action).
However I would say that more people than not probably no how to use Expose because while it may not be easily discoverable, it is both desirable and easy to remember - people that see it once want to know how to do it, and knowing it's in the last few function keys is pretty easy to remember.
Anything Windows can talk to. Incidentally, Windows has shipped with support for reading Jet databases (the format Access uses) out-of-the-box for many years, so you could use that.
But would that not imply needing access to create the database? With Tiger you get free embedded databases for any app that needs them, as part of the core OS infrastructure. It's a system service not a different database, and also really an OR tool because it persists object graphs.
While there are other ways to access "real" databases, that's quite a step up. And it's easier to use for developers than "real" databases.
Core Image: the DirectX comparison may not be entirely valid in an API sense, however for the user the GDI+/DirectX combination gives equivalent features (esp since DirectX and GDI+ will, like Core Image/Core Video, take advantage of your present and future hardware assuming you've got drivers). This is why I said Core Image was comparable to DirectX.
You are right that it's not "an order more magnitude more useful" to the user, I was trying to imply that with what I was saying - there I only disagreed with your assesment of what it is. I still think Quartz is closer to what you are thinking of as Core Image - core image itself is more like custom system image filters that work against anything displayed (including video). I think actually that Core Image is less cool than people are making it out to be, while Core Data is far more cool than people know.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Although the review starts right well. When he starts saying that 10.4 is a Minor upgrade and that XP SP2 was a bigger upgrade, he put on his "I am paied by MS shoes".
So in 10.4 you have
- new Browser release (major upgrade)
- new Mail application
- Automator: script everything in your system (he didn't even mention it, probably never opend the Application Folder)
- Dashboard
- complete new Core Programming: CoreSound, CoreGraphics, etc. Perhaps he should have installed the Developer tools and tried out the CoreGraphics demos there. Really great.
- new Quicktime, with new Video compressing for better Video chat
- conference Video chat
- ACL (finaly)
- Spotlight (as if this is minor, seriously)
and I probably forgot one or two things.
I don't know, but I feel, this is more a Major upgrade. Bigger than Windows 2000 to Windows XP. But hey, I use a Mac. Perhaps I turned into a Mac Zealot!
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Yep, my brother's iPod suddenly wiped itself, and after that kept being not recognised by iTunes, etc. So we file a report under 'not recognised by iTunes/finder' and I detail the obvious hard drive damage that has occured.
I send it over, they send it back saying it works fine under their testing and no replacement is needed.
Three days later it wipes itself again.
Apparently one quick test is all they need to disregard an intermittent drive failure.
This has nothing to do with a reluctance to rewrite their applications to the new API, and everything to do with the fact that to use the new API, they would have to move to a language that's not implemented on platforms other than MacOS X.
- AC
I wonder when Paul Thurrot's time will be...
Excuse me for skipping over the early years of OS X, which included bizarre missteps like "Yellow Box" and "Rhapsody,"
Rhapsody was a code name for OS X. "Yellow Box" became Cocoa + Carbon. "Blue Box" became classic. Where's the bizarre misstep? (Aside from Aqua, the main difference between 10.0 and Rhapsody DR1 is that Classic runs in a Window.)
Alas, despite the wait, Tiger is a minor revision, like all previous OS X updates.
Um, OK.
I guess you need to gratuitously change the UI graphics to count as a major update. I guess by this standard the last major Windows update was Windows 95.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger includes, in my opinion, only two major new features, Spotlight and Dashboard, and both were clearly influenced by other existing products and services.
If Spotlight and Dashboard were the only two major new features in Tiger, I'd probably agree (although the integration of Spotlight into the system and user interface is beyond anything else out there).
Core Data and Core Graphics (which I guess he is too clueless to understand) seem far more significant to me, but don't rate a mention in the article. Perhaps because they don't appear on Apple's Tiger overview page (you need to actually click on "Developer Tools" to find out about them).
Automator looks like an impressive concept -- although whether it will find a target audience remains to be seen.
But Exposé is a weird solution, requiring you to hit various "hot keys" (read: A function keys) in order to trigger its display
Or gestures. But I guess you'd have had to use it and not just watch a demo to know that.
I agree completely. When I'm sitting there at a Windows 2003 Enterprise Server session with about 10 MMC sessions open and about 20 of those trees expanded the thing I wish the most is that MS would just copy Apple's Exposé. I won't say one bad thing about them, just gimme the damn function! PLEASE!! Alt-tab my-ass, and the taskbar isn't a whole lot better than desktop icons. Exposé rocks. In the article he calls it a power-user feature. Yeah... right... pressing F9 is SO power-user.
I'm put in mind of the evil character from _Who framed roger rabbit_;
... throughout the movie he does everything he can to destroy the toons and then turns out to be one himself.
(--- spoiler warning ---)
Hmm... Now I'm thinking about Jessica Rabbit.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I don't think they're overpriced. It's called value perception. I throughly enjoy what I pay for. Good for me and not for you?
Yes, it is value perception. Quite a few people percieve Macs as more expensive.
No, and no.
Users simply run the Classic environment, while developers use Carbon. UNIX users have X11 Window System.
And if you're really a sad case who prefers Windows, you can run Virtual PC.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I respect for him just rose a millimeter. Huh.
I would partially agree with the 200 new features exaguration. However, like mentioned earlier he overlooked the most important updates. He talked about core image, audio, video but failed to mention their importance when making multimedia apps or doing tasks in the OS. Also I think the most monumental change they made was making it 64bit for the G5 (which he left out). Making it 64bit opened up speed and potential that never existed in panther, such as the theoretical ability to adress exobytes of data to memory, and more. Some benchmarks indicated roughly a 70-80% speed increase on the G5 with Tiger in some areas.
I don't find it much of an issue with about 16-30 windows (which is my usual). Even for text windows you can often tell by the shape what is going on... and of course if you are in the app you will have fewer windows still with the app-specifc expose...
Now it is true that something like a command line window is worst case, if you have a lot of shells open it can be hard to distinguish that. but generally it's pretty easy, and overall still much faster for me than the taskbar is in Windows. And again, I have to stress that I use both heavily every day so it's not like I am unfamiliar with how to use the taskbar.
As for minimizing, I'm not sure why you'd do that. I almost never minimize windows, again because it's so easy to pull up what I want quickly .
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Tiger may lack some of the niceties that make Windows more appealing to new users" haha oohhoooheeehaa awww
... is freaking dragging and dropping between windows with it!!! No more lining windows up side by side, then doing a drag and dropping it somewhere, or hovering over the taskbar waiting for it to popup. Just start dragging, activate expose, mouseover the window you want, deactive expose, drop the data. Or dragging to the desktop... start the drag, press f11, let go. done. f11 to get back to your app.
Windows just does not compare (not just because of this, but because of everything about Mac OS X).
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
uh, how is this a "troll" at all?
very suspicious modding going on your account dude...will look for it in m2
Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, or wait for the June release of Mac OS Tiger for Unix Geeks.
>>Who knows, a logo like that could be so popular that people would get a tattoo of it.
j pg
Wouldn't be the first time... This is one of my professors:
http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~koch/mac-tattoo-1.