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Rave Reviews for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
druid_getafix writes "The first mass market reviews of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger are trickling in with a big thumbs up for the release. Walt Mossberg of the WSJ says 'Tiger Leaps Out in Front' but complains about slowness of some applications - notably Mail. David Pogue of NYT says 'But with apologies to Mac-bashers everywhere, Spotlight changes everything. Tiger is the classiest version of Mac OS X ever and, by many measures, the most secure, stable and satisfying consumer operating system prowling the earth.' In related news Mossberg also covers the rising incidence of spam/virii in the Windows world and says '...consider dumping Windows altogether and switching to Apple's Macintosh...'. Previous reviews of Tiger were covered on /. earlier."
As do I, but I really thing Apple need to do something about getting a cheap machine out. I can build my own for half the price of a Mac mini, and until they can match that they won't be getting any of my money, and I'm sticking with Windows.
ROFLCOPTER. "Apple need to sell a cheap [$250] computer."
An upgrade to Windows XP Professional is $200 alone. How much computer can you buy for that last $50? Sorry, but if you're going to complain that a $500 isn't cheap enough, I'm going to say you're a biased troll who thinks pirating an OS makes a computer cheaper for comparison purposes. You can't call something cheaper if you're stealing part of it.
"Man, that $2000 PowerBook is too expensive. If they had a $1000 laptop, I'd buy one, but NOT SOONER NO OMG."
"Man, that $1000 iBook is too expensive, but if they had a $700 Mac, I'd buy it. NOT SOONER, though!"
"Man, that eMac isn't cheap enough for me. I can build my own computer for $10 and a pack of paper clips. Wake me when they sell an AFFORDABLE computer."
"What? They're charging $500 for a computer?! Too bad they don't have a $250 computer, or I'd buy one."
Pattern here?
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
You can only build a machine cheaper if your time is worthless.
I need someone to do some yard work can I hire you for $1 a day? That is your going computer assembly rate. So it won't be much of a difference.
You do reaize that in order to put even a nano-itx board into a mac mini chassis, you can't have a cd-rom drive right?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Uh, dude, you can't do that.
you can't take a quote, edit it to death to remove the point of the sentence, and then call it hype. "consumer" was the key freakin point in that sentence and you just said "haha no. I shall rewrite this to mean something else and then call them liars!"
Can you show me another consumer desktop OS that's as stable, secure, and satisfying? It ain't Linux, Linux isn't 'consumer' enough. No more than a Ford F-850 is a 'consumer' truck.
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Good G*d, man, in grasping the Tiger's tail let's not lose our grasp of Reality.
OS X may be better than Redmond.*, but 95% of computer users and corporations would rather have a better OS ~that they can install on their current hardware~.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Well, the main reason I use Macs and MacOS isn'nt blazing speed differences and OMG!!! It just works!!! statments. although I have yet to install a driver to get something om my PowerBook to work. I don't know how they do it, but most things seem to not need a driver or use a preinstalled driver of some sort.
I use Macs because they make me efficient. I feel more comfortable sith a Mac and lots and lots of nifty solutions make it a better platform for me. An example: When I work in Photoshop, all I need to do in order to view all the open pictures is to take the mouse in the lower right corner. Expose kicks in and I can see every picture I'm working on. If I want to see all the open apps and switch to another, mous in the lower left corner. Another example; everything is drag'n'drop. I'm composing an email and need a picture from a website? Just drag the pic from safari over in the email totally seamlessly. And both the email client and safari are preinstalled. Easy-peasy.
There is so much to tell, but just try it. If it is good for you use it. If not, don't.
Hardly XP Home.
Apple has got this one right. There is NO "OS X Light." There's just one O/S to serve them all...
OS X comes with web server (Apache), SSH server (where's that in XP anything?), a SQL database, and many other things that you can't get without XP Professional or even Win2000/2003 Server.
Now, most of those "advanced" services are turned off by default, but they are there if you want to use them, and don't cost anything (other than the space they take up) if you don't ever configure them.
I think Microsoft's OS strategy sucks, because it generalizes: I need Win2003 Server Standard Edition--or is it Enterprise Edition?--to get some of the services I need, but need XP (Home,Professional) to get the desktop bubblegum that my kids want. I can't pick and choose--Microsoft does it for me and I don't get a say in their selections!
Of course, you can always get freeware/shareware or commercial add-ons, but that ups the price of the OS.
So... the proper comparison is OS X would be to purchase XP Professional with bits of Windows 2003 Server (total cost, mucho dinero!).
Who wants to bet that Microsoft will continue this silly strategy with Longhorn? I can see it now: Longhorn Home, Longhorn Professional, Longhorn Advanced Server, Longhorn Lite, Longhorn Media Edition, Longhorn Tablet Edition, Longhorn Pocket Edition... And what will developers target? (This requires Longhorn Home, with some bits of Longhorn Server, but is incompatible with the display driver in Longhorn Tablet...)
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
This point has been run into the ground by now but I guess some people still don't get it. If you started with 10.0, you have to pay $130 to get to this point. No one is forced to upgrade. If you don't consider the enhancements being offered to be worth the cost, don't upgrade. Panther will work just as well tomorrow as it did yesterday.
We use Groupwise at work, doesn't work there. But there's something interesing about your statement. You didn't know it until now. In the Mac world, there's this wierd feeling you get that "this probably works" and you try it. Usually it works. It is difficult to explain, but the global drag and drop feature is so thightly integrated that one tend to use it. In Windows, it works in some situations and not others. I don't have the time to find out what apps / situations that can have DND to make them more efficient. In Mac, you just do it.
Sorry for the bad explanation, but the feeling is difficult to describe.
the whole point of the Mac voice control is that it DOESN'T NEED ANY TRAINING.
of course a "well trained" system will be better. jeez...
the Mac voice control isn't about, say, replacing typing (that will never work properly anyway). it's about commands. that's why it works so well - there are a limited number of words and phrases, though still some flexibility with precise phrasing.
the best use imo is the things like "home phone for Joe Bloggs" which will access the Address Book and display in huge font the home number. dismiss it with "ok" or "thank you" etc.
another good one is to select a file and say "mail this to Joe Bloggs" which open mail, starts a message to Joe and attatches the file. it's good because it actually saves time as opposed to a lot of voice control stuff which ends up taking LONGER than to just do it manually.
I really like Spotlight, and I have to say that counter to your assessment that something needs to be built that will make things easier to organize that there are a lot of people that will never care and just dump documents somewhere.
However I do agree that for those that seek a cleaner path, a tool that made the creation of symlinks much easier for normal people would be cool. To some extent Smart Folders in spotlight and other systems fill this role in that a smart folder is sort of like getting a directory with links to all of the files from one subject. But I think you might end up with results not quite exactly what you want at times - like too many files or perhaps missing a few. So a tool that let you build a set of symlinks using spotlight as a base might be pretty interesting and has the possibility of eliminating the need for photo management apps for many people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This pattern is real, but it exists not because would-be Mac owners are stand-offish about parting with money, but because PC prices have dropped, and dropped faster than Mac prices.
The problem, of course, is that people look at the cost of the hardware alone, and not the cost of the OS, upgrades, and applications and the value of the security and usability advantages provided by Apple. Windows piracy (and Windows applications piracy) probably hurts Apple more than it hurts Microsoft.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
A lot of people will make this into a religious debate -- which I'm guilty of from time to time -- but it's really just a matter of personal taste.
I have Macs and Win boxes in both my home and work offices. I've got a Debian box at home as well.
There are very specific tasks that work better on the PC in my opinion. For me, those tasks are games and Maya. This is coming from an artist's perspective primarily, a coder's perspective second and gamer's third.
Everything else, I use my Macs for because they just 'feel' right. It feels like I'm drawing with my left hand to use Photoshop under Windows with an identical interface and mostly identical key commands. Mouse acceleration curves feel funky, and I loathe -- nay -- LOATHE the fact that the majority of apps I use have to have a second desktop behind them (that gray background you get when 'maximized'). I like seeing my desktop. I like having a palette monitor that's got my email client in the non-palette space. I like the Mac's implementation of drag & drop. I like the lack of reliance on the second mouse button to do everyday tasks.
Quark Xpress 6+ is flaky on any platform at any speed, however type is significantly more manageable and supported on the Mac.
BBEdit is reason enough to buy a Mac, all by itself if you're a coder. It's rocked my world for years (network-wide find & replace from circa '95 -- maybe earlier) and just keeps getting better.
Don't even get me started about Windows and CMYK support, professional level color management, search functionality ("find" was practically instant across all drives and servers BEFORE spotlight -- now we have instant filename, content and context-sensitive metadata). Coupled with 45 minutes on my 3ghz P4 to search just my frigging C: and D: drives.
Once you get yourself immersed in the Mac, it fits like a tailored suit -- there's an astounding amount of tiny bits of polish and subtle features that have been cloned to the Win side by someone who didn't understand the meaning of elegance or subtlety (see the Longhorn 'Glass' demo that's surfacing for a prime example).
Anyhow, at home I choose my relatively slow 17" flat panel iMac G4 over my screaming and fully loaded gaming and Maya PC for almost every task because I'm more productive and happier. YMMV.
There's some evidence to suggest that they're headed in this direction already. The last time their Powerbook line got a bump, they also got a mild price cut. Their Cinema Displays also just had a mild price cut, bringing their average cost from "an arm and a leg" to "a hand and everything below the knee."
Of course, once their sales hit a certain level, their incentive to keep dropping prices goes away, and there's only so much growth a company like Apple can reasonably expect to support in a given period. So, in other words, ignore me completely.
I keep seeing all of these posts where someone mentions they can get a PC with 'X' ram, 'X' HD, 'X' CPU for 'X' cheaper than a Mac... You can also go buy a $1000 Honda and add all sorts of ground effects, spoilers, lights, and other 'performance' mods and have a pretty quick little car that will beat a BMW 740il soundly... But it's still a Honda. And unless you're stupid, you'll wind up going down the road at the exact same speed as that Beemer. The only difference is that you added all of that stuff to your car, you know every rattle and squeak, tolerate the lousy ride because you can corner like no ones business, have bass that can make your neighbors evaporate, and you can fix any of it easily or upgrade it... Meanwhile the guy with the Beemer has a 10-year warrantee that covers tears in the upholstery and doesn't have to think about the car, he just drives it. He gets to spend his weekends out playing with his kids rather than tweaking a new intake manifold, can drive the car from Denver to L.A. without worrying about the radiator being two sizes too small for the type-R motor that has been shoehorned into the car, and his stock sound system is pretty nice because he doesn't need 3000 watts to overcome the #10 coffee can exhaust system. Of course the average /.'er drives a VW Thing that was hand built by everyone he/she knows, only runs on methanol that he/she makes in the back yard, has the steering wheel on the wrong side, and requires three keys to start. ;)
On a lighter note... my Tiger shipment is on the FedEx truck for delivery today. Woohoo!
I dare say they know what they are doing. That's like saying Daimler Benz should drop the price on their high end cars to compete with GM.
They aren't even in the same Market.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
OS X may be better than Redmond.*, but 95% of computer users and corporations would rather have a better OS ~that they can install on their current hardware~.
Not true. That's true for geeks like us. Most people have absolutely no what an operating system IS, and upgrade their lifestyle by buying a new computer. I am currently finishing a masters degree with a bunch of people that complain they need a new computer, because "this one just doesn't work anymore." They're using P4s and Windows 2000, and are going to upgrade to XP, not aware you don't have to get rid of your existing hardware. For that matter, they could speed up their machines by simply reformating all the spyware off and starting with a fresh system, but no. They're going to Dell.com to pick out a "better" machine.
Thank God for those people. I get lots of good quality, 1 year old hardware from them for cheap. Not my fault they didn't take the time to learn about their computers.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
I love Linux. I've used it on the desktop at home for about 8 years. Linux can't compare with my Powerbook in terms of desktop user experience. My Mac 'just works.'
The hardware you're talking about has the same capacity hard disk and RAM. There's a 2.3GHz celeron compared to the 1.25 GHz G4. If you're talking about raw GHz, I guess you have Apple beat.
Video? I'm sure that the included video adapter is superior on the mini. Does your server have a modem? A DVD player, CD burner? Audio in or out? USB? Firewire?
But Linux has free software! Those free applications push Linux ahead, right?
Photo management? gPhoto has pretty good camera support - if you're using the right USB drivers. That gets the photos from the camera - now, what about organizing and editing photos? Slideshows with transitions, audio, etc? iPhoto kicks butt here.
Video editing? First find and configure the firewire card drivers for the chipset you have, then go get what? Cinelerra? Too hard for a linux geek to make work. VirtualDub, Kino? WAAAAY too limited in terms of features and ease of use.
DVD mastering? Don't get me started...
Music software? XMMS is pretty handy for playing music, but organizing, sorting? Grip for capturing the data...
OpenOffice and GAIM on linux are fine tools. NeoOffice and Adium are fine tools on my Mac, and they work almost identically on the Mac.
The point is that it's POSSIBLE to do these things on linux. On my Mac, it's EASY.
Write a letter, print it to a remote printer, rip a CD and copy it to a USB or firewire equipped MP3 player, take digital photos, create a slideshow with music, export it to a readily available format (doesn't have to be quicktime, but find something equally easy for the recipient to use.... Compare start-to-finish time on both platforms. My Mac clobbers linux in this.
Don't get me wrong here I'm a big Linux geek. My Mac makes desktop computing useful and usable.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I do have kids and I can guarantee you that the world is not any more dangerous than it was 50 years ago, 500 years or even 5000 thousand years ago... except kids are less likely to be eaten by wild animals now. I always hear people saying, "kids nowadays! they are so much more X than when I was their age." or, "Things have changed so much from when I was a kid." Let me clue you in buddy. Sure, there are cycles where things are a little more this or a little more that (or a little less!) but for the most part, people are not changing. The internet did not suddenly create a bunch of sick people hunting down your child. Those people were always there. The internet did not create a whole new class of racists/paedophiles/[insert other dangerous scary type person here].
It is always the same old song and dance. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
strike
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen