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journal: mac
Thurrot likes Tiger but dismisses it as “minor”
Paul Thurrott posted his review of Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger.” Overall, he gives it a thumbs-up, but sees is as “a minor upgrade.”
Apple Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is the strongest OS X release yet and a worthy competitor to Windows XP. 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.
Deep Thought’s take: It’s nice to see that he likes it, but Mr. Thurrott unfortunately seems to ignore some fairly big new features and under-the-hood changes (CoreData, CoreVideo, CoreImage, 64-bitness, Automator, Parental controls, among others come to mind). Me? I’m waiting for John Siracusa’s definitive review on Ars Technica. Also look out for Deep Thought’s Tiger review shortly after Tiger’s public release.
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| Nick | comments | views |
thinkback
You could make that argument over just about every major OS update Apple has made since 10.0 and MS has made since Windows 2000.
I think there are a couple reasons why Apple wouldn’t give big Tiger features away as freebies:
-most of the Mac base is on OS X (I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen a Mac running OS 9 short of old G3 PowerMacs at school). Most OS X users are on Panther as it is (being Mac users tend to adopt the latest versions quickly). There’s very little market to sell boxed copies of Panther to. Selling a large boxed update is a good way to to stimulate sales of boxed copies of OS X.
-Apple has this thing about integration. Apple likes to release things in one coherent unit. That’s why you see iLife updates, pro video apps, etc… updated all at once.
-Apple knows Mac users will buy it anyway. 
And I think Tiger is defined by more than Spotlight and Dashboard. Automator is a fairly big addition, as is QT 7 (which will be out for 10.3 and Windows), Safari 2.0 (version 1.3 brings many of the rendering engine updates and other tweaks from Safari 2.0 to 10.3 users), Voiceover (a beta of which was available for 10.3), iChat 3, parental controls, and a mess of under-the-hood updates. When I first saw the Tiger preview on Apple’s site right after WWDC, I felt the same way as you. But this is a fairly big release. In fact it’s arguably a bigger update than any major release Apple has ever had, short of 10.0. I don’t know what you are expecting.
| me94501 | Apr. 17, 2005 | |
| 6:55 pm |
1.
I’m beginning to agree a lot more with Thurott. Looking over the Tiger features list, I see a lot of stuff that should either be free downloads or point upgrades.
Tiger is defined by Spotlight and Dashboard. I could see that Core* could be a boon over the next year, but until then, Tiger looks like an XP service pack with a couple of big new features.
It looks like the transition from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I didn’t think that was worth it at first, either, (even though I got seduced into buying it early) but Microsoft’s continual free upgrades and software releases have made XP into an incredible value. It remains to be seen if Tiger will get the same treatment, but my Magic 8-Ball says “Not Likely” on that one.