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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."
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 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
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?
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.
Even more!
"Tiger may lack some of the niceties that make Windows more appealing to new users"
*cough* *splutter* - what!?
And really, the guy claims that Tiger is akin to a service pack in the "Windows world", yet most of the functionality it contains will only be delivered by Microsoft in (wait for it) - a new OS! (Longhorn)
And Longhorn still won't have Dashboard, or Automator, or Core Data/Core Image, or Expose, or anything else that makes OS X great.
This space intentionally left blank.
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
I should have also mentioned the early benchmarks which show massive increases in CPU speed for G4's, healthy increases in memory speed for G5's, and no performance hit at all on G3's. In fact, even G3's will see massive increases in UI speed, as will all Mac OS X users when upgrading to Tiger.
Thurrot may consider Tiger "certainly not worth $129", but I wonder how much he's willing to pay to upgrade his Windows machines to make them 25-50% faster?
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.
All well and good, but even the *BSD support more hardware than Microsoft Windows and still wind up much more stable than any version of Windows
Microsoft has it easy - they target only x86.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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
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.
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. The dealers are on your side with this. The most recent class action lawsuit against Apple by its official dealers includes the "warrenty starts as soon as it leaves Apple" crap, which has made many dealers look bad and lose customers (if it takes 10 days to get to the store, and another 20 days for it to sell, that's 30 days off the advertised warrenty period)
This always works.
The ATI card on my Dual 2GHz G5 failed. It was 4 months after I bought it. I knew it was the card because the AGP card from my Cube worked. I took my G5 to Apple, I told them the video card was bad and they needed to replace it. That's what they did. No charge.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
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.
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.
I have to completely disagree with you. I had a PowerBook G3 (Lombard) that I slipped down the steps and broke the screen on. I called Apple, they overnighed me a box, shipped it to Texas. It was in Texas for less than 24 hours, was overnighted back to me. A couple of days later the screen quit working, no video displayed. I called Apple, no questions asked a box arrived the next day. The PowerBook spent just over 24 hours in Texas and was in my hot little hands the next day. Optimally the screen wouldn't have malfunctioned after the first replacement. However, I was able to get my computer back in perfect condition in less than a week.
Contrast this to my friend's Dell repair experience. She bought a top-of-the-line laptop. A couple of months later the motherboard went wonk out, of course that was only determined after three trips to service where the replaced the video card, then the hard drive, and then the processor. When they finally determined it was the motherboard they decided to replace her whole machine. They replaced the machine with a refurb! She was furious, she didn't pay for a machine someone else had used, she payed for a new one. After much wrangling Dell gave her a new machine. So, whereas my support experience with Apple took less than a week and everything went smoothly, hers took two months and her computer was barely useable most of that time.
That's funny, they must have paid off ConsumerReports then. Note: the links require subscription, I can't find articles that are free-reg.
Here's a summary of what the articles say:
For Desktops (3/05):
For laptops 3/05: Dude, I'm not denying your experience, but sadly that is probably better than par-for-the-course in the industry. My sister had issues with her iBook (her long fingernails scrached off the lettering on the keyboard) which AppleCare refused to fix... but would she switch to another laptop? Doubtful.Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
This only applies in cases when dealers do not register the transaction (ie, link the serial number to the sales date) and the customer fails to register with Apple on the machine's first run. Failing these two things, how else will Apple know the date that the one year limited warranty should begin? By default, it then begins at when it is received by the dealer.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Apparently, I did. I wanted a Mac, but I didn't want to drop a grand on it. I was at Fry's. There was a deal for a computer case containing power supply, motherboard, cooling system, graphics, everything. All you had to add was the Sempron processor, memory, and SATA hard drive. It was a good deal, and it would have come out at just over a grand. Then I saw the Mac Mini. It looked cool, so I bought it. I already have a monitor--19", mind you--and a perfectly good USB hub, wireless trackball mouse, keyboard, USB floppy drive, USB DVD burner... So I spent half as much money and got a box that's a heck of a lot smaller than that PC would have been, for less money... and the OS is just freakin' beautiful. (I was gonna try and make FreeBSD or Linux work on the other box, but no need anymore