The Pipeline: Tiger, Tiger, burning bright
posted May 1st 2005 1:03PM
Welcome to The Pipeline, where you can check in on the MSM without getting your fingers dirty. This week, we almost ended up with an all-Tiger edition, since Apple's OS update (officially known as Mac OS X 10.4) has swallowed up much of the media world's attention (in all fairness, the same can be said of much of the blogosphere). But there were journos who chose to ignore the Tiger stampede (do tigers stampede? are we trying a little too hard with our metaphors here?), including John Dvorak, who returned to his reliably cranky mode this week with a list of gripes, and Johanna Jainchill of The New York Times, who offered some guidelines on avoiding gadget theft. But for the most part, this was Tiger's week to roar (sorry, couldn't resist).
We started our Tiger prowl looking
for a negative review. Surely someone had something bad to say about it. But negative reviews were harder to find than
an iPod in Redmond; it seemed all tech journalists had fallen victim to Steve Jobs' infamous "reality distortion field"
— either that, or Tiger really was as good as Steve said it was. In The Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg focused on
Spotlight, Apple's desktop search technology, and called Tiger "the best and most advanced personal computer operating
system on the market." David Pogue of The New York Times, meanwhile, highlighted features that haven't been
aggressively marketed, including the system's security, and called the OS "the classiest version of Mac OS X ever."
Even PC World — not exactly a publication known for gushing over Macs — declared Tiger a win, with Narasu Rebbapragada
calling it "a giant leap" over OSX 10.3 (also known as "Panther").
We thought we caught an inkling of a negative writeup by Business Week’s Stephen Wildstrom, who actually starts his review by knocking Steve Jobs down a peg for hyperbole, and calls Tiger an “incremental improvement.” But that incremental improvement is pretty good, since Wildstrom sums up by saying Tiger “bolsters OS X’s edge as the best personal-computer operating system around.” After days of hunting, the closest we came to criticism was Rob Pegoraro’s Washington Post review, which is headlined “Mac’s Tiger Gives Panther Owners Little Reason to Pounce” and hits Apple for not making Tiger compatible with older Macs and requiring more memory than OSX 10.3: “Given how halting and sluggish Tiger ran on a 256 MB Mac Mini, doubling the memory seems wise.” Pegoraro also found a handful of interface quirks and minor bugs and — horror of horrors — actually had one serious crash in five days of testing on three Macs. Nevertheless, he declares that ”[f]laws and all, Tiger still beats Windows soundly, from its smooth, nag-free installation (save a brief but heavy-handed promotion of Apple’s $100-per-year .Mac online service) to its sleek, shimmering graphical interface.” Oh, well. Guess we’ll have to suck it up and spring for a copy after all.
Walt Mossberg - Tiger Leaps Out in Front
David Pogue - From Apple, a Tiger to Put
in Your Mac
Narasu Rebbapragada - First Look: Tiger Lives Up
to the Hype
Stephen Wildstrom - Tiger Makes Mac’s
Edge Even Sharper
Rob Pegoraro - Mac’s
Tiger Gives Panther Owners Little Reason to Pounce
On a recent trip, we accidentally left
our iPod in our hotel room, and thought it was gone for good. But it turned out the maid actually turned it in after we
left. We’re not sure if it was a sense of altruism or our hefty gratuity that sparked her generous act, but we’re not
going to take that chance again. Fortunately, The New York Times’ Johanna Jainchill has some good tips on protecting
your gadgets from theft. First up: specialized insurance, which can cover replacements with no deductible ($52 a year
can cover a music player; not bad if you’re as careless as we’ve been). For computers, she cites track-and-recover
software such as PC PhoneHome, which will send you the thief’s IP address the first time they go online with the stolen
box (the developer claims a 90% recovery rate). We’ve learned, however, that one option Jainchill offers may be the
best one: be more careful. Next time, we’ll wear one of those goofy travel vests with a dozen pockets and make sure
each precious gadget is nestled in its own secure nest. Go ahead and mock us; at least we’ll know that our iPod, Treo
650, flash drive, digital camera, spare batteries, extra memory cards and multiple headsets are safe. Of course, we may
not have any room left for our wallet, but we’ll figure something out …. or make sure to leave a big tip again.
Johanna Jainchill - Combating Gadget Theft
We like it when John Dvorak complains; like Andy Rooney, he’s a natural at it, and unlike Rooney, we don’t have to actually listen to him gripe (though it’s easy to imagine Dvorak putting on a faux-Rooney whine and intoning “didja ever wonder why Apple gets so much ink?”) Dvorak’s latest gripes are a grab bag, including the lack of functioning outlets on airplanes, poor mobile phone net service and the domain-name registration process. Entertaining? Sure. Irrelevant? Maybe, but still worth a read.
John C. Dvorak - Concerns with the Future
Wowy, I want an iPod with the headphone jack on the side... There's nothing wrong with the Tiger coverage, add up all the Longhorning and I bet it even's out, and when XP verision 0.2 does arrive, you'll be mad with slanging and bitching and "my Tiger this... my Longhorn crashed...".
Don't worry Engadget, Editorial standards are still up to scratch!
If the rumors are correct, finding an iPod in Redmond shouldn't be a difficult task at all... There are some estimates that put 65% of all Microsoft employees owning an iPod.
Yeah, I don't see why it would be a big deal. Microsoft doesn't really make anything comparable, and I think they'd be silly to outlaw Apple products from the Redmond campus - just make them look bad and a bit hostile towards their employees.
how about you read the ars technica review? It's a review from a developers standpoint that is actually pretty hard on the OS. Most of it I honestly can't understand, but it seems to suggest for the most part that the OS is still needlessly complex to develop software for and the usability in some instances (which is all users like us tend to care about) is incongruent and unintuitive. Whiiccch is an interesting thing to nitpick about considering what it's compared against is anything but.
I don't find it surprising that Narasu Rebbapragada gave Tiger a good review, she was working at Macaddict not long ago. (at Pcworld less than a year I think)
I thought the Tiger metaphors were okay, but the iPod in Redmond one was a little over the top ...considering that a huge number of Redmond people have iPods, much to the irritation of Bill and company. ;)
http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66460,00.html
see?
And yet you missed the best review of all, in fact I have cheekily tagged it "One Review to Rule Them All"
By the one, the only,
John Siracusa
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/
As a mac user since '89 I've come to expect vast improvements with each os upgrade. And I've also learned to wait 6 months before implementing them. Lab testing may be nice but in the field it's always been a trial by fire.
they wouldn't outlaw apple products from redmond. If they did that how else would microsoft steal ideas?
The boss bought a brand new G5 and now it runs Tiger. We're a microsoft gold partner, but we have to draw straws to decide who gets to play with the mac next. =)
The Tiger review at Anandtech calls it a released beta operating system. And indeed they found several bugs in the new OSX 10.4. He also talks about an 10.4.1 to be released soon.
www.anandtech.com
I would have to say, after a day or so of running Tiger, that the upgrade was very comfortable and most everything works correctly. My MS mouse and keyboard, however, are no longer supported by MS and, thus, I'm having troubles finding drivers. Leave it to MS to foul up a perfectly good upgrade...
The only issue I have with Tiger is Dashboard. Yes, it is pretty. Yes, I think a lot of the widgets are functional. But Dashboard is useless in the exact way I found Konfabulator to be and showing the OS's clock in a window on the desktop. I would prefer to have the widgets integrate into the Dock or the menu bar somehow, not be an additional thing I have to interact with outside of my desktop. So, for now, all of the widgets have been quit, Dashboard has been removed from the dock and the F12 key has been unassigned (Apple, maybe a "Quit" for Dashboard would be a better idea?).
But, really, that's a minor complaint. Safari RSS works well (need to get a little used to it), all of my apps have survived the transition... I'm a happy camper.
Geoffery -- have you tried USB Overdrive?
# 11.. Check this link.
www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050422172929402
It allows running the widgets out of dashboard.
Dave
I don't find it surprising that Narasu Rebbapragada gave Tiger a good review, she was working at Macaddict not long ago. (at Pcworld less than a year I think)
---
Oh so Narasu hasn't been 'indoctrinated' yet? Please...
I got it jsut to fuck around with it, and it is nowhere near "the best and most advanced system on the market."
Mental note: Don't read the Washington Post.
http://www.icebin.net
so cool the tiger is !!!!
My complaint is that Tiger doesn't tuck me up in bed at night with a cup of hot milk!
I certainly have problems with Tiger's Automator. Many things are not as intuitive as they seem ...
Why does the MAC mini still show shipping with 10.3. Does it or DOES it NOT run 10.4? If so why are the pricks not shipping it with 10.4?
I had a few bugs with Tiger, but worked them all out. I actually didn't think I'd use Dashboard, but now that it's there I've used it quite a bit. I had Konfab, but a lot of the widgets got in the way and I only needed them for short periods of time anyway. The best one, by far, is the Transmit3 widget which allows you to upload files to your server or even your iDisk through Dashboard. Makes things much easier.
Spotlight seems cool, but I know where most of my files are anyway. I definitely think the price is a little steep for an upgrade like this, but it's still very cool.
Fishes,
narco.
I have been waiting to buy an iMac for awhile because I knew tiger was coming out soon. But I seem to remember something on this site about updated iMacs coming out around the time that tiger comes out, is this true and how long until the new ones come out?
>>Spotlight seems cool, but I know where most of my files are anyway<<
Spotlight can find text strings inside files and PDFs, as well as keywords in photo & music file metadata, and more. It's not just a file search utility because hell, that already existed.
That wasn't my point. I do work with a lot of PDF files, and I know exactly how Spotlight works. The point is, for what I do, I don't really need it. Works great in Mail, but overall it's just something I know I'm not going to use all that often.
Fishes,
narco.
One good use for spotlights smart folders is this: I have some words I constantly write wrong (English is only my third language). Now what I did, I created a smart folder that scans for files with misspelled words in the last 24 hours. Now everytime I save a file with something spelled wrong, the file will show up in the smart folder and I can go to correct it. Now maybe you wonder why I don't use a spell checker? The reason is simple, many of the apps I'm using don't feature one. You see, Spotlight is much more than just a simple search, especially thx to smart folders and the instant scan, you can do some interesting things a normal search would never be able to do.
Fredi
>> Why does the MAC mini still show shipping with 10.3. Does it or DOES it NOT run 10.4? If so why are the pricks not shipping it with 10.4?
Runs fine on my Mini so far - I suspect there's a lag. Some number of old machines will ship with 10.3 still, but usually Apple throws in the disk of the new OS when available. Once inventory clears out machines with 10.4 pre-loaded will ship.
>> I agree that this has been an "incremental improvement". One thing I am really ticked off about though is that my hp printer doesn't work with Tiger right now. Grrrr and there don't seem to be any drivers that I can download. The hp site gave me something that seemed promising but nope, nothing happened. I hope apple releases some new updates SOON. Anyone fixed this problem yet???
"Normal" retail channels outside of the Apple Stores are stuck with Minis still running Panther. I just picked up a new mini at the Palo Alto store this weekend, and it came with a Tiger install disk, just not pre-installed... no biggie.
Does 10.4 NOT run on the mini?
Riiiight! It's running GREAT on my 500Mtz G4 Powerbook with 768MB of RAM. No problems whatsoever. Sure, so Core Image, but it's damn good.
not a negative review per se, but the closest thing I’ve found.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2404
he summarizes by saying "lots of bugs"
not a negative review per se, but the closest thing I’ve found.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2404
he summarizes by saying "lots of bugs"
A dashboard is useless in the exact way I found Konfabulator to be and showing the os clock in a window on the desktop. I would prefer to have the widgets integrate into the dock or the menu bar somehow, not be an additional thing I have to interact with outside of my desktop.