While the third update to Mac OS X, Panther, was an essential upgrade for Mac users, the fourth has presented Apple’s marketeers with something of a challenge. The ritual that we call the annual OS upgrade is Apple’s best publicity showcase after January MacWorld – a chance to remind the world that it doesn’t just make iPods. Read the review here.
Mac OS X 10.4 – more bling than bang?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
looks like the best company IMO is losing thier touch
I do have to laugh a little at how in the late 90’s when Microsoft was on a 18 month OS release cycle that every person (including many Mac fans) yelled and screamed at Microsoft for making the release cycle so short which made home consumers and business feel the need to upgrade ($150) every 1.5 years.
Now, Microsoft hasn’t released a new consumer operating system (WinXP) since 2001, THAT’s 4 YEARS AGO yet still releasing updates etc FREE OF CHARGE, and now Apple is shipping a new OS every 18 months requiring a pay upgrade ($150) yet NO Mac fans are complaining?
What irony
“it worth the upgrade? Well, at Patip Plaza in Bangkok I was offered Tiger on DVD for 600 Baht. At $15, or £8.20, you’d be silly not to.”
Why do we support copy pirating ? is that some kind of special bangkok priced situation or he is talking about acquiring a black market product ?
The integration of Spotlight in Finder is clearly much inferior than the solution
that BeOS offered years ago.
In Tiger you can’t define your own filetypes while BeOS, in a very straightforward
manner, did let you define even how to display the attributes in Tracker’s
columns (centered or left-aligned, i.e.); you could decide what columns to
display and edit the attributes directly in place like iTunes does, but only partially. Navigating through the smart queries by using contextual menus was another very comfortable feature which let’s hope Apple will implement in 10.5.
Microsoft hasn’t had major feature upgrades to Win XP. In fact, almost all of it is security updates. Apple is coming out with new things and Microsoft isn’t. Of course, many people want to upgrade when something new comes out because it is there and so by not giving the people the option of upgrading to something better, Microsoft isn’t charging them more money. Of course, Microsoft’s customers are using an OS that is looking more and more dated.
Should OS companies let their stuff become dated without releasing upgrades to save people money or should they let consumers choose whether they want to upgrade or not? Remember that consumers aren’t forced to upgrade.
Actually, no, many Mac users refer to it as the “Apple tax.” However, you don’t *have* to buy it, so there’s really no need in complaining, unless your computer magically stops booting tomorrow as a result.
The reason that 10.4 is not as spectacular an upgrade as 10.3 is for two reasons: 10.3 fixed a lot of problems that really needed fixing. 10.4 has a lot of developer tools that will make future 3rd-party software that much better, but doesn’t present much to the end user. When people start to get those 3rd-party releases, however, that require Tiger, the OS will start to look a lot more appealing.
That being said, 10.4 has been a lackluster upgrade to me because of the sheer number of bugs that have appeared in the latest release. It’s not just the bugs, but the size and sheer strangeness of the things that are broken that really stands out. Photoshop 7.0 stopped working. Part of the problem seems to stem from the “.0” in the application’s file name. Many installers were broken as well, because 10.4 seems to handle permissions differently, forcing companies to have to issue new installers so that users can continue using their old software.
The upgrade from Panther to Tiger is not just some simple service pack that MS doesn’t charge for. Apple provides updates all the time (Tiger is now at 10.4.1) and they come free of charge. Going from Panther to Tiger, for me anyway, was a lot like when I upgraded from Win 95 to Win 2000. And having only paid $10 for my Tiger upgrade, after using several great utilities such as Spotlight (which IS actually a great thing, not JUST some simple search app), Dashboard (WAY batter than konfabulator), and Automator, I would most definately have paid $130 (not $150- that extra 20 goes a long way for a college student) for the upgrade.
Why can’t people see this? Tiger isn’t just a little service pack!!
uhhh…. no. Going from Panther to Tiger is not like jumping from Win95 to Win2000.
That kind of a jump (95 to 2000) is like going from OS9 to OSX.
SP2 wasn’t just a little service pack either. All the Windows code was gone through and re-compiled, not to mention it benefitted from the Server 2003 code-review that Microsoft did. The difference is SP2’s upgrades are mostly under the hood, while these updates in OSX are mostly user apps.
“It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Apple now views the Mac as a platform for a closed home entertainment system – based on iTunes and QuickTime – rather than an open computing platform. AirPort Express is a great example of how a little vision, and terrific engineering, can be spoiled by this new approach. Using Airport Express, it ought to be possible to pipe audio wirelessly from any Mac application to the remote speakers – which should appear as another sound output device in the control panel. But Apple crippled the software, forcing the user to pipe music through iTunes.
The Mac is becoming the incredible vanishing media platform!”
The Register always comes with attitude doesn’t it?
I use Tiger as a production machine and all my audio/visual/web creation apps work darned good.
But reading this article, I should just ditch Mac altogether.
NOT!
uhhh…. no. Going from Panther to Tiger is not like jumping from Win95 to Win2000.
That kind of a jump (95 to 2000) is like going from OS9 to OSX.
SP2 wasn’t just a little service pack either. All the Windows code was gone through and re-compiled, not to mention it benefitted from the Server 2003 code-review that Microsoft did. The difference is SP2’s upgrades are mostly under the hood, while these updates in OSX are mostly user apps.
I’d say the move from 10.3 to 10.4 is more like a move from Windows 2000 to Windows XP; most of the sexy stuff which has been added and changed, are under the hood – completely outside the scope of end users.
Same went for Windows XP, most of the *really* cool features were changes in the Windows XP kernel – there was quite a good MSDN article on it when Windows XP came out. The interface was merely refined further, but in regards to MacOS X, I never liked their finder change, they should have kept it the standard MacOS X Aqua/Toned-down-pinstripe. Right now, the GUI looks frankensteinish to the extreme, and as for the Mail, good lord, its so fugly I’m now using Entourage instead!
Yes, there are good features, but lord, there are some damn annoying changes, and bugs that still persist – hopefully they’ll fix these problems by 10.4.2.
Regarding the Adobe CS issue, if its any consolation, CS2 runs fabulously on it; no problems yet, everything seems to be rock solid and fast (even on a consumer end iMac G5) – just as a side issue, its interesting to see the number of pro’s now going to iMac instead of PowerMacs, ever since the inclusion of the G5 in the consumer end models (probably explains the slip in shipments).
Regarding Photoshop 7, it seems that you’re not the only one. People have been experiencing their application hanging, certain plugins not working etc. Btw, have you installed the latest update, 7.0.1 ( http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=1852 )?
Lots of people, or rather Mac fans have been talking up spotlight and how great it is and how Apple has it now while MS won’t have it until next year, blah blah, I personally don’t find spotlight anything special or great, I manage and keep track of all my video’s and audio files on my own, by simply putting them into specific folders as I get them. It’s not really that hard to do and just takes up a few extra seconds of a users time.
But doing it this way for a few years now, I really find no need at all for something like spotlight.
Just my 2 cents.
I can define my upgrade to tiger as a luxury upgrade. I have been using it for almost a month now. And I believe I can live without the new features introduced in Tiger. The only thing I really enjoy is the support for dial up connection thru Bluetooth using my Nokia 6600. oh and some performance kicks.
Slide Show, Dashboard, and spotlight are extras I barely use them. IMO, Apple can hold up a little bit by expanding release life cycle to introduce more features.
Why doesn’t anybody ever mention the Most Important Tiger Feature of All???
http://www.idyll.org/~n8gray/blog/2005/05/03
That alone was worth the price of the upgrade! Insolent whelps. 😛
I hear this from alot of Mac users and thought the same thing when I saw their laundry list of upgrades. Coredata should be noted and launchd, but for the most part nothing revolutionary for the average user. Now that being said this is just one release and we shouldn’t go predicting that Apple will explode into a big fire ball from merely this one poor release.
Sometimes I wonder about how the word “progress” is interpreted in this industry. Around 1990, in the dark old DOS days, there was a file search tool called Norton FileFind. It allowed flexible searching for text in documents, it displayed the documents, it marked the occurrences and you could jump from one occurrence to the next – of course from one file to another too – by hitting a key. Now I haven’t seen this usability in any OS’s search tool as of today, even though I think 15 (fifteen!) years oughta be far enough to implement this
Cant believe someone actually said that spotlight isnt that great because they structure their files in folders. I am a MS advocate, but geesh. Just install the MSN desktop search and see how much faster you can find something in your hierarchy of folders than browsing through them. I have so many documents that it sometimes took 5 minutes or more to find them before the search tool. You can search the billions of pages on the internet in 5 seconds, but you still browse to a folder. Now I can search locally just as fast.
Something tells me that this article is terribly biased. I have yet to find *one* single positive remark about Tiger in it.
I got Tiger through ADC and I’m happy with it. A few bugs, but nothing I can’t live with and it does indeed have some nifty new settings and things somehow seem better integrated (although a long way to perfection).
You’re not paying $99 for just an OS upgrade, you’re paying for OS upgrades through to Mac OS X 10.4.9 (judging by how many updates they’ve given 10.3 and 10.2 users). It costs $99 to get on now at 10.4.1, it’ll still cost $99 in 12 months time when we’re at 10.4.7 (or whatever). So why not get on now.
Or stay with 10.3. But it’s false economy to wait, unless you plan on waiting 18 months until 10.5.
Do you even tried Spotlight before saying it sucks? The Spotlight window and menu in Finder ARE NOT spotlight. Spotlight is an API. The use of it in the Finder is just an exaple of how you can use it.
Almost every news in Tiger are hidden to the end user. Have you ever heard about Quartz2DExtreme, CoreData, CoreVideo, and so on… No, the updates in Tiger ARE NOT for the end users. Just google it! The major changes were done in the architecture of the APIs. Tiger is not a Panther v.2, the new and updated APIs will make the difference.
By the way, do you know a single OS which has no major update (not just security ones) during 4 years, except Windows? No update=no improvements, you Windows guys should think about it… And Apple is releasing about one security update a month (with bug fixes and patches to free software and proprietary apps which evolve continuously, not just when the Marketing has decided it…)
more crap from TheRegister, why don’t they stick to the usual Microsoft bashing, and leave the news and reviews to other sites.
Do you even tried Spotlight before saying it sucks? The Spotlight window and menu in Finder ARE NOT spotlight. Spotlight is an API. The use of it in the Finder is just an exaple of how you can use it.
And what use exactly is an API to your average user? None whatsoever, until Apple or others come up with a decent GUI for it.
Almost every news in Tiger are hidden to the end user. Have you ever heard about Quartz2DExtreme, CoreData, CoreVideo, and so on…
Same here, no use to the end user until programmers actually use them.
No, the updates in Tiger ARE NOT for the end users.
Well, thing is as usual Apple have made a great big marketing brouhaha about Tiger, so they shouldn’t be terribly suprised if users and reviewers are a bit disappointed that Spotlight isn’t as much as it could be and Dashboard is pointless bling.
than bashing Microsoft, because Apple fans are so easily trolled. I have yet to see any negative remark about anything related to Apple in a public forum without at least 20 fanboys biting.
True. IMHO, Apple should have pushed the release date back to the WWDC in June, *really* fix those bugs that people have noticed AND work with Adobe to get Adobe using as many of these new API’s as possible.
Now sure, you *can’t* promote and API directly BUT you can promote it via applications – demostrating how zyx product works faster under Tiger because of a fancy new feature added. Once the users see it from *THAT* angle, they’ll also see the merits of those API features, and will start to also demand that software vendors exploit those features like Adobe did.
I see a lot of hits returning on simple keywords and it takes me a while to get there.
However, I do find the stuff and I am seeing results, so I’m not displeased about it [and it DOES work fast].
If you’re going for common words, you’re going to find hundreds of hits, making you guess about the one you need.
If it’s a search for specific words, you’re coming back with hits that will be more relevant. Either way, I’m finding my files, I’m not complaining.
As for having to pay for it… hey: I’m not spending money on virus scanner fees and spyware removers, I can drop 129 dead presidents for an upgrade. And please don’t start about insecure widgets. That’s a non-starter. There’s this guy who has a link on his webpage ‘that will install a widget on your machine without your knowledge, which may potentially harm your computer!!!’. Oh my. Gosh. Really? BULLSHIT. The download window pops up and tells me this guy wants to install a widget and am I ok with that? Say what? I wasn’t expecting to download a widget, what is this assclown trying to do with my computer? Click “no”. Download is aborted, nothing happened. Nothing to see here, people. Move along.
I want more directly useful widgets for Dashboard but I am using it and the Automator, with a few little things I set up, is already taking away what used to be a major headache in my workflow. I can forego having to deal with 50 files individually while storing them. And there is far more potential as yet unexplored.
So, are there bugs in it? Sadly, yes.
Are there incongruencies in it? Sadly, yes.
Does it work? Oh yeah.
Was it worth the upgrade? You bet.
You want Apple to industriously work to improve the system and how it works and to develop great apps to populate the system. But a few quirks here and there isn’t going to make me buy a Windows machine. It’s not Apple that has an abyssmal reputation for security, is it?
Interesting that so many articles are marked as abuse. I guess Mac users are really sensitive people. I never understand the idea about the finders. For the thousands of files that I have and hundreds upon hundreds of megabytes of email that I have, I can count on my hands the number of times that I use the Window’s file find feature. So what’s the beef? Are Mac users more disorganized or something?
Now sure, you *can’t* promote and API directly BUT you can promote it via applications – demostrating how zyx product works faster under Tiger because of a fancy new feature added.
Yes, and pre-releases or beta-releases or whatever Apple might want to call them, would help with that, because they would give developers the chance to start exploiting those APIs before the hype around the actual release.
As it is, the .0 release basically is the beta, as witnessed by the quick .1 release.
This strategy gets them more beta testers (aka early adopters), but also bad publicity due to bugginess and a lack of applications actually exploiting new features.
Hence the reason to push the release back to June; atleast have a *really* stable release cadidate to show off the audience. I mean, if they pushed back the release date to after WWDC, I’d still be happy; throw in another update for 10.3, and you’d find that things would work out alot better in the long run – no last minute dashes with the service packs once 10.4 is released.
Apple *NEW* the things that were buggy, the chose to push those bugs down the list of priorities, rather than “this is a bug, fix it”, it more, “this bug doesn’t blow up the users machine, so lets not worry about it until later”. They *KNEW* the bugs, they chose *NOT* to fix them – thats bad, in *ANY* book.
…how much feelings little corporation like Apple causes? 😉
I work in the software industry. I can say I have some knowledge about bugs and the necessity to fix them.
Let me tell you sweetheart, if people really understood what drive’s a company’s need to fix bugs, they might be a little bit offended *dirty grin*.
If it nukes your hard drive when you click on the Finder icon, yeah, that’ll be bad for PR, they’ll fix that one. If a multi-million dollar customer calls and shares a hefty chunk of their mind with many references to body parts usually associated with successful married life, that’s a problem you can count on to be fixed too.
If you complain because your precious collection of Barbie doll impression pics went to the big bit bucket in the sky: shit outta luck, sugar.
I’m a big Apple fan. That doesn’t mean I pray that each day the sun may go up over 1 Infinite Loop campus. They’re working really hard to produce some very complex software and it also has to work together without breaking too many bits and pieces along the way. I think they’re managing ok, but I have no expectation of perfection anytime soon [although, why not run the risk of igniting a nice, big flame war by saying their stuff needs just a little bit of polish to be insanely great, while Redmond is going to have to seriously clean out the barn before the cow feels at home].
Thanks for this one:
They *KNEW* the bugs, they chose *NOT* to fix them – thats bad
it made me laugh.
I’m actually really happy with Tiger. It fixed a few bugs from Panther that were annoying me. I use spotlight and dashboard all the time.
My GF however can barely tell it was upgraded. Safari and Word (the only programs she uses) looks the same, so no difference for her.
She does like the iPhoto upgrade, however (because of the new photo books).
“Microsoft hasn’t had major feature upgrades to Win XP. In fact, almost all of it is security updates. Apple is coming out with new things and Microsoft isn’t.”
Apple is coming out with new things and is also pulling things from the OS and incorporating them into iLife. iMovie and iPhoto are no longer a part of the OS so paying for an OS update doesn’t get you new versions of them. Tack on an additional $79 if you would like the latest and greatest there. Just iTunes is left of those apps in the OS or available as free updates from apple.com
“Microsoft hasn’t had major feature upgrades to Win XP.”
That is an absurd thing to write. Here’s a quick list of feature upgrades:
Directx 9
Windows Media Player 10
MSN Messenger 7
Windows Desktop Search
MS AntiSpyware
Services for Unix 3.5
Windows Movie Maker 2.1
.Net framework
or for a little longer list read this page http://pcnmac.com/updates.htm
it works like that for PDF. it is up to the filter creator to give that function when you open the file.
“Or stay with 10.3. But it’s false economy to wait, unless you plan on waiting 18 months until 10.5.”
Convenient to think the next OS update will be 18 months since Tiger took that long, but look at Apple’s history:
Since OS X was released in March 2001 we have had updates to 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. In other words, 4 of them in exactly 49 months. Make that a year per update. The pattern is set and even goes backwards into the classic Mac OS:
Since January of 1997 with OS 7.6, Apple has shipped NINE paid upgrades to their OS. Nine in 8 years and 3 months. The pattern is quite clear, with Apple over time you will pay for a new OS every single year. And most of the enhancements are not ported to earlier versions so to take advantage of the new stuff you have to pay to get them.
See http://pcnmac.com/tco.htm for a better run down on it all.
Ok before we get 100 posts on how someone tried Tiger for 5 minutes at CompUSA why don’t we get some reviews from people that actually use Tiger?
I like the posts that discount Spotlight because the poster uses folders to put files in, WOW genius! UInfortunately this is not Spotlight is about. Think along the lines of DAM and programs like Portfolio but pervasive throughout the OS.
hey smart guy.. Apple said they were going to stretch it out to 18 month release cycles… so wI think you need to look at the history there bub.
I own 2 Macs and use it as my Primary OS.
Tiger definitely boots much much faster. this is good for anyone.
Spotlight as far as an API is cool, but we need programs to start using it.. QS will be using it in its next version. I use the finder search from CMD-Space all the time.. I meticulously keep my files in folders and arrange them just so all the time. I do however find Spotlight to be a huge time saver because I usually know the name of the file I need, so I hit command-space.. type the name, and 1 second later, there is the file.. click on it and the file opens. same goes for Application launching… I never used Q or LB, I have heard that they do app launching faster, but SL is fast enough for me… it is faster than right clicking on the Application menu I have in the dock, or browsing the application folder in finder. I Have also used the semantic abilities of spotlight when doing research recently. I download files I think are going to be useful after reading the abstract.. when I need info, I had to know what each file talked about.. no I just type a search in spotlight for the info I need and see what comes up.
Dashboard is useful now, but has the potential to be great. I have it set to expose when I move the mouse the the lower left corner. it is web services done right. I have a yellow pages applet that gives me the address and phone of businesses… it is much faster and convenient than going to the web or opening sherlock. Wikipedia is great too… got a nice search for that. the calculator is nice, I like not having to open up the calc.app when I need it now. Weather is nice to have as well at a flick of the wrist. Finally, I am getting use from the stickies… when they were a separate app and their windows had to take up space on my desktop, I never used them.. now that I can use them and not see them unless I need to remember what I jotted down, I use them all the time.
Automator is great… it makes applescript usable :-p… it needs of tweeks because it is a slow app, but other than that, it is nice.
At times I like what the Register has to say, but this seemed like an awfully negative and judgmental article. Not that Tiger is all good, but still. A few specific thoughts…
I try to reserve judgment on Apple’s media strategy given what I imagine is significant pressure on them from the media companies. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit. But to be fair, I don’t think most people need to stream their iTunes content to multiple people or burn more than 7 copies of a playlist. In most instances I feel like Apple’s done a decent job (on Mac and Windows) of getting the music companies to play ball while providing a user experience that doesn’t make users mess around with DRM explicitly.
I was skeptical of Dashboard too, but figured I’d make myself try it out for a while. I’d tried Konfabulator and given up; it was too much cluttter and too much of a pain to try and locate the widgets I wanted. Because Dashboard uses the same “layered” concept Apple introduced with Expose, I can quickly call up my desk accessories, do whatever I need, and dismiss them entirely. I’m finding it pretty handy and using Dashboard more than I expected to. The visual changes like the fade in and ripple effects don’t get in the way, and in the former case help provide context as the user switches from layer to layer.
I agree with the author about the lack of context – the fact that I can get 4 documents named “specification.doc” in the results with nothing to differentiate them is a pain, and I hope Apple will address this. That said, I think Apple’s done a good job with the UI overall. The categorized results are really nice. (Google doesn’t separate categories; Copernic only shows one category at a time.) The simplicity is nice. Saved search folders could use some improvement (I agree on the need for “all”/”any”, and some speed improvements for searching on things like labels would be good), but I don’t agree with the author’s boolean-centric approach. It’s not a boolean search tool the way Google is. In the next version I could see some keywords being handy including some boolean ones, but I don’t think boolean is the focus, and I suspect most folks don’ use boolean much.
Mail’s search is different but overall, I actually find it faster. You do specify restrictions after you type rather than before, but the author is mistaken that you have to do a full search before restricting to a header. If you search, then restrict to a header once, it remembers your settings the next time. And I like the new look, particularly the elimination of the mailbox drawer.
What’s unfortunate about the article is that in being so completely negative, it’s drawn many Mac users’ ire. I think Tiger’s a great upgrade, though it may benefit those who give it a chance most. If the author had made his suggestions in a less antagonistic context, they might be better received.
LIES, LIES, LIES…
“Since January of 1997 with OS 7.6, Apple has shipped NINE paid upgrades to their OS. Nine in 8 years and 3 months. The pattern is quite clear, with Apple over time you will pay for a new OS every single year. And most of the enhancements are not ported to earlier versions so to take advantage of the new stuff you have to pay to get them. ”
7.6 PAID
8.0 PAID
8.1 FREE
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30345
8.5 PAID
8.6 FREE
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60283
9.0 PAID
9.1 FREE
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75103
9.2.1 FREE
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120030
9.2.2 FREE
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75186
I count PAID 4 times and you say 9.
Let me ask you this, since MacOSX 10.0 to 10.5 how many paid upgrades have their been? I bet you get this wrong too.
I find this quote interesting:
“So OS X Tiger sees the Mac in excellent health. However for many existing OS X users there isn’t a single compelling reason to upgrade.”
I wonder if the writers have considered the situation in the Windows world: Microsoft has decided to roll WinFS into Windows XP, in addition to their ‘Avalon’ graphics system and ‘Indigo’ communications system.
These are three main pillars of ‘Longhorn’. The only thing left is Microsoft’s “Next Generation Secure Computing Base”, (revamped security system). Software developers were so unhappy about having to recode all their applications to work with it, that Microsoft had to water it down severely.
In view of all this, with regard to ‘Longhorn’, one has to ask: “Why is Microsoft taking a year-and-a-half to deliver nothing?” It looks to me like Microsoft will be the one lacking compelling reasons to upgrade.
I think you mix up the difference between an upgrade and an update.
“hey smart guy.. Apple said they were going to stretch it out to 18 month release cycles… so wI think you need to look at the history there bub.”
Apple released Panther in October 2003
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.3.ars
12 month is 2004, was it a leap year?
Apple released Tiger in Apr so that is 4 months…are Mac users the only ones that can count?
Anyone want to count the actual days to make this less than 18 months? Try please…
“Let me ask you this, since MacOSX 10.0 to 10.5 how many paid upgrades have their been? I bet you get this wrong too.”
10.0 – pay to play for some, free for some
10.1 – pay to play
10.1.5 – pay to play after the “free upgrade” date was gone – this included new machines with 10.1.4 on them.
10.2 – pay to play
10.3 – pay to play
10.4 – pay to play
10.5 – doesn’t exist
Lets not forget that apple also decided to play the old vendor lock-in trick of getting consumers used to the iLife software suite, which for a long period of time was touted as one of the reasons the MacOS was such a great bargain (free multimedia apps), and then started charging for it after 10.2.
I use OS X, and have the “family pack lisence” for 10.4 but even I have to say that 10.4 doesn’t really excite me. Sure there are lots of nice features under the hood, but I hardly touch them. Spotlight might find its way into my workflow, but hasn’t yet. Dashboard is mostly a complete ripoff of Arlo’s Konfabulator. Sure it has tighter integration, but so far I haven’t found any of the “widgets” very useful. I upgraded though since apples track record of cutting off security updates to recent past releases/not fixing major and known security bugs makes it more or less mandatory.
Microsoft has decided to roll WinFS into Windows XP
Actually that has been dropped from Longhorn completely, but should be back in a later upgrade. But you point still stands.
Thanks for the first sensible post on this thread. I don’t really agree with you about the article, though. It seemed quite fair to me. I have no axe to grind – I’m a long time linux/unix user but I’ve just ordered a powerbook, which will be my first ever experience of a mac. I found the article pretty informative.
“What’s unfortunate about the article is that in being so completely negative, it’s drawn many Mac users’ ire.”
Well, I’d say that this is an unfortunate property of (a subset of) Mac users rather than of the article.
The article is hard but fair and nowhere near trollgasm.It simply pinpoints some issues and at the same time gives the evangelists a save landing to bring their feets back on the ground.I think MacOSX is a good one but isn’t so perfect as many proclaim it to be.Which OS is?
I upgraded though since apples track record of cutting off security updates to recent past releases/not fixing major and known security bugs makes it more or less mandatory.
That’s roughly the prime from the view of many who come from 10.3 and could (should) upgrade.
However Apple doesn’t release 10.4 only as an upgrade for it’s current customers but has to address to the potential crowd as well and as allways the marketing trolls have to twist and bent reality a little to simply sell the stuff.
Actually, 10.1 was a free upgrade due to the overwhelming inabilities of 10.0, which was pretty well acknowledged as a public beta.
10.2 and 10.3 were leaps-and-bounds ahead of the previous versions, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a mac user who did want either.
Oh, and although things have started getting moved from “free” to “with iLife”, every new mac comes bundled with iLife
From the article:
The marketing focus on the slick, but useless Dashboard does rather detract from Spotlight and Automator, which are extremely promising.
I find Dashboard useful. The weather widget is a lot faster to get to then calling up a web browser, clicking on a weather bookmark, waiting, and then finally seeing your forecast intertwined with a dozen or so advertisements (weather.com) and alternative information (pollen count). I also like the stock ticker, but the calculator seems a little ridiculous to me. I still prefer the one that doesn’t hide whenever it looses attention.
So I was off by one.
Every new mac – sure. This is not the same as bundled with the OS – not by a long shot, especially when you consider how monstrously expensive Macs are. Selling iLife separately is certainly fair, but after years of extolling the virtues of their revolutionary multimedia ready OS that *came with iLife* it was quite a shock to many, and somewhat dirty pool IMO.
It doesn’t affect me at all, though, since I have no intention of every buying iLife again – I bought ,04 and quickly discovered that I have no use for any of it beyond iTunes.
Perhaps this is the article some had in mind:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/27/review_macosx_tiger/page1.h…
Apple’s engineers saved their reputation (just) by adding an option to enter your own query string – it’s the Raw Query option. This does allow you to use boolean operators, but you have to known the query verbs and nouns, and they’re not straightforward – my query is:
(kMDItemFSLabel != ‘0’) && (kMDItemContentType != com.apple.mail.emlx) && (kMDItemContentType != public.vcard)
I forgot to mention that it was to be AFTER 10.4….. 10.5 will be 18 months from now…. 10.4 was late.
We pay the “Apple Tax” because we like what they do with our money. Improve, innovate, and deliver. Can’t say that about MS.
I love the Mac faithful. No matter what Apple does (or more specifically Steve Jobs) the fanboys cheer. Whether it makes sense or not.
I’ve been using Mac OS X 10.3/4 since January. Whenever I ask my Mac friend how to to X, he tries to convince me that I don’t really want to do that.
The review seemed spot on to what my expereince has shown. My eMac won’t push Dashboard–well it will push Dashboard but iPhoto slows to a crawl when I have it running in the background.
My experience has shown me that Macs just work. If–and only if–you do things the way Apple wants you to. Make a change and it doesn’t work. I bought my eMac (10.3) because of the advertised compatibility with Windows–it was a myth. I “upgraded” to 10.4 becuase of the advertised Windows compatibilty–suckered again! Why can Xandros make SMB work the way it is supposed to but Apple can’t?
Another thing, when the Register slams MS, everyone thinks they are telling it like it is. But let them speak truth about Apple, and the fanboys come out accusing them of being Trolls. What’s up with that?
it took me three installs to get a workable one, reminded me of NT.
“Whenever I ask my Mac friend how to to X, he tries to convince me that I don’t really want to do that.”
Just because your friend doesn’t know how to do X, doesn’t mean it can’t be done, sometimes quite easily.
http://www.macosxhints.com
Okay, so everyone is griping about all the things they didn’t think was justified as improvements or upgrades to Tiger. Here’s the biggest one I can find.
I just bought a mac mini a few months ago.. it sits on my nightstand. I haven’t cranked it two or three weeks… why??
Quicktime. I tend to play a lot of media on my computer (music, movies), and so on.
I don’t have an application that comes with my computer that can play all the stuff that WMP can do. I can’t watch wmv video right out of the box. Please don’t say it’s Microsoft’s fault for the codecs… Even linspire offers a download to get the appropriate codecs to watch them. It may cost 4.95 or something, but the option is there…
Also, why can’t I make my included video player go full screen? I don’t want to hack it with a script, use a pirated serial.. I want it to work out of the box….I’m definitely not paying 30.00 to get full screen. Not all of need to do quicktime recording… right?
I’m used to Microsoft’s handling of allowing to do pics, videos, and music right from install. It’s a de-facto standard that I’ve now come to expect from an OS. Hell, I even get all that from Linux…
It’s just a bit of a gripe.. I know that I can use videolan for most of that stuff… where do I get the wmv codecs without having to use WMP for mac though????
The reason linspire and linux can use Microsoft’s codecs is because they run on x86, and linux will use hooks into the microsoft codec libraries to decode the video.
On Mac (which is PPC), you have to supply your own decoder, theres no other way, and the only people who do that for WMV are Windows Media Player, Videolan, and MPlayerOSX.
The fullscreen thing, I agree with though. there are ways around the non-pro limitations, but I shouldn’t have to do that for fullscreen.
what? are you on crack? you are mad because QT cannot play Microsoft’s Codec?
I upgrade by choice. I like to have the latest and greatest. Office 2001 worked for me but 2004 was shiny and new so I went for it. Panther was a solid and stable OS for me.. no complaints at all, but Tiger is there and it’s fancy so I didn’t mine buying it for my Macs.
However, even Panther is a much more feature-rich OS than XP. You don’t HAVE to upgrade if you don’t want to, the older versions are fine.
XP hasn’t been touched, feature-wise, since its inception. Yeah you can say the firewall is there and so forth but that is something it should have had at release. As far as I know, the ipfw has ALWAYS been a part of OS X and it’s not at all difficult to configure. Quite frankly, it’s MUCH easier to configure than that crap firewall in Server 2003. If I can figure out iptables in 15 minutes, anyone can.
Service packs do not count as an upgrade. XP has gone untouched for years. They’re too busy sticking their fingers in the holes to keep the water from leaking.
Apple is much more on the ball these days than MS. And hey, when it was the other way around and all I had for my dual-G4 tower was OS9… my Mac sat in a closet while I used Windows 2000 on a dual PII. And as an avid and long time Mac user I grumbled and complained about OS9 non stop.
But now the tables are turned and I call it as I see it. MS has absolutely dropped the ball. Stripping features out of Longhorn left and right… It will likely be 5 years after XP that we will see Longhorn. That is ridiculous, yet the Windows faithful shower them with praise over what looks to be nothing more than Windows XP SP4.
And if I, one of the most fanatical anti-MS people out there, can criticize Apple non-stop for the mess they called an OS in 2000, the Windows faithful should be up in arms over the injustice MS is dealing them.
It’s only fair to you because you agree with it. Thankfully, I don’t share your lack of intellect.
What’s so unfair about the article?
I am not sure what this guy was smoking when he wrote this article. I have been using OS X since day one and each iteration has greatly improved on the previous edition and Tiger is no exception. I am not sure why he thinks the Spotlight UI is a problem. Spotlight works great, looks great, and I have found not usability problems whatsoever thus far. Dashboard likewise has been a very useful tool for me thus far. I love to keep tabs on the weather especially and I have several weather widgets running with the 5 day forcast for each of the locations around the world where I have family. The calendar, yellow pages, and calculator have also all come in very handy. And the implementation of these widgets is incredible. But the big draw for me in Tiger was the new XCode with auto-vectorization. I took Byte magazines old Bytemark benchmark app and compiled it under Panther before I upgraded and then recompiled it under Tiger with auto-vectorization turned on and wow what a difference. An improvement of 30% across the board. Tiger likewise is snappier and just seems more solid than Panther and thats saying alot because Panther was very good. Bottom line Tiger is well worth the upgrade price.
I have to say, I was drawn to tiger because of dashboard mostly and I now find that dashboard is really just a nuissance. I don’t use dashboard at all anymore after i had too many widgets open, overpowering my dual g4 1.25 Ghz.
Spotlight seems to be ok, but I never really need to search for anything, my stuff’s fairly organized.
Tiger to me is rather useless, it doesn’t seem as stable as Panther 10.3.0.
I do like having the h264 codecs, but they backported that to panther as well, tiger has no benefits except to stay current.
just look at the review at arstechnica, it is much better documented
your inability to not gorge on widgets makes dashboard useless?
oh and BTW.. I am very organized, but spotlight is a much faster way for me to get to my files.
Just download Windows Media Player for Mac from MSFT, if you want to play .wmv. It’s actually not so bad (but is not as nice as QT).
To those people who have been following the internal improvements over the years (like arstechnica) you will notice that they have been trying to stabilize the sets of hooks and APIs in the core system. Which, they appear to have accomplished. Now that the major hurdles are finished, many people are not EXPECTING an 18 month release cycle, but rather a longer cycle.
I agree, this release is not really for everyday users… yet. But when developers and small time programmers really start to use what was given to us, then it will be a more than worthy upgrade for everyone!
I store literally thousands of photos On My machine. Each one has metadata that gives me the details of the photo. If I search for a particular photo or set of photos, it finds just the ones I need. If I need to prep some photos to send to a customer at a specific size and quality, I can have Automator do it all for me. I can find anything in my hundreds of document folders, but if I’m just wanting to access a few specific files, Spotlight really comes through. I find myself using just about every feature in Tiger, and I’m sick of hearing about reviews where people say “Spotlight is absolutely useless… Automator is non-intuitive… and Dashboard is just plain dumb…” when they don’t even make use of these features in their day-to-day work/leasure.
Those more interested in signal than noise might want to check out http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/27/tiger_ui_letters/
which lists some reader responses to the original article.
Lots of people, or rather Mac fans have been talking up spotlight and how great it is and how Apple has it now while MS won’t have it until next year, blah blah, I personally don’t find spotlight anything special or great, I manage and keep track of all my video’s and audio files on my own, by simply putting them into specific folders as I get them. It’s not really that hard to do and just takes up a few extra seconds of a users time.
You can keep track of your videos but you you seem to have lost your grammar book. An apostrophe is not necessary to denote the plural of video.
From the article:
> Saving an MP3 that you’ve loaded from a web page and played in Safari now requires an additional $29.99 payment for Quick Time Pro.
I upgraded immediately to Pro because I used its features in QT6, but I think you could still right-click an MP3 link to save from a webpage. Perhaps I’m mistaken
> That will be reason enough not to upgrade for many. Roxio’s Toast no longer burns songs purchased from Apple’s Music Store.
Sure it does, unless you go to Roxio’s site and download the new “upgrade.” The old version works fine on my install.
> Right-clicking to download a file from Safari still works, but for how long is anyone’s guess.
This is just silly. The same could be said of *any* OS. How about, “We can still browse the web without inserting quarters in the side of our PCs — but for how long?”
… FWIW, I showed Tiger to my girlfriend and she became instantly aroused.
“Widgets? Jesus — they look cool! Yummy …”
Then I demonstrated Spotlight.
“Ohmigod! It’s fast. I can find all my stuff now.” She’s the kind of person who’s happy with three hundred overlapping icons on the desktop, I admit. Spotlight will change her life.
I showed off a couple of hi-def trailers on the new QT codec and she was toast.
“I’m all yours, you dual-processor stud. Take me now!”
I don’t mind upgrading OS X from time to time. Thanks, Apple.
“I count PAID 4 times and you say 9.”
1- 01-97 Mac OS 7.6 released for $99 on CD or $129 on floppy disks
2- 07-26-97 Mac OS 8 released for $99
3- 10-17-98 Mac OS 8.5 released for $99
4- 10-23-99 Mac OS 9 released for $99
5- 03-24-01 OS X 10.0 —cost of $129.
6- 09-25-01 OS X 10.1 released—cost free, but $20 to have Apple ship it (no download available).
7- 08-24-02 OS X v10.2 —Cost of $129
8- 10-24-03 OS X 10.3 —cost of $129
9- 04-29-05 OS X 10.4 —cost of $129
Count over, thats nine….in just over eight years.
BTW, I am not taking exception to the quality of OS X or that it has clearly gotten better with time. My qualm is with the expense. It would be nice if Apple learned the same lesson that MS learned in the 90s: people are sick of buying a new OS every year to 18 months, so slow down the blockbuster upgrades and sell me an OS less frequently with some nice enhancements over the life of the OS. 5 years between XP and Longhorn suits me just fine as long as MS keeps rolling out the updates for free. Hell, they are even giving away a brand new XP Pro 64 bit OS to people that bought 64 bit cpus! (I did have to pay $12 to ship it so not entirely free, kinda like OS 10.1).
After reading all the other entries, now my 2 cents. I have been using OS X since 10.2 (when I made the switch) to Mac. The jump IMHO from Jaguar to Panther was much greater per end user than that from Panther to Tiger. However, I was NOT at all initially impressed with the implementation of Dashboard, I now use it daily (mostly for the yellow pages). Im able to looking things up very quickly then port them over to my Address book for future references. As for Spotlight, I too am very organized yet; it has been help from time to time with the ability to look into file. My suggestion, if you have Panther and you are happy stay there, if you have anything less update yesterday, and finally as for me I am pleased to support innovation and truly hope this forces Microsofts hand to do even better in their future releases.
Chan, I agree with you with the exception of 10.1. It was available for free at CompUSA or at an Apple store.
As far as upgrades Apple is not forcing anyone to upgrade and in my experience apps don’t break from one OS revision to another. For example IE and Outlook Express will work with 8.1 to 9.2.2.
10.1 was a must have upgrade, 10.2 made MacOSX useable and 10.3 was the sweet spot. At my workplace if we have clients running 10.3 we recommend for them NOT to upgrade to Tiger unless there was a new feature that they MUST have.
Personally I have found the features in Tiger to great but NOT necessary.
For MS to give XP64 is a good thing. I will be downloading an eval when my MSI board comes in.
For Apple their OS updates is a revenue stream that they need in order to make money and being that they are always compared to MS, Apple has NO choice but to keep moving forward and either be ahead of the OS game or give that impression. So yes Apple is on an aggressive schedule out of necessity. You can pay for the newest version of MacOSX or not, either way its not going to break somewhat recent apps or hardware.
“It was available for free at CompUSA or at an Apple store.”
That was limited availability. One, not everyone lives in the USA, two how many Apple stores were there back then, three how many people live within a convenient distance of retailers that had the free discs, and finally, many retailers ran out of stock of the discs (my only local retailer ran out).
Many people paid $20 for the mailing, including me. $20 isn’t a lot, but it adds to the total expense of running a Mac. If someone wants to pull it from the list, it still leaves 8 full priced updates in 8 years time. That is excessive is my point.
Chanman wrote:
“I count PAID 4 times and you say 9.”
1- 01-97 Mac OS 7.6 released for $99 on CD or $129 on floppy disks
2- 07-26-97 Mac OS 8 released for $99
3- 10-17-98 Mac OS 8.5 released for $99
4- 10-23-99 Mac OS 9 released for $99
5- 03-24-01 OS X 10.0 -cost of $129.
6- 09-25-01 OS X 10.1 released-cost free, but $20 to have Apple ship it (no download available).
7- 08-24-02 OS X v10.2 -Cost of $129
8- 10-24-03 OS X 10.3 -cost of $129
9- 04-29-05 OS X 10.4 -cost of $129
Count over, thats nine….in just over eight years.
BTW, I am not taking exception to the quality of OS X or that it has clearly gotten better with time. My qualm is with the expense. It would be nice if Apple learned the same lesson that MS learned in the 90s: people are sick of buying a new OS every year to 18 months, so slow down the blockbuster upgrades and sell me an OS less frequently with some nice enhancements over the life of the OS. 5 years between XP and Longhorn suits me just fine as long as MS keeps rolling out the updates for free. Hell, they are even giving away a brand new XP Pro 64 bit OS to people that bought 64 bit cpus! (I did have to pay $12 to ship it so not entirely free, kinda like OS 10.1).
Let me ask you this question, “Do you record the money you spend on your personal habits in such regularity as you do with purchasing upgrades?”
I have met many a person who between their cigarette and specialty coffee drink habits are sinking anywhere between $300 – $500, per month on such addictions. Take that recorded over 7 plus years and suddenly instead of bitching about software that clearly must be useful to you enough to purchase it with such regularity and focus on comparing it to other aspects of your finances that are literally “pissed down the drain.”
Extend this idea to alcohol and other consumables.
If you aren’t skilled to develop in Cocoa than you will never discover that such skills can quickly bring you an extremely high ROI.
TO EVERYONE CLAIMING APPLE SHOULD WORK WITH ADOBE TO HELP THEM:
They have for the past 7 years and from the very day of the merger Adobe has had no interest in building a Cocoa/ObjC in-house development team to move to the NeXT/Openstep and now Apple/Cocoa APIs.
If you can’t see that OS X 10.4 is much improved than I dare say you really haven’t looked that close.
I hope everyone has many of their concerns squelched after WWDC 2005 has run its course.
Why can’t Microsoft Apologists understand release schedules.
Panther got 14 FREE updates just like Windows folks do. (Difference is those Windows updates are spread over half a decade vs. Apple’s 12 months.)
And every 12-18 months, a feature rich upgrade comes out which Apple charges for.
Microsoft does the same thing. It’s no different. The only difference is Microsoft takes half a decade to “innovate” each release. Apple, about 12 months.
People will think of anything, including ignoring obvious facts, to feel good about their decisions.
It’s always funny how MS Apologists like to enumerate the number of paid releases available to Apple customers as if it is some tax.
What people seem to forget it:
1. It’s optional.
2. MS started this whole annuity upgrade trend, including naming software by year so it feels outdated.
3. The industry has followed suit. Every year, there is a new Quicken, CS suite, Quickbooks, etc.
Could you imagine saying the price of Quickbooks is:
2006: $249
2005: $219
2004: $199
2003: $199
2002: $149
SEE HOW INTUIT TAXES YOU EVERY YEAR?
Obviously not. You update Quickbooks when you want the new features. Some update every year, most do not.
Yet, people use this as an argument against Apple. It’s moronic.
Finally, MS Apologists miss the biggest argument. You have the choice because Apple innovates, and innovates FAST. You have no choice with the Wintel monopoly but to wait around for Redmond to need the revenue then cut features and ship whatever they have.
Saving an MP3 that you’ve loaded from a web page and played in Safari now requires an additional $29.99 payment for Quick Time Pro.
Pathetic. After this fact I will not hear any complains about MS from mac-users.
Seems like a very stupid one. Why no advanced search option from the begining? Seems many 10.4 users have abandoned mail for other programs thought, which is said because to me as an outside mail looked so good and simple earlier. But I guess it doesn’t cut it.
Microsoft has released a lot of upgrades for free. They have even made their own 64-bit Windows and gives it away to existing WinXP customers. That product cost MS more millions than you might think.
They have also released new free upgrades of DirectX, Messenger, Media Player, Movie Maker, Firewall, .NET, Desktop Search, Services for Unix, AntiSpy and offers free viewers for word, powerpoint etc.
MS has never once removed a feature and integrated it into a paid product like Apple has done. If you look at all the facts, you will find that MS is a lot more friendly than you would like.
While I agree that there are features of QT that shouldn’t require a pro license, claiming that a minor one will shut your ears to any/all mac-users is beyond reason.
The Quicktime Pro versions, and especially QT7 Pro, have significantly more features, mostly in their ability to encode media, and not just decode.
In QT7 Pro, theres full support for N-channel audio recording (great for those 5.1 setups), the ability to encode H.264 content (very useful, especially in a .mov container), multiple simultaneous media exports, and some new features to assist in a/v editting.
To say all that isn’t worth a measely $30, well… I sure beats the hundreds/thousands of dollars one would need to spend to match the unique qt-pro package.
No one is forcing you to upgrade. Granted Tiger has Core functions that you may need to run pro apps but everything that I used in 10.3 works in 10.4 or there has been a free update available.
If you feel that you have no choice but to upgrade every single time a new version of MacOSX comes out then that is a personal decision but I think it is pointless to blast a company for aggresively updating their OS. Its a revenue stream and a moneymaker. The only people that seem to hate it are users that don’t use MacOSX or have a gripe to pick.
You don’t have to upgrade!
“You have the choice because Apple innovates, and innovates FAST. You have no choice with the Wintel monopoly but to wait around for Redmond to need the revenue then cut features and ship whatever they have.”
Tell that to AppleWorks users. To Mac buyers that are buying machines with CPUs that first shipped in 2002. Or that use a system bus speed first released in 2001. Or video ram quantities that I first had in a Mac (ATI Nexus 128) in 1999. Or the one year refresh cycle on the eMac. Or how long it took the G5 to get speed bumped. Or to Apple putting USB 2 on Macs about two years after it was introduced on PCs. Or that no Mac has RAID on the motherboard, no SLI, no PCI Express. That Apple has no 64 bit OS. No 64 bit capable cpu for notebooks.
As for innovation or added value with MS I can just count on one hand the things that MS gives away free that on Apple you have to buy a new OS to get:
1) Windows Desktop Search, on Mac you have to buy 10.4 to get Spotlight.
2) MSN Messenger now up to v7, on Mac you had to buy iChat for $29 or upgrade the whole OS to get it.
3) Windows Move Maker 2.1 with all fun and bonus packs, on Mac you now don’t get iMovie with the OS anymore, you have to pay $79 to get the latest iLIfe.
4) Photostory 3 as v2 it was part of a $30 suite, but is now free, on Mac you now have to buy iLife for $79 to get similar things in iMovie or iPhoto.
5) new Energy blue theme for XP is free http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=15373c73-d… , to get the latest skins and themes with X you have to buy the latest OS.
The list would go on for pages and does at http://pcnmac.com/updates.htm
Chan, as a PC user why is this such a big deal to you and why do you need to continue to plug your site?
Does it make you mad that Mac users are not mad?
If your interested in getting everything for free why don’t you just run Linux and be done with it? If you want to compare MacOSX and Windows don’t forget the other benefits of Windows like viruses, malware, security vulnerbilities that are NEVER resolved.
For some people running MacOSX is a small price to pay to NOT run Windows. Paul Otellini the CEO of Intel spends an hour each week cleaning up spyware on his kid’s computer!
“Tell that to AppleWorks users.” Runs in Classic fine.
“To Mac buyers that are buying machines with CPUs that first shipped in 2002. Or that use a system bus speed first released in 2001.”
Apple doesn’t make the processors which are tied to the bus. If they did it would be a different story.
“Or video ram quantities that I first had in a Mac (ATI Nexus 128) in 1999.”
I agree Macs have always lacked the necessary VRAM and have not used the state of the art GPU.
“Or the one year refresh cycle on the eMac.” You see Apple updating hardware as a problem?
“Or how long it took the G5 to get speed bumped. Or to Apple putting USB 2 on Macs about two years after it was introduced on PCs.” You see Apple NOT updating hardware as a problem?
“Or that no Mac has RAID on the motherboard,” RAID on the desktop for the markets Apple supports is NOT an issue. Leave RAID on the server where it is properly implemented. I don’t trust grandma and iPod kids to setup stripes.
“no SLI” Since gaming is such a niche group on a small platform why would NVidia put out SLI cards for Macs? Talk to NVidia your beaching at wrong group.
“PCI Express” no demand…I wouldn’t be using PCI E except for video cards.
“That Apple has no 64 bit OS” Aren’t you complaing that Apple upgrades their OS too much? If they did you would complain about that too.
“No 64 bit capable cpu for notebooks.” Does Apple make CPUs?
“What’s wrong with you?”
Not a thing and if you have to resort to personal slights, there goes your credibility.
“Chan, as a PC user why is this such a big deal to you and why do you need to continue to plug your site?”
I use and own both Macs and PCs, so what Apple and MS do are both big deals to me.
“If your interested in getting everything for free why don’t you just run Linux and be done with it?”
Because Linux doesn’t have the software and hardware support that I need for the way that I work and play. Some day it might.
“If you want to compare MacOSX and Windows don’t forget the other benefits of Windows like viruses, malware, security vulnerbilities that are NEVER resolved.”
I don’t get any of the above on Windows since I know a simple set of precautions to take with my network and my machines. The same precautions also apply to OS X so they are in the same boat as for how I have to manage the two.
“”Tell that to AppleWorks users.” Runs in Classic fine.”
I guess you have never used OS X, because it runs just fine in it too. I meant that AppleWorks 6.2 hasn’t had an update of any note since 2001.
If Apple chooses to use certain CPUs and technology, I could care less who is at fault for not getting that technology enhanced. The end result is what I care about as a Mac buyer and that end result is that Apple is today still selling expensive machines with very old CPUs and that lack fairly mainstream modern computing features.
I have seen your site, I have read your posts, and I have only one question :
Why in hell do you buy Macs ?
You are correct. But I read complaints from mac-users about the greed of Micrsoft, but Apple is just as bad. When Apple took a feature out of OS X just to increase sales of QT pro, they crossed a line.
@ChanMan
Apple has started out-dating AppleWorks over time with the introduction of apps like Pages and Keynote (ala iWork), which are far superior for there intended purposes than I ever found AppleWorks to be.
@N.N.
Its likely that I’m just not very observant, but what feature was present in OS X, then removed to force people into QT-Pro?
I don’t know what the heck you are talking about. I download MP3s from airamericaplace.com all the time. I just right click on the link and download the file like a normal user would in windows.
From the article:
Saving an MP3 that you’ve loaded from a web page and played in Safari now requires an additional $29.99 payment for Quick Time Pro. That will be reason enough not to upgrade for many
Open the following link in Safari…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml
select the .mp3 download and you will be downloading it in Safari
Do you have a Mac NN or is everything you know about Macs stuff that you read about or tried a Mac at CompUSA for 5 minutes?
Reminds of people who think they know everything about a car from a 10 minute test drive at the dealership or from a few reviews that they read.
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