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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 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?
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)
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.