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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."
unless there's a torrent..
Some people were waiting on Tiger's release to find out. Does AltiVec handle the CoreImage stuff alright?
I did find it tremendously annoying that the multimedia part of the article requires you to have Real or WMP but not Quicktime.
You wear wraparound sunglasses, even indoors. You wish your mother would let you ride a motorbike. You tell your friends you're pulling in $50,000 a year and $2,000 a month "playing the stock market" but in reality you're only bringing in half that and your dividends from MSFT havn't been good in years. Your non computing friends all turn to you for help; you only charge $30 an hour. Your collegues talk about you behind your back. Your workplace nickname is likely to be "The Asshole". Unlike the Linux fanboys, you actually try to pick up dates in bars but women laugh at you.
You think you're so cool you hurt. You have mirrors on every wall in your "loft apartment", which is really a grimy little apartment next to a guy who plays Guns 'n Roses at 3am. All of your furniture is from Ikea. You sometimes think that changing your name to "Steve" would be "pretty cool". When you go to bars you only drink Miller Lite. No body ever asks you for help with their computers because they know you don't know anything but OS X, even if you do tell them you "run Unix" now. Your friends openly laugh at you.
You regularly give $10 bills to homeless guys because you have too much money. Computers baffle you, but you enjoy looking at pictures of naked women. You don't know what Linux is, but you continually bugged the IT guy at work about your computer so he installed Linspire on your machine.
You shop at GAP. You probably used to use a Mac. When you saw the multiracial image used as a desktop picture and heard that this operating system came from the same country as Nelson Mandela, you knew it was for you. You meet with your friends in fair-trade coffee houses and talk about the eventual overthrow of evil corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks. Like the Linspire user, you have very little real knowlege when it comes to computers but you would never use your computer to look at pictures of women degrading themselves.
You've been "into computers" for ohh, one or two years now and fancy yourself as "a bit of a hacker". Wouldn't know C from C++, or even Perl for that matter. Older Gentoy users may be building their homes from matchsticks. You've explained to all your friends that your matchstick house will have an "optimised floorplan". They've tried to tell you that your house violates every known building code and law in your area, but you've ignored them so far because you can't read those complicated regulatory documents.
Much like the Gentoy user but you'd also be into sadomasochistic sex if you could get it. You're not just building a house from matchsticks, you're planing to grow the trees to make the matchsticks. You've cleared some land but don't know what to do next because you havn't read the books you've got, so you've posted to alt.arborists.newbie asking for help. It's been three days so far and no one has replied. You remain hopeful.
welco... AHHH!! *mauled to death by a tiger for using a slashdot cliche*
Pity, I haven't got my copy yet. Can't wait... Spotlight will definetly change everything.. I wish we had this functionality on our windows network. Usually colleagues have a habit of making emssy files and storing things all over the shop, if we could search on meta data that would really help. From what I can tell so far, spotlight means you no longer care where things are, they simply exist and the context becomes the "path"... Truly innovating and definetly worth my money.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
I'm always amazed how people seem to be able to judge the quality of an operating system within just a couple of hours. I can't imagine that you can really tell if productivity and/or stability have improved within a couple of hours.
So how do they review the OS?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Java 5 is not included with the operating system, but 1.4.2 is included.
Java 5 will be provided as a separate installer, so that folks can upgrade when they're ready.
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
I've had Tiger on my 17" powerbook for a few days now - it's actually installed on my iPod so I can dual boot.
One thing I have noticed so far is that Expose seems a lot less fluid than in Panther. Has anyone else noticed this, or am I going mad? The difference is noticable even with only a couple of windows on the desktop.
Other than that it seems nice. My Vodafone 3G card works, and most apps that I have tried. The only thing I can't get working yet is OpenVPN - as the TUN/TAP driver isn't ported yet.
Java 5? That's Java 1.5.0, yes? No, wait, I mean that's Java2 1.5.0?
Does it run on SunOS 2.10? Sorry, I mean, Solaris 10?
Reality Distortion Field.
No news as to when Java 1.5 (I refuse to call it Java 5 - see more) will be out. However, Apple has said that Tiger will be required for Java 1.5 (ie they're not gonna make it compatible with Panther) Early reviews of 10.4 Beta have said that a beta version of Java 1.5 is there, but seeing as apple hasn't mentioned anything, I'd be surprised to see it on an actual 10.4 disk. Summary: Java Tiger on Mac Tiger? If not now then soon. More: As for the name Java 5... Java 1.0 was Java 1.0. When they came out with Java 1.2, they called it Java 2 Then they had Java 2 versions 1.3, 1.4, etc. Now they have Java 5. Come on people! I don't care what your versioning conventions are, I just care that you have some.
Java 5 (Tiger) is not included in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). But Apple's got it under development and I'd suspect there'll be a Java update to Java 5 within a short period. Apple's been making test builds available to developers.
Apple, now raking in profits from its iPod, should seriously consider lowering their prices on their high-end machines to gain market share. Currently APPL is trading at $36.35 +0.40 (1.11%) a share and the stock has gone up consistenty since 2003 when it was around $10 a share. Now is the time for them to make some moves.
If Tiger indeed blows away XP, so they should try to advertise it more, get it out to as many people as possible in order to increase their popularity and inspire more people to use and develop Apple software. If everyone had a better alternative to Windows for say just a fraction more in price, people would start buying it. The iPod has already convinced people Apple is a good brand, all they need is a price incentive to switch to Apple PCs.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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)
David Pogue should disclose that he is a popular author of Apple books. I don't disagree with what he says, and I am an Apple fan, but if you have a major interest in Apple you should probably disclose it when writing neutral articles for the NYT.
I would love to make the switch, but I am not sure I could justify it. I know it is all subjective, but what is a good reason to switch away from WinXP? Looking for real reasons to switch, not trolls or flames.
For reference, I don't have problems with virii, my system never crashes, and all of my main programs (mainly design programs from Adobe and Macromedia) run very nicely. So what would I gain from switching?
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
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.
Apple is obviously not interested in competing with all this crap'n'cheap PC storese and hardware floating around. Why can't people figure that out ?
Furthermore, I've actually spent less money on computer hardware since I bought my Power Mac, simply because I was suddenly so happy with it, and felt no need to constantly change stuff.
I threw my last Windows/PC years ago, running Linux/OpenBSD on my servers, and OS X on laptops/workstation. I dont miss this fuzz about crappy drivers, PSUs that goes black, noice, having to install a shitload of free/shareware just to be able to do something.
Simply put, I value my time, so I save money (and adrenaline) on my Mac's. If you dont mind all the crap that goes with cheap PC hardware, Apple is simply not for you, so dont "whine" about not being able to buy a cheap Mac.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
From the NYT article:
The Safari browser now subscribes to R.S.S. news feeds,
And its "private browsing" mode conceals the tracks of online deeds.
There are archives now, and log files, when you send or get a fax;
You can make the pointer bigger on those Jumbotron-screened Macs.
You can start a full-screen slide show from some photos on demand;
And the voice that reads the screen aloud can lend the blind a hand.
There's a password-phrase suggestor meant to make yours more secure,
And the Grapher module draws equations simple and obscure.
Then the Automator program is a geeky software clerk -
You just choose the steps you want performed, and it does all the work.
There's a lot of miscellany, lots of spit-and-polish stuff,
But it works and doesn't slow you down - and these days, that's enough.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
The plural of virus is viruses.
Writing "virri" doesn't make you look clever, educated people will laugh at you.
Speak for yourself. Not all of us trot out our soapboxen for such little things.
Their new automator framework, which let applications send streams of objects to each other and have them propose interfaces to interact with.
(Well that's how it seems to work at least). It looks like the equivalent of unix pipes for desktop apps.
Something i've been waiting for for years.
Everyone is a buzz about Spotloght and it is no doubt going to be great, but I am also looking forward to improving productivity with Automator.
As with lots of scripting languages, sometimes it is just plain faster to brute force what you are doing than sit down, recall a language syntax and function set, write a script, give it a test, and then run it. What I see as cool about Automator is that it makes building a script so freaking easy and fast and since you can call scripts with scripts, you can build a nice function library of scripts to make the process even faster.
I am also digging on Dashboard. At first I didn't like the idea of a second desktop that is different than the first, and I will have to try before I agree that it makes sense to keep these on a different desktop, but I love the idea of the small applets (I used Konfabulator breifly) for small tasks like weather, itunes, stock tickers, and calculator. That they take minimal system memory means I will be more apt to keep them open and within easy reach without having to launch the applicaiton.
Lastly, I am totally excited about iChat AV supporting up to four people (including me) in a video chat. It just looks so cool to see three people sitting around the virtual room like that and this feature is making me finally break down and buy the iSight. It looks like the best autofocusing camera available for $150.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Did you just honestly use Enlightenment .17 in an argument? Isn't that like saying "Game X sure is great, but hell, Duke Nukem Forever will blow it away" ?
It runs Oracle.
Java 1.5 isn't available yet, but will be soon.
64-bit memory addressing is available for 64-bit backend processes. As the PowerPC can handle 32-bit and 64-bit at the same time, there's no performance cut at all.
I wasn't able to test the final GCC 4.0 yet.
I don't know what you mean by performance problems, outdated hardware and expensive prices.
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?"
Usng both a Windows2K (was using XP for a while as well) computer and a Mac day to day, I can list some little things that annoy me on Windows that are solved by the Mac:
Lots of windows? Taskbar has two modes, neither of whcih work very well - either fold your icons together and make it really a bother to get to, or have the taskbar go to multiple lines. Expose is just SO much better a way of dealing with finding multiple windows.
Macs don't ever hide menu items just because you've not used them for a while.
Ever had a Windows Window no respond to you because a modal dialgue has popped up somewhere and that window is now obscuring it? Well, I have and Macs do not have that problem due to a much more intelligent way of handlind modal popups (it's embedded in the window that spawned it).
Config files for every app that are really text and editible (or removable) by hand.
UNIX utilities as first-class members of the OS and not something that clings to life within the system. Yeah I'm looking at you Cygwin!
Usable simple text editing app (TextEdit). Both Wordpad and Notepad have unique issues that means you can't just automatically use one or the other (why do you think they are both still there). Heck in Tiger you can just use TextEdit for 99% of your word processing since it reads/writes Word files and supports things like tables.
Everything supports save as PDF through printing interface. No need to use Acrobat.
A home directory that reallly is in one place!!! You don't have to search the whole hard drive to REALLY back up all your app settings. They are all under ~/Library.
When people talk about being more productive on a Mac, these are the kinds of things they mean. It's all the little annoyances that are part of using Windows day to day... you don't notice them after a while but each one makes you just a tiny bit slower and interrupts your workflow. In my experience Macs have a better sustained throughput for humans. Sure if you're just sitting there typing a letter one may not be faster than the other, but it's when you have to stop typing and make transitions when your odds of being interrupted are lower on Mac.
And for less subtle reasons - Spotlight? Dashboard? Automator? These are pretty compelling reasons all on thier own, especially if you can write code at all. And if you can't then Automator should be even more compelling.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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!
Liger is going to pretty much be my favorite OS. its bred for its skills in stability and magic.
thats pretty much my best post ever. I spent like 3 hours typing it.
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. ;)
So can it search for relationships between files? Not just metadata, content of filename, but stuff like "show me the emails with the picture of the dog that I sent to members of my family"?
SpotLight is not just metadata plus content. It's also about relationships between objects. You can create relationships by dragging objects about (say a picture of a dog onto an email to family members) and SpotLight remembers them in detail (the dog metadata in the image is then in a relationship with the people in the email address fields, as well as the email itself and any objects inside it).
This seems like a new thing to me.
Mac OS X includes speech commands, not speech-to-text. You can't dictate to your Mac using the built-in software. So don't compare it to anything you talked about here; it's a different kind of solution.
That said, speech commands work amazingly well. You can click a file in the Finder and say "Mail this to (name from your address book)," and it opens up a Mail window with that address, the file attached, ready for you to type or just click "Send."
That's cool. That's really cool. No question. But you know what really blows me away? About two weeks ago, without really thinking about it, I did it while brushing my teeth. Seriously. I was sitting at my computer at home early in the morning, still half asleep, with my toothbrush in my mouth. I mumbled "Send the latest blah-blah file to person-so-n-so," which I have set up to trigger a Spotlight search to find the most recent copy of a specific file and e-mail it to the named contact. (I have to do this often enough it was worth automating.) I said this with my toothbrush in my mouth, with a mouth full of Crest. And it understood me.
Honestly, it kinda freaked me out a little. It was a very "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" moment.
(Just for fun, I tried it again, and it didn't work. I guess I was able to mumble it just right the first time, totally by random chance. Got lucky. Still a pretty funny moment.)
Good luck getting that recognized by today's speech recognition systems!
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 turned off Speech Recognition on my Mac - it was freaking me out when it started responding to voices on the TV. No lie! A typical conversation:
TV: "...we don't have the time..."
Mac: "It's seven thirty two".
Ok, it's not exactly riveting dialogue, but still.. You KNOW you're getting neurotic when your household appliances are having conversations and you start feeling left out.