Did you update Tiger, QT, Safari, etc., to the latest revs? Did you simply install Tiger and run it without updating it and the rest of the update package?
Did you compare Spotlight to Finder, to determine each’s purpose? MS Desktop Search is a copy of Finder, so, to be fair, compare MS Desktop Search to Finder.
Did you compare playback quailty of QT to WMA or WMP? Also, did you compare QT6 streaming to QT7?
Did you compare iPod transfer functions with QT6 & QT7?
Did you note the improved vid quality in Tiger, as compared to Panther? Did you see the improvements to vid quality on a PCI monitor card?
Did you note the improved Safari speed in the latest version? Did you time it, as compared to FF, for speed?

For those of us who moved to Tiger, first impressions weren’t all that great, but extended use and the upgrades reveal the many worthwhile improvements. For those of us doing a drive by review, little improvement would be seen.

And still no viruses for OSX.

This is a typical report from a person that doesn’t really USE their computer. Hence, it’s normal that they don’t see the use or value for many of the things there.

USE a machine beyond surfing and chatting, and you’ll quickly see that Tiger is actually way UNDERPRICED for what you get.

The feedback you got using the built-in microphone is not inherent to iChatAV. You’ll get feedback from *any* voice program on any platform when using a mic that can also hear speaker output. That is why noise cancellation equipment exists (iSight) and also why people use headsets.

Though I will agree that many Tiger features aren’t revolutionary, I think it is unfair to say it should be $20 for Panther users because this or that feature is available on a completely different platform. That is comparing apples to oranges. It represents a worthwhile upgrade for those who will get their money’s worth out of the new features, and that is for each user to decide. I personally appreciate Spotlight, regardless of whether it is available for XP, since of course I don’t use XP as my primary machine (for reasons why I don’t, see xvsxp.com )

If the REAL point of your article is to say Tiger ain’t that great because xyz exists on XP, then your article leaves plenty to be desired, since you’re only comparing a few of the new things in Tiger rather than doing a more thorough comparison of the two. I know this sounds like a plug for my site. It isn’t. It is merely meant to refute the entire (hidden) premise of your article.

If you ever wanna write for another site, drop me a line .
Dan Pouliot

What a pointless, badly written article.

You start with this:
“It should have been made available at $20 for Panther customers, because that’s about all the value it delivers over its predecessor.”

And end with this:
“Whether it will prove to be worth it as a Panther upgrade remains to be seen.”

So what are you trying to say, other than trawling for hits?

Deep thought, my arse.

Sounds like you know very little about Macs or Operating systems in general. Konfabualtor is only recently free and Dashboard is much better.  Not a huge memory hog for one thing.  Comparing Spotlight to MSN desktop search is a joke.  Spotlight is much faster and indexes in the background whereas MSN desktop search (what a dumb name) is slow and indexes way too much slowing down other processes.  Tiger is also faster than Panther especially on G5 processors.  I’m betting you didn’t do a clean upgrade btw which is the best way to go about this.  Buy David Pogiues book on Tiger and learn something.

I have to agree with unndunn on this one. Even though I don’t yet have Tiger just from the advertising on Apple’s site it doesn’t look like a huge advancement for the end user over Panther. Many of the features are just upgrades to apps. Over Panther I’d have to agree that Tiger doesn’t really live up to the price tag for the end user.

For the developer however it is a completely different story with Tiger being the most important developer release since the original betas came out.

It seems that comments in this blog are made with a strong bias and severe lack of support for statements made.

1. Dashboard vs Konfabulator.  Have you actually used both?  Konfabulator has been historically less stable.  Konfabulator was not free when Tiger shipped.  Rather, Konfabulator is free because nobody is buying it.  The same (if not better) functionality is now built into Tiger and will also be built into Vista (see start.com / slideshow).  Also, please describe the “less polish” comments.  You’re own “wavy effects” comment contradict your own claim.

2. Again, have you actually used both Spotlight and MSNDS?  My MSNDS is continously indexing on my system.  Some of the items found tend to be invalid as they may have been moved since it was last indexed, the searches take much longer on MSNDS.  I always have to manually click the “end now” button when shutting down.  How about integration with other apps?  Sure, it indexes my outlook mail, but it doesn’t work from within the application for me.  In short, on the surface it appears similar to Spotlight, but it’s a quick hack in terms of implementation.  You can’t be serious by comparing the two.

3.  Safari vs. Firefox.  This topic is almost starting a religious war.  I like them both, but tend to prefer Safari on the Mac, but prefer Firefox on the PC.  Firefox is more compatible with the wide range of web sites, but that’s not an indication of adherence to web standards.  The vast majority render perfectly fine in Safari.  When seeing two pages rendered side by side, I’m not sure how you prefer Firefox.  Look at the buttons and the text rendering.  On the Mac, true Cocoa based apps render better text.  That is, Camino (another Mozilla based browser) renders better than Firefox on the Mac as well.  That said, I do like the find command and the plug-in architecture of Firefox.

4.  QT7 - Agreed, the pro version should be free.  However, it was a very substantial update and is also available for Panther, etc.

5.  You call the “.Mac” service a rip-off, but you fail to explain why.  I’d agree with you if you’re just talking about e-mail and web hosting alone.  .Mac offers more than that if you’re actually interested in find out the details.  There is a convenience factor that comes at a cost.  Suggesting it’s a rip-off without discussing the details is disengenious.

6.  You’ve listed the top marketed attributes of Tiger.  But Tiger is an overhaul of the entire OS and packaged applications.  Not all changes are monumentous, but they are real.  I hate to be in a position of having to defend Apple, but you should at least do an investingation before making such claims.  Start here:  http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/ove r200.html

Personally, I don’t find Tiger to be such a big upgrade either. I don’t care for Spotlight and immediately disabled it but for one small partition—in fact, I loathe the Finder can no longer find anything. (It requires Spotlight to be activated for that partiton etc.) I also disabled Dashboard and direct view of pdf files in Safari. Furthermore, I am still waiting for GUI file mapping and windowshade functionality, for Apple to fix the horrendous label implemenation, and for Apple to quite experimenting with the GUI. (The new iTunes burnt Aqua is the one to go with.)

And, without question, Tiger has the most bugs in it of any OS X I’ve seen since when I migrated to v10.1.5. There are so many I haven’t even bothered to quantify them.

That being said, I think most of the coding is under the hood and it will be a while before we really benefit from that work. So we really haven’t seen Tiger’s full potential yet. But was it worth the price of admission—nah, not even close. But, then again, I think they should give it away anyhow to drive hardware sales. It’s not like any other platform can use it—yet. Time will tell what happens with the MacIntel transformation.

Apple did not make major changes compared to Panther from direct visual interaction. Tiger has major improvements in its Unix (absolutely love nano), Apple specific under the hood style code, and performance. Tiger demands a ton of memory, but if you give it a ton - meaning at leasts 2G, you get fantastic performance returns. Photoshop in some actions goes an alarming ten times faster on Tiger than on Panther with the same hardware. Graphics performance is massively improved. That said, many of the most exciting elements of Tiger are really groundwork and are perhaps not going to be seriously enabled until Apple has completed further testing. Some items, such as Quartz 2D Extreme, hopefully will get turned on in a later revision of Tiger. Some elements are already being employed, but will need widespread adoption by developers before we start to see them as truly exciting. Tiger is a lot like buying a brand new car of the same model you already own. Perhaps visually not much different, but under the hood lots of improvements. More importantly, these are improvements that Apple and developers will build on in dramatic ways for Leopard.

I agree.  I was very underwhelmed with Tiger when I first installed it.  I think Panther was faster myself.  I agree with many of your points.  However, you have always had to pay for QTPro.  So there’s no surprise there.  As for Spotight, I’m not all that impressed.  When I search for files, (at home or at work) it is generally by name because I named the files, so I know what I need to find.  I think the metadata thing is a bust.  I don’t need all that crap.  I always use the find panel on the Finder window.  I NEVER open the blue Spotlight window - ever!  Also, I turned off tons of the Spotlight search tools.  This has heleped a great deal.  I don’t need to search for email, when I am not in Mail for instance.  Yes, I agree, Tiger was very underwhelming.  Burn Folders are great though!

i think by comparisson sistem restore is healthy for most,
but if you think adding more to the premise that it delivers so be it, but the main point being on the argument of clarity of vision,
defining the goals , and acting that really all seem to be in a palce
of most regard to each other,

It is all about usage!

Personally I couldn’t care less about burn folders, and you couldn’t separate me from Spotlight with a stick of TNT! .Mac is one of the greatest values on the net and iChat AV is reason enough for me to buy mac’s for christmas presents for most of my friends and family.

Because i use Safari and mail, all of the updates that were added to these programs (as well as addressbook) were of real value to me. If you don’t use them then they are of no value to you.

I must say that I am disappointed in apple in regards to Core image and Core video. I’m working with one application from a tiny mac only company (belightsoft) that supports this feature. Why didn’t iphoto, iDVD, and preview and quicktime player (pro of course) ship with access to these features.

Panther was a great OS. If you are on it and don’t use Safari, Mail, Address Book, iChat, and the Finder. If you are so organized that you would never use a context search. If you don’t like using web utilities for everything from finding phone numbers, getting driving directions, tracking packages, following stocks, finding movies....etc. I doubt you will find enough value in Tiger to justify it’s price.

But if you fall into the above category, you probably are not speaking to the majority of Panther users so why did you write an article?

If you cannot tell an drastic increase in speed, then something is gone bad wrong.  My grandfather noticed immediately how much faster Tiger was than panther after I installed it on his iMac 600, and eMac 1.25.  It’s simple ludicrous to claim that it isn’t a value.  Tiger runs graphically intensive apps, including games, anyhwere from 10-40% faster on my G5, maybe less on a slower machine.  To say that tiget isn’t a good value is to say that Windows ME is.

Actually… the TRUE value of Tiger is in it’s underpinnings… particularly it’s completely rewritten threading capabilities and the foundation for true 64-bit development. Feature-wise it’s simply a small upgrade… but under the hood, it’s an entirely new animal.

ArsTechnica does a very thorough review of the underpinnings:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10 .4.ars

Tiger is a very good OS and I know the under the hood changes are significant and worth the upgrade price. I also appreciate that some people find the new features useful, but there are some glaring problems.
The worst is Spotlight which has completely replaced the Finder’s Find command. Unless your drive has been indexed recently it simply won’t find what you’re looking for. Why is this important? Backup drives that aren’t active except when backing up or looking for an archived item. When I updated to Tiger I had to wait half an hour for one of my FireWire drives to be indexed before it would find anything. That’s unacceptable when the Panther Find command would have returned a result in under 5 seconds.
QT Pro has always been an paid extra, but why is full screen playback considered a “pro” feature? Why impose artificial restrictions that lead people to believe other playback software is better simply because it offers full screen and QuickTime doesn’t?
The .Mac service is handy for people on the move and for synching address books and such. For some people the convenience is certainly worth $100/year. On the other hand it would be very stupid to back up sensitive data to an iDisk because it transfers everything in plain text. Can you say “identity theft”?
Apple is finally running on all cylinders, but there’s some disturbing grime building up in the engine.

To Doug:

“I must say that I am disappointed in apple in regards to Core image and Core video. I’m working with one application from a tiny mac only company (belightsoft) that supports this feature. Why didn’t iphoto, iDVD, and preview and quicktime player (pro of course) ship with access to these features.”

You’re asking for products to support features of an OS before the OS is released.  That’s a bit unrealistic.  This is very much a chicken/egg scenario.  Give it time. I’d be surprised if iLife ‘06 didn’t include core image/video support.  The only product that had similar functionality was Motion and that’s only because it had it’s own version of core image/video.

To your point though, much of Tiger’s improvements are under the hood and will see the light of day when 3rd party products exploit these features.  Keep in mind that developers now have to focus on Intel compatibility in addition to whatever improvements they had planned.  Some cross platform programs may not take advantage of core image/video as there is no real equivalent on Windows.

Since the review in this blog was both negative, brief, unsubstantiated, etc. I’m not surprised there were no mentions of things under the hood such as finer grained locking in the kernel, better 64bit support, hfs support for common Unix CLI commands (you could call that a fix), the addition of the Korn shell, the ability to do secure webdav connections, tiger’s inclusion of key Unix/Linux portability APIs, SQLlite, Unix System V message queues. 

How about the work Apple’s done with Launchd which addresses a sore spot for other Unix like OS’s by providing a common framework for handling daemons, etc.  This is one area where Apple has not just borrowed from, but gave back to the Unix community.

Then there’s the inclusion of extended attributes at the file system level, Tiger’s inclusion of ACLs, securityd (Apple’s unified authentification process for CLI and GUI), not to mention all of the goodies that come with Xcode 2, etc.  But hey, what do we know, we’ve only been using the OS for more than 3 days…

To Dave:

“The worst is Spotlight which has completely replaced the Finder’s Find command. Unless your drive has been indexed recently it simply won’t find what you’re looking for.”

Spotlight can be disabled to restore the previous find functionality.  What’s more, simply drop into the terminal and use the locate or find commands if you’d like. In this way, you can keep both methods. While I see room for Spotlight improvements, the current situation is hardly worth the drama you’re providing.

“When I updated to Tiger I had to wait half an hour for one of my FireWire drives to be indexed before it would find anything. That’s unacceptable when the Panther Find command would have returned a result in under 5 seconds. “

Ridiculous.  Have you ever used any other indexed system?  Try installing MSNDS or Google desktop before making such ridiculous claims.  Any of these similar methods require an INITIAL indexing.  If you don’t want to wait for the INITIAL indexing, the try a clean install where no initial indexing is necessary.  Of course, you’ll have to reload all of your data and software, but hey no delay on searching!

“On the other hand it would be very stupid to back up sensitive data to an iDisk because it transfers everything in plain text. Can you say “identity theftâ€?? “

Tiger now supports secure WebDAV connections.  You might want to try it.  Secondly, the non secure webdav connection does send data in clear text, but not account and password information.  So, if someone is sitting with a packet sniffer, they still couldn’t obtain your name and password information which is the real concern with regards to identity theft.

I agree with unnDunn on one point: Quicktime should have full screen included without buying Pro.  Others have said “You’ve always had to pay for Pro”.  This is true, but that $30 isn’t just for full screen, it buys you the ability to save, edit and author.  Put another way, regular Quicktime is a playback engine, and Pro is a recording engine. 

Looked at in that light, what playback program in this day and age doesn’t have full screen capabilities?  Answer? NONE!  It should be free.  The iTunes work-around is annoying and not indicative of a company that prides itself on a happy user experience.

“Since the review in this blog was both negative, brief, unsubstantiated, etc. I’m not surprised there were no mentions of things under the hood such as finer grained locking in the kernel, better 64bit support, hfs support for common Unix CLI commands (you could call that a fix), the addition of the Korn shell, the ability to do secure webdav connections, tiger’s inclusion of key Unix/Linux portability APIs, SQLlite, Unix System V message queues. ‘

Be sure to read the DT Tiger review for a more thorough look:
http://www.dtgeeks.com/index.php/mainsite/r eviewview/mac_os_x_104_tiger_the_deep_thought_re view_pt1

We meant to do a part 2, but unfortunately daily life got in our way.

If you want to find files and data in files without Spotlight, check out EasyFind (Google will find it for you). It’s a nice replacement.

Omigosh! Someone didn’t drink the Apple Kool-Aid! The Apple Fanboys have gone ape! More exclamation points!!!!

I am a confirmed Tiger hater.  I have realized NO performance gains on my PB - just headaches.

Safari is extremely unstable. iLife apps too (don’t know if this is a Tiger problem or an iLife problem) In 10.4.1 the Finder would just LOCK UP with no explanation, and Dashboard was completely unusable. And yes, 10.4.2 is much, much better.

I will do a clean install over Christmas when I have lots of free time. But I shouldn’t HAVE TO.

I’ve had good luck with Tiger thus far. The one thing that killed my stability was--unsurprisingly--Norton Antivirus (since removed from my hard drive; my school has a site license for it).

Nick,

Thanks for the link, I’m mot a regular at this web site.  Just to clarify, my comments were to the original blog entry where “UnnDunn” spends 3 days with Tiger and concludes it might be worth a $20 upgrade.  That would be a fair assessment if his review or criticism had substance to them, but he essentially equates Tiger to Spotlight and Dashboard with a few vague references to minor changes in other apps.

My point was simply that if you’re going to compare the worth of an OS, then at least discuss the OS itself and not just the marketing fluff and satelite applications.  They are fine to mention since they are part of the distribution, but minimally, the summary appraisal was short-sighted and lacking of information/facts.

The link you provided was a good start for a review (good part 1), but as is, it’s little more than a rehash of Apple’s marketing material.  The Ars review is a good example of the OS level detail.

The final point is, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.  But someone that spends 3 days with a product and doesn’t come across as even knowing the platform well enough to appraise it, should expect a fair amout of criticism.  OTOH, someone that provides a legitimate review, at least touches what the OS upgrade is really about, at least preaches from an informed perspective.  From what I’ve read, that doesn’t appear to be the case here.  I’m looking forward to the Vista review as well…