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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."
"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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bred for its skills in eyecandy.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
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?
Short Answer - Tying the OS and hardware is a large part of the reason why things work so well on a Mac. Or conversely, the sheer number of parts that MS needs to support are a large part of the reason why Windows has many of the support problems it has...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
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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Imagine it this way:
Microsoft, with Windows, has to support every reasonable configuration of x86 hardware there is - with all the quirky motherboards, audio, video, serial ports, 250 formats of memory and that old 5.25" floppy drive you insist on using. The problem being, MS doesn't make any of that.
Apple, being the control freaks they are, dictate that their OS will only work on their proprietary architecture. That way, the hardware is designed for a certain OS (much like many PC hardware is) and, unlike PC OSs, Apple can optimize its OS for its components. It doesn't have to worry how it works on XYZCorp's motherboard or whether it will support the next version of Podunk Inc's sound card.
That's the rationale, and I think it's a good one.
They're not mutually exclusive. I am a fan of Linux, but that doesn't stop me from issuing criticism when it's warranted.
You make a good point here. I guess the installer for Windows has to be user-friendly because the user spends so much time running it...over and over again.
I think that the author of the article is so used to having to reinstall windows that he forgets that OS X users typically only install their OS once per machine.
I have to admit that the install process is something I never would have even considered including in a review of OS X, *especially* since he didn't even mention CoreData/CoreAudio/CoreVideo or a host of other new features.
I understand he has to keep the article short to keep the attention of the Dell-buying, XP-running PHBs of the world, but come on...comparing Tiger it to a service pack release from MS? What an Asshat.
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.
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?
Because Apple is not a charity. They exist to make money (and make money they do, with overpriced machines and the regular OS X upgrade cycle), and to look at their stock price some investors clearly believe they'll make a lot of it.
/. as the lamers around here
If Apple makes OSX run on x86 two things will happen:
a) Mac sales will tank
b) OSX-dissing will begin big-time on
discover that an OS tested on a small variety of hardware will
not do well with the wide variety of rigs out there
Go somewhere random
An example as proof - I am a huge fan of the Detroit Tigers - and you should have heard me bitch when they traded half the team away for one season of Juan Gonzales (who mailed in his performance when he wasn't milking a debilitating pinky injury), when they hired Phil Garner to manage (ugh), when they fired Sparky Anderson, etc.
Still, I wanted (and want) the Tigers to succeed. This guy is probably no different - he wants Apple to succeed, he just critizes what he believes are dumb things.
Just because you are a fan of a team, company, or some other entity does not mean you should blindly overlook their faults.
Other short answer: Apple researches and develops the OS with the money they make from the hardware. If you could buy the latter without the former, Apple could not continue to do that.
...many of which do not work correctly.
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.
yep linux supports all kinds of hardware. but what fraction of that hardware works well? what fraction of the supported peices of hardware work perfectly, without tweaking, every time?
THAT is why they tie the OS to the hardware. so you don't have to fiddle or hope that your video accelleration is detected.
Or conversely, the sheer number of parts that MS needs to support are a large part of the reason why Windows has many of the support problems it has...
While you are true that this (flakey hardware) is one of the primary reasons for Windows' instability, there's a subtle distinction that I think you miss.
Microsoft no longer developes for the PC platform; hardware manufacturers develope for the Windows platform.
Remember back in the early '90s when things were "IBM compatible"? Do you see those words any more? No. You see "Designed from Windows XYZ" on software and hardware.
Microsoft Windows is the new platform, and most things (both hardware and software) are developed for it. The statement that I quote from you implies that MS does the work of dealing with new devices, when in reality it's people that make the devices that have to release Windows drivers (and other OSes sometimes) if they want their product used.
Linux hardware support is often limited to "here is a driver. it is supposed to work. it takes these flags. have a nice day." sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (like in the case of my ITE8212 RAID.) windows driver support is also sometimes limited to that, but there's usually a cute configuration tool where applicable, and so on. Also, linux is a community effort. How many people have written/worked on those drivers? They did it because they needed a driver. Just a strength of the model...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just because you are a fan of a team, company, or some other entity does not mean you should blindly overlook their faults.
Exactly... doing that pushes you over into fanboi and/or zealot status. It's when you think that can do no wrong that you're over the edge.
Now, I'm of the opinion that a fundamental change in the filesystem (the vastly upgraded metadata system that allows the kind of dynamic searching et al described, coupled with yet another GUI look, in addition to upgrades of less prominent functionality elsewhere, represents a bigger upgrade than, say, Windows 2000 to Windows XP, which in many senses was 2000 with yet another GUI look and lots of minor improvements.
Indeed, it seems a festival of grudges, from the discredited claim that Dashboard is a rip-off of Konfabulator (Thurrot even mentions the counter evidence himself, but not in the context of discrediting the claim, instead in terms of discrediting the need for any special status for these widgets), to an attack on Apple's over-the-top marketing that manages to be just as over-the-top as Steve Jobs on Jolt:
Er, what?From my point of view, it's a wierd review. It is, of course, aimed at an audience that is rabidly pro-Microsoft just as much as a review of some Longhorn-type thing on MacRumors.com would be as grudge filled. It's certainly interesting, it's a good demonstration that platform fanaticism is still very much with us, and very much full-duplex. It's interesting less for what it says about Tiger than what it says about Thurrot and his audience.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
It's the #1 issue...for you and I, but we're not really representative of the marketplace. Most OS buyers don't look for broad video gaming support. I'm also not convinced that building in support for all kinds of gaming hardware will bring wide support for games to the Apple either. It's all about market share, and Apple just doesn't have it. In fact, the latest and greatest Apples will run all of the necessary bleeding edge hardware, but there's little incentive for game developers to sink the necessary amount of cash into developing for the Apple platform.
-Turkey
Microsoft, with Windows, has to support every reasonable configuration of x86 hardware there is - with all the quirky motherboards, audio, video, serial ports, 250 formats of memory and that old 5.25" floppy drive you insist on using. The problem being, MS doesn't make any of that.
Sorry, but this is nothing but a big fat red herring. Microsoft writes the specifications for x86 hardware, and Microsoft can choose to support, or not to support, what ever hardware suits them.
In no fashion is Microsoft forced or obligated to support *any* particular configuration, and recent history has shown quite well that even such an august institution as the United States government cannot force Microsoft to do anything they don't want to do
In fact, Microsoft doesn't even offer *support* for their own product, unless you buy a retail copy. Otherwise, you're left to the tender mercies of the hardware developer that sold you the OEM copy.
What, exactly do you find proprietary about Apple hardware? Is it the PowerPC processors (which are found in many places other than Apple hardware, so therefore must have an available specification)? Is it Open Firmware? Is it PCI or USB? Is it FireWire? Is it Serial ATA? Is it AGP? Is it PCI-X? What?
Possibly the only thing which can be described as "Apple Proprietary" is the bridge chipset, and I'm not even so sure of that. After all, there are many other fine operating systems out there that run just fine on Apple hardware--like OpenBSD, or Linux, in case you were wondering.
And, Darwin seems to work just fine on x86 hardware. In fact, it arguably got its start on x86 hardware. The guys at Apple are no dummies--the upper layers of the OS may not be open source, but you can be sure that they are sufficiently abstracted from the lower layers that it would be a relatively simple job for Apple to port to another platform. They might lose things like AltiVec/Velocity Engine, but vector processors are widely available elsewhere.
For the same reason, I don't buy the argument that Apple will never release an x86 version of Mac OS X--after all, by the same logic, in no way is Apple obligated to make sure that an x86 Mac OS X would be compatible with commodity PC hardware. If Apple were to go down this path, you can be quite sure that commodity hardware would never live up to Steve Jobs' expectations. In fact, I'm shocked that Apple ever released the Mac mini! Who wants to see some crappy old PC monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers next to the elegant Mac mini?
And even Microsoft is no stranger to PowerPC development, if you count Windows NT and the XBox...
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
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