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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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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.