May 11, 2005

• Fuck, I haven't had my tea yet this morning. I meant to write "sooner or later".
• Depends on what you mean by "worth it". What do you do that you want to do faster/differently? For me, it came with a new machine, so I got it pretty quickly. I do some trivial development and I want to work on dashboard widgets, so Xcode 2.0, Java 1.5, automator, and dashboard are important to me. Spotlight is pretty nice and none of my important apps seem to have broken without an update available. However, if you're using your mac as a web client (mail + browsing), you may not need to upgrade.
• This stuff is why I'm glad I use Linux -- and don't care what "Final Cut Pro" is. (Whatever it is I probably can't afford it anyway.)
• No, it's not worth it.
• that's still $100 more than it costs to upgrade a windows os.
• I've not heard anyone regret upgrading. They probably won't upgrade for another 18 months, so tiger will be around for a while. I don't have a mac though, so I've no firsthand experience with it.
• I upgraded as part of the monster network-wide upgrade at my house (4 machines to upgrade, so we bought the 5-pack). I haven't found a lot of have-to-have changes yet, but I haven't played a lot with the new features. Even so, Spotlight is very useful, and I've already found a couple of things to do with Smart Folders. Dashboard doesn't thrill me, but I never did that much with Desk Accessories back in the day. The RSS finder in Safari is very cool, but not a must-have. None of my major apps have broken (DW, PS + mail/web/chat/productivity, mostly Apple). The only problem I had with the upgrade was not uninstalling a now-irrelevant Preference Pane (Set iChat Status, which is now built in). You can probably wait a while if you don't want to lay out the $$$. Keep an eye for when the discounts go away, though, so you can get the best price.
• If you know anyone who is a student or someone who works for a school/university, you can have them buy it for $79. I am thinking of upgrading since I have heard only good things besides this.
• My b-school professor is a consultant for Apple (he actually is the one who pointed me to MoFi), so he gets to try out new stuff. In class, we noticed that the new system was hanging up sometimes, so there are some bugs. You might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Of course, this depends if you have patience and what kind of consumer you are (wait-and-see, leader, etc.). However, you are probably entitled to free updates if you upgrade, I imagine. Doubt that I helped, but good luck.
• My machines are still comfortably running 10.2 Jaguar but this new one is tempting. The Spotlight feature alone is a compelling reason to upgrade so I may do just that when the 10.4.1 bug fix becomes available in a few weeks. Good idea to max out your memory with this one though, it looks a little more demanding.
• From what I read over at Ars Technica Tiger is more demanding on the videocard since it moves even more of the rendering to the videocard but, like previous versions of osx, is supposed to be a bit faster. Your milage may vary, of course. That ars technica article is a good read, but it's probalby the most technical article I've read in a good while, so be warned!
• Hmmm. Educational discount? I may have to look into this. I've found panther to be significantly more tetchy than jaguar was. I only upgraded so that I could run skype.
• That Ars Technica article was an immersion course in Tiger. Whoa. I know file system metadata
• I noticed that Tiger significantly pepped up my wife's older (white-shell) iBook. It feels much faster to both of us (not that I'm allowed to touch that computer very much). On my G5, it was less of a notable increase. However, I really like spotlight. The widgets are fun, and are nicely done from a programming perspective. Was it worth $150 to buy a family pack? Absolutely, for me. I hate doing tech support in my house, so for me using Macs to begin with, and keeping their OS versions in sync is the best way to avoid that nightmare.
• Tiger has made my G4 Powerbook nice and snappy. Couldn't care less about the widgets or the other new features and Apple completely fizz-ucked the mail program (IMHO), but I run enough graphics programs simultaneously that it was worth the $79 education price to upgrade for the improved response in my machine. Find a friendly student to help you out once the 10.4.3 update comes out, and it should be well worth your trouble.
• I'm amazed we're fifteen comments into a discussion of paying for a software upgrade and nobody's mentioned piracy. Well, there's that taken care of.
• I get my upgrades through ADC, so it was free for me. Is it groundbreaking? No. Is it worth the upgrade? Not really. Sure my laptop's faster, but if you don't need it, save the cash for hookers and beer. And more expensive than a 'doze upgrade? Not unless you've got an eyepatch and fuckin' parrot.
• 10.4.1 has reported problems with Chicken of the VNC clients, Cisco PIX boxes, Extensis Suitcase, some VPN connections, Adobe CS apps, and SMB file sharing.. If you don't use any of those you should be fine (and note that not EVERYONE with those apps are reporting issues, but there have been enough people complaining that the respective publishers have taken notice)
• The UI is much more responsive. For the first time, Aqua doesn't just look like liquid, it feels like it too. As Siracusa points out, it's getting close to having "teh snappy."
• Only fitty-nine dollars if you know an MSU student who doesn't covet Tiger for herself.
• "Software XXX requires YYY OS which just came out last week" = "Software XXX will require 48 GB of RAM and a 16 GHz processor, and even then it will run slow"
• And more expensive than a 'doze upgrade? Not unless you've got an eyepatch and fuckin' parrot. No kidding. When I saw that criticism, I almost did a spit-take. Yar.
• And more expensive than a 'doze upgrade? Not unless you've got an eyepatch and fuckin' parrot. Someone's been reading (and believing!) Paul Thurrott, it would appear. Contrary to his opinion, OS X 10.4 is far more than the equivalent to service pack 2. While the new OS' outward appearance and new goodies aren't at first glance wildly exciting for the user, it is profoundly different under the hood. Previous releases of OS X saw Apple focusing on the user experience. This one was for the developers. More than any release before it, Tiger shows how smart Apple was for picking Unix as the underpinning for the new OS as they have been able to swap out vast amounts of code much more quickly than they ever could before--and faster than MS could dream. OS X is now light-years ahead of Windows, and we will soon see a flood of new apps leveraging all the amazing goodies Apple slipped 'under the hood.' I am drooling with anticipation, even though it means for me personally that I'll be spending then next year learning the gritty details of supporting all these new goodies. Upgrade? Hell yeah!
• You absolutely do not need Tiger for FCP 5 FCP 5 will work fine on OSX.3.9 It says right there in the Apple notes. And i know you want to try out the new OS and new revisoin on th editing systme. STOP. LET. SOMEONE. ELSE. BE. THE. GUINEA. PIG.
• Thurrott's a moron and a shill.
• And more expensive than a 'doze upgrade? Not unless you've got an eyepatch and fuckin' parrot Arrrghh. Ahoy matey! Since when is a patch that is required to make yer machine work close-to-right a freakin' upgrade? I'll probably wait on Tiger, 'cuz in my mind I haven't fully expensed all of the software upgrades I needed when I went from IX.II to X.III, and a major portion of that was Adobe--and I'm on a wait & see with them folk to see what happens with the conglommo with Macromedia.
• 1) Safari now has RSS. You can even map an RSS feed to your screen saver. Does anyone know if you can pipe an RSS feed to a text-to-speech function? 2) Spotlight may redefine how you organize files. If you set up Smart Folders with searches for pertinent keywords, you can have the equivalent of one file being in multiple folders at one time. Spotlight also updates the Smart Folders in realtime. Does anyone know if Spotlight can index MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint yet? 3) Xgrid is flying under the radar right now. This is the network utility that allows clustered computing. You can distribute large tasks across the network to other Macs. If developers take advantage of this, you could shave serious time off all those CPU-intensive tasks. A) Dashboard loses a lot of its functionality if you don't have an always-on connection or if your firewall blocks certain sites. B) I don't like the new Mail UI. YMMV. C) At times, Tiger seems peppy, but at other times everything slows down to molasses speed. I haven't had enough patience to open any Help files yet (either that or the Help Viewer crashes every time I use it -- it just sits there with the Spinning Beachball of Contempt mocking my ignorance of the topics it's protecting.) The price is fair for this type of upgrade. Apple backed themselves into a corner with the OS "X" thing -- OS "XI" isn't as sexy, so all new versions have designators that look like incremental point upgrades. This is not a patch; it's as much an upgrade as Longhorn is to XP (with the exception that, you know, Tiger has actually shipped).
• Word to tha mutha. A service pack that doesn't add functionality is not an upgrade.
• And more expensive than a 'doze upgrade? Not unless you've got an eyepatch and fuckin' parrot. aarrghh.
• and who's Paul Thurrott?
• AAaaarrrrrrgile socks.
• Paul Thurrott's the guy that runs the Winsupersite. Possibly the saddest case of 'doze boosterism this side of Steve "Monkeyboy that makes more bling in a goddamn day than I do in a year for being a big sweaty cheerleader" Balmer.
• filmgeek, it is time that someone else on this site do video clips of meetups and such. I hereby dub you uber-filmgeek and thereby require you to do video clips of the next Philadelphia meetup. Okee-dokee?