Mac OS X Tiger Released and Analyzed 563
bonch writes "Ars Technica has gone under the hood of the Tiger release and offers up detailed impressions on the new OS X update. The review covers everything from interface changes, new kernel updates and programming interfaces, the unification of UNIX system startup services into one service called 'launchd', the return of metadata, to the fact Apple has announced that from 10.4 forward there will be no more API changes. A fascinating read about the technical details behind Tiger and the specific changes that have occurred since Panther's release 18 months ago." Today is the update's official launch day, though some lucky people have had it for a few days already.
Another good review (Score:5, Informative)
Fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:5, Informative)
- Dell's Website [dell.com]
- MIT's iLab and ShuttleTrak services [mit.edu]
- T-Mobile's customer portal [t-mobile.com]
- Infragistics website and software solutions [infragistics.com]
- Any one of the items listed in Microsoft's
Or perhaps you would like to look at the massive amount of work that has gone into emulating the
Re:Fantastic! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Insightful)
He did say application you know (Score:4, Insightful)
He was talking about user applications - I've seen some simple examples myself but nothing really beyond shareware.
Re:He did say application you know (Score:3, Insightful)
He was talking about user applications - I've seen some simple examples myself but nothing really beyond shareware.
Sounds similar to Java. I think
And
Think of it like like J2EE. Do you know any commercial desktop
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure this is an upgrade I won't be making. I'm perfectly happy with XP and see no reason to upgrade (many said this about 2k). I really dont' like the fact that their preliminary stated minimum requirements are 1GHz 512MB RAM. Yes my computer exceeds that, but that will pretty much mean I'll be on the lower end of the spectrum requirements-wise.
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Insightful)
- Simple interface (command line is okay, but simple GUI prefered)
- Cross-platform app support
- Straightforward firewall
- Cross-platform networking
- Meaningful user's manual
- Minimal system resource demands (reserved for apps)
Maybe I am asking too much.
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Fantastic! (Score:3, Interesting)
If no one in a particular segment of society has seen it, it's innovative to them. Imagine that, somewhere in space, there has been a society who has done every single thing we have about 1000 years before we have. Are we still being innovative? Well...yes, because we don't know about this other civilization. To us, it is innovative.
The same thing goes for Microsoft's useage of innovative. To Microsoft's customers, it is innovative.
However, by all this logic, the w
I'm heading over... (Score:5, Funny)
How did you find them? (Score:5, Funny)
I wanted to do the same, but I just can't find them no matter how much I search on Google.
will it stick this time? (Score:2, Informative)
RSS (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:RSS (Score:3, Funny)
Nah. They'd probably aggregate the Slashdot RSS feed too...
What about TigerDirect? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about TigerDirect? (Score:3, Informative)
If Apple were renaming all of their Apple Stores to Tiger Stores, they might have some grounds. As it is, Tiger Direct [tigerdirect.com] is a computer hardware reseller, and Mac OSX 10.4 Tiger [apple.com] is an operating system. It's only slightly mor
Yay ars! (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, "The installer is cool, look at these spiffy screenshots" and nothing else is not a review. 21 pages of detailed technical and UI examination and discussion - now that's a review.
Re:Yay ars! (Score:2)
If you love their articles, get a paid subscription.
Re:Yay ars! (Score:5, Insightful)
A few months ago, Jordan Hubbard came to CERN to talk about some of the Unix elements of Tiger, and talked about launchd. I think that this is one of the features of Tiger that should be cloned ported to Linux (John Siracusa seems to agree). Having an unified launching mechanism for processes is really something that is needed on Unix, especially for laptops.
You really want to be able to launch processes depending on different triggers and circumstances, like saying at that time, if the machine has been idle for some time and I'm not running on battery power, then launch that process. Yes, you can do hack similar functionality with scripts, but no, this is not convenient or stable.
Re:Yay ars! (Score:4, Informative)
No need to clone it, from TFA:
Re:Yay ars! (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't. We're releasing it as part of Darwin for a reason. Please don't waste all that time re-implementing what we created in a similar but not entirely compatible fashion. Just use our code, then invest your time doing something new and wonderful.
Re:APSL (Score:5, Informative)
You provided a reference to an FSF document to support your reasoning. The cited web page says, in part:
Granted, the APSL does not prohibit users of the software to link with proprietary libraries, thus is not a "copyleft" license. So, what? This is less restrictive than the GPL, not more. This, in and of itself does not preclude Linux users from using it on their systems.
The FSF concludes that it is ok to use and improve software which other people release under this license.
You would be allowed to compile the daemons using gcc and glibc libraries and use them with no problem from the APSL. You would also be allowed to link GPLd programs against the supporting APSL licensed frameworks.
The only limitation is that if you ship an improved version of this code that you make that code available to others under APSL terms. i.e. you provide source code so that Apple and and other users of the APSLed code benefit from the changes.
Insisting on re-inventing every wheel just so that everything is covered under GPL is a waste of effort. It steals time of those working on GPLed code from doing other work, and selfishly prevents others from benefit from you good ideas if you improve a fork of the work rather than the original work itself.
It strikes me as foolish that GNU/Linux people spend so much effort to mimic other people's work, re-implementing large subsystems just to get them under the GPL umbrella, rather than cooperating with others to re-use and improve the best code available.
Re:Yay ars! (Score:4, Informative)
The launchd service is responsible for launching services on demand, be that at boot time, at login time, or upon network connection. It's responsible for automatically detecting dependencies, and for firing off tasks in parallel whenever possible.
The launchd service replaces (hold your breath) init, rc,
And yes, the configuration files are all property lists.
"Silliness" of proprietary software abounds. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yay ars! (Score:3, Interesting)
The privacy problem in Office Documents was mostly that the file contained data that should not have been there.
While that is a big part of the problem, there is also just the data that is "supposed to be there" but that the user is unaware of. This includes revision information, and the metadata like Author, Organization, etc. I've received documents that were clearly based upon the work of other people, based upon the "Author" field and I've received documents that are clearly adaptations of similar o
File Types in Spotlight (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:File Types in Spotlight (Score:4, Informative)
In System/Library/Spotlight/
Application.mdimporter
Audio.mdimporter
Bookm
Chat.mdimporter
Font.mdimporter
Image.mdimporter
iPhoto.mdimpor
Mail.mdimporter
PDF.mdimporter
PS.mdimporte
QuartzComposer.mdimporter
QuickTime.mdimporter
RichText.mdimporter
SystemPrefs.mdimporter
vCa
In
AppleWorks.mdimporter
Keynote.mdimporter
Micr
Pages.mdimporter
SourceCode.m
If you install XCode 2.0 (free with OSX 10.4) it contains template project code to create your own metadata importers. The OpenOffice people would need to create an importer and stick it in
Perhaps they'd like to port OpenOffice first though.
Re:Lack of native OpenOffice is huge in my opinion (Score:3, Interesting)
And everybody who doesn't need it can get Pages and Keynote for $79.
Re:Lack of native OpenOffice is huge in my opinion (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me tell you a little story about how the lack of a native office suite is hurting Apple's sales.
About two years ago, my in-laws had this old PentiumPro computer they wanted to get rid of. Basically, they write letters, do a little Excel for their business, e-mail, and surf -- that's all. My idea was to have them buy a Mac because they wouldn't have the hassle with all the malware, and it would Just Work. Also, my brother-in-law has a PowerBook
Re:File Types in Spotlight (Score:3, Informative)
Lawsuit? (Score:2, Funny)
Tiger Has Arrived! (Score:5, Interesting)
My copy arrived from TNT 24hours ago. Along with a friend who's copy arrived at the same time, we upgraded his iBook and my PowerBook overnight.
I have two words for you:
1. Spotlight
2. Dashboard
If you don't know what I'm talking about (presuming you all do!)... --> http://www.apple.com/ [apple.com] and read all about them! Say no more!
Well, I can happily report that my experience has been a happy one! After backing up
All I can say is that Tiger be pretty, Tiger be fast! It was a complete surprise to find that at long last my problems syncing my Sony Ericsson P900 seem to be over, as are my faxing problems. I haven't tried either *fully* yet, first impressions are good, and happiness should prevail.
A couple of interesting things noted last night:
* The install *really* doesn't like it if you don't enter in valid
* The almost-missed "sending registration details to Apple" message was kind of surprising. My fault for giving my PB a working network connection, but it would have been nice to be asked first before sending off data! Having said that, it's nice not to need loads of installation
keys, etc. And hey - it's probably in the EULA which of course I read in detail before installing (*NOT*)
So, for anyone out there holding out to see what the feedback is like - don't! You'll just kick yourself harder the longer you hold off upgrading!
Re:Tiger Has Arrived! (Score:2)
Re:Tiger Has Arrived! (Score:5, Informative)
> 1. Spotlight
> 2. Dashboard
I got my copy of Tiger yesterday, so I installed it last night. Dashboard is cool, where I spent way too long adding and removing widgets just so I could watch the ripple effect (I've got a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 17" with 1 GB RAM). It's kind of like when everyone spent about 30 minutes doing the Genie effect when they got Mac OS X 10.0 Beta. Random cool things:
1. When it's sunny outside, the sun from the Weather widget spills out above it, gently illuminating the other things on the desktop. That's cool
2. The Address Book widget is fast and makes AddressBook far more usable. Just type in a name, and boom! you have their info.
3. The Calendar widget is next to useless. I thought it would show me my iCal events for the day or something, but no such luck. It just sits there, red and unaware.
4. I find this hard to believe but QuickTime 7 looks much better than QuickTime 6. I watched the large Star Wars Episode III trailer in it, and it appears to look far more detailed! You can actually see Anakin's complexion turning gray when he's talking to Palpatine!
5. Spotlight is really cool. It took about 30 minutes to index, but once it was done. I searched on a few terms. It found emails I wrote six years ago that I forgot I received. It's very fast. Type in someone's name, and in one second, you can see all sorts of stuff about them on your hard drive. Basically, your Mac turns into a giant contact manager (if you've ever gotten one of those PIMs to work where it tracked files, emails, and whatever for contacts). I'm getting used to the idea of using SpotLight to look for a file or application before I even go to the Finder, and it works well. SpotLight has earned its place in a hallowed corner place on the screen.
6. iChat can now display what song you're listening to in iTunes. That's cool, too!
7. The mouse preferences has a place to adjust the sensitivity of the scroll wheel and which to make the primary mouse button (left or right).
8. When Safari can't open a page (like this Ars-Technica page right now), it displays an error page, rather than a slide down dialog box. It's less obtrusive this way.
Won't install. (Score:5, Funny)
You write emails to yourself? (Score:5, Funny)
i know we've all been a bit lonely at times, but, you know, there are people you can call before you get to that stage.
Re:Tiger Has Arrived! (Score:3, Informative)
Did the Archive and Install option that moved all of my original settings/data/files over to the new OS without a hitch, quick too, took under 35 minutes on a very modest 667MHz TiBook w/ 1GB RAM. Somehow missed the Custom install setting that lets you de-select the languages you won't use and the un-needed printer drivers, but it was tri
An insanely thorough review! (Score:4, Insightful)
Still, Tiger is really, really impressive compared to their competition. While Longhorn continues to look more and more like a cross between Copland and the White Whale, Apple delivered its project on-time and with all the features they promised. It looks like the computing mainstream is finally starting to give Apple some credit for their accomplishments, too. Even the New York Times put out an editorial [nytimes.com] about how cool it is to upgrade to Tiger! It's just interesting to think about how much more it could be.
A truly spacial Finder with real metadata? Incomparable!
Re:An insanely thorough review! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An insanely thorough review! (Score:3, Informative)
Or you could save yourself the headache of potentially unsupported or unstable calls to the kernel (sheesh! talk about killing a fly with a shotgun), or you could just edit the .nib file in Interface Builder.
10.4 does indeed encrypt swap files (Score:5, Informative)
As evidenced by profiling [onlinehome.us] in Shark [apple.com], page faults can trigger decryption. I was initially worried--as files in
Wow! Now that's a Review (Score:5, Insightful)
It was great to read about a lot of backend stuff like metadata handling or core video rather than just here about Spotlight again and again. No mistake, I'm looking forward to spotlight, but I like knowing how things work and or the problems that had to be overcome to get them to work.
Box review (Score:5, Funny)
No kidding, but then it does work (Score:4, Insightful)
But you know, every last thing I buy from them does feel like blinkin' Christmas morning to open. Anyone who has an iPod, and obviously they're out there, did a little "that's cool" reexamination of the box once they'd gotten the thing out. God knows why it makes a difference, but it does.
Maybe Apple just regards it as a way to stake out their market position as (Steve J's analogy) the BMW of the desktop set. Same thing happens in optics: I'm a birder, and if you buy Swarovski or Leica or Zeiss, you get a very cool box around your thousand-dollar binoculars.
Spotlight alone worth twice the price (Score:2, Interesting)
Spotlight is astounding. It is amazingly fast, beautiful to watch, easy to use, and wonderfully complete, searching applications, documents (word, pdf, txt, rtf, html, etc, etc), images, music (though I haven't checked *lyrics* yet), mail
Re:Spotlight alone worth twice the price (Score:3, Insightful)
"Change your user experience -- completely." Either that's a complete overstatement, or you can't keep track of anything. I'm a slob, but I can find pretty much anything I want in 500GB of disk spread over 3 systems in a few seconds, without using find. It's called "o-r-g-an-i-z-a-t-i-o-n".
Re:Spotlight alone worth twice the price (Score:3, Interesting)
I find that Spotlight is fantastic when I want to get an overview of things - for example, if I want to type in the name of my latest project and get all the correspondance, documents, and (commented) address book entries about it. I can hit Ctrl-Space, type in "Project Gopher" for example and hit 'All Results' and bring up a window where I
Great big whiners (Score:4, Insightful)
John Siracusa is a great big whiner. Thankfully, in this article, his Spatial Finder crown of thorns is only employed in one sentence. He also predictably complains about the unified title bar look for aqua Windows. And the new look for Mail.app.
I've been a Mac user from the age of four on. I could move at light speed in System 8's finder, and I'm delighted to be rid of the spatial Finder. I like the unified title bar look, and I like the Mail.app redesign. Does my anecdote cancel his out? The guy at Ranchero Software seems to like the unified title bar look too... now can Siracusa bite it?
Re:Great big whiners (Score:4, Insightful)
Application Compatibility? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm worried that some apps that I have might be broken and may take a while for fixes to arrive. The one I'm worried about the most is Office for Mac being broken ( yeah yeah I know iWork is better but I got this for free from a friend )
Re:Application Compatibility? (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest annoyance for me right now is that fink and darwinports are partially broken. Ethereal continued to run (which was not expected), but glib appears to be broken so irssi won't run for me right now. That's OK, I needed an IRC break anyway.
Great Alternative for Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
My copy of Tiger will arrive this afternoon... (Score:5, Funny)
Upgrade technique? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Upgrade technique? (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, I didn't even back anything up.
The longest part was restoring all the music onto the iPod.
Re:Upgrade technique? (Score:4, Informative)
The hard drive in the iPod isn't designed for sustained use. Booting off of it and installing Tiger should probably take about a half hour. That might be okay. But it's an oft-repeated and I think true story that one of the engineers somewhere here on campus installed Mac OS X Server onto his iPod for testing and booted it up in a lab.
The iPod froze up after eighteen hours. The hard drive completely failed.
Just FYI. Caveat emptor and all that.
worth the price just for Quartz Composer (Score:5, Insightful)
You can use patches from it your apps with a single function call, make screen savers with it or run the compositions stand alone in Quicktime.
Hours for fun for graphics geeks.
launchd (Score:5, Interesting)
The article and summary both mention the consolidation of many launching methods into an new 'launchd' daemon that is responsible for a wide-range of tasks including starting and stopping applications and other daemons on behalf of users and the system. After more than 100 comments, I have not seen even one mention of it. Is this because it is uninteresting, no one has RTFA, or because nobody really knows what it does yet? The Arstechnica reviewer advocates that the other UNIX type systems immediately steal this idea and code and incorporate it. Nobody here has an opinion on that?
Re:launchd (Score:5, Informative)
The advantages of this approach are the following:
- All those daemon have shared functionality but different code, this means more code to maintain and more security risks (all those daemon have to run at some point as root). Each of the 'old' daemon also has a different file format, which does not make life easier either.
- Process launch criteria can be a mix of those offered by the 'old' daemons, crond is based on time, inetd on network connections, initd on boot sequence. Launchd 'understands" all those notions.
The example I was given was of starting a backup task on a laptop. The criteria to launch the task would be something like if last execution was more than X days ago and the computer is not running on battery power and there is a network connection and CPU load has been low for some time then launch... Launchd is supposed to have 'adapters' to understand the old file formats.Personally I think this is a good idea, factoring out common functionality and using more reasonable file formats, but of course the old guard will complain that the current set of daemon just works (not on a laptop) and that this was proposed by people who do not understand Unix - who is this Jordan Hubbard anyway? :-)
Re:launchd (Score:3, Insightful)
launchd is super-cool. Anyone who writes software or admins systems should be really excited about it. They are also likely doing real work right now, just like I should be.
To be fair, I have seen some comments posted about launchd and it's coolness, some of regarding "if it weren't for that damn Apple license, we could just use their code in Linux
metadata (Score:4, Interesting)
I have difficulty getting users (intelegent users, mind) to file things in a single directory consistantly (yes I know this is ment to avoid directories but a location is only one example of metadata) . Fill in meta data as well? I may as well ask them to fly!
Ok text docs, spreadsheets etc will be fine (ish) as some occasionally appropriate info will be extractable, but what about drawings, scans, films. I know companies and the analy retentive will fill this in but an awful lot of people will not.
On the plus side I see this as the near end of application (un)installation hell....
rm *.mozilla !
ls *.apache !
or whatever syntax you choose, as the metadata will gladly be added by distro builders/app programmers. I've never heard this mentiond.
Ah well I'm off for two weeks holiday. Promise to think of you all while walking the dog
Jo
12 hours with Tiger (Score:3, Informative)
* A very smooth install. Point, click, walk away for 45 minutes. Added a drive before I started, and booted to a new RAID array. Entirely painless.
* I wasn't particularly excited about Spotlight until I tried it. We're all used to Find functions searching on demand. Having everything pre-indexed makes all the difference. It is REALLY easy to find things this way. I quit using the mouse to launch applications when I discovered Quicksilver. Now I'll stop using it to find things on the drive. You non-Mac guys are gonna love this feature as Beagle matures and Microsoft gets with the program. Makes mousing around a diectory tree feel like clubbing things with a stick.
* Not sure if I like Dashboard yet. It's impressive eye candy for visitors, but I don't know how really useful widgets are unless you have them open on the desktop all the time. Even on my big-ass flatscreen, that means burning valuable real estate. I'd rather call the apps more-or-less instantly from Quicksilver when they're needed. Guess we'll see what sort of widgets people come up with.
* Like previous releases, Tiger feels more nimble than its predecessor. I know a lot of this is just tweaked user interface, but I like it.
* The RSS screensaver is as cool as it is useless. ;-)
* Mail is improved. But it's now ugly as sin.
* The cosmetic presentation of Tiger is cleaner and less "lickable" than 10.0-10.3.
* Nothing has broken yet. I have a LOT of apps to check, though. Am concerned older ones -- such as Office v.X -- won't run well.
* Safari totally smokes now. Fastest thing I've ever used, including Opera. We got a preview of this when Safari 1.3 was released with the last point update.
* Looks like Automator will be worth learning.
Pretty subjective stuff, but I'm quite pleased with Tiger so far. Looking forward to pushing it some over the weekend.
You should read this (Score:4, Informative)
Why develop something as impressive as Quartz 2D Extreme and then leave it turned off by default? My inquiries to Apple have gone unanswered, so I can only speculate about the reasoning behind this decision. My best guess is that all of the bugs could not be excised from Q2DE in time for Tiger's launch date, and that it will be enabled by default in a subsequent update--perhaps as early as version 10.4.1." [arstechnica.com]
I told you so.
It ships on DVD ONLY. Target Disk Mode rocks (Score:5, Informative)
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes out this Friday, April 29th. It only ships on *DVD-ROM MEDIA* - if you want it on CD-ROM, you'll have to order the $9.99 CD-ROM set from Apple, and jump through a few other hoops (I don't remember what they are offhand)
If you don't want to wait, here's how to install it using Target Disk Mode. This will require *two* Macs, both equipped with Firewire.
* Take the Mac with the DVD-ROM drive (Mac #1) and insert the 10.4 DVD.
* Power the non-DVD Mac off.
* Plug the Firewire cable into Mac #2.
* Plug the other end of the cable into Mac #1.
* Boot Mac #2 with the letter "T" held down. Hold it down until you see the Firewire logo appear on the screen.
* Wait a few seconds. Mac #2 will appear as a Firewire volume on the desktop of Mac #1.
The 10.4 DVD contains the 10.4 Installer - double click it, and it'll ask you to reboot. Go ahead and let it reboot. The installation procedure will be just like you were installing it on your local machine, but when it asks you which volume to install it onto, select the Firewire volume (Mac #2) and go from there. It's safe to have it reformat & install (unless you want to just do an "upgrade" which is rarely recommended.)
Once the installation is complete, it'll want you to reboot again. Go ahead and reboot. As soon as the machine powered off for the reboot, yank the Firewire cable out of both machines. Mac #2 will still have the Firewire logo, but that's ok. Just force reset it with the reset button.
Mac #2 will boot up & walk you through the Mac OS X 10.4 setup assistant.
At this point, you're done. Software Update will run once you get to the desktop. Have fun!
(Hopefully this will stave off the "Wah, I don't have a DVD-ROM.. how can I pirate teh Tiger??" crowd.
New Mail.app look (Score:3, Funny)
Also, am I the only one who actually liked the mailbox drawer in Panther?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask Slashdot... (Score:3)
Where does one go to get help with some of the more advanced, Unix-related issues of Tiger? Message boards, etc. Any good ones? I'm having a bugger of a time with NIS issues, ones that didn't plague Panther.
Highly recommended (Score:3, Informative)
1) How to enable ACL's on a non-Server OS X installation
2) The fact that Quartz 2D "Extreme" (wow! nice breakdown of the tech!) is there, but not turned on... and probably won't be until 10.4.1 or later... but you CAN turn it on temporarily... and it explains how.
3) How to play with the emerging metadata features
4) A description of how Spotlight (which is file-focused) indexes objects such as Address Book entries which are (normally) not stored as separate files
Etc., etc. Excellent.
And of course I forgot (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The perfect slashdot article (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The perfect slashdot article (Score:2)
If I could have modded the guy I'd have modded him underrated (+1 mod, unlike funny, which is +1 but non-karma, thus his -1 troll took from his karma even though he had +1 funny).
Re:Grats to the Mac Community (Score:5, Insightful)
You can have:
- reliability/stability/security
- lots of choice
- bleeding-edge feature set and interface
But you must pick only two.Re:Grats to the Mac Community (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Grats to the Mac Community (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Grats to the Mac Community (Score:2)
Re:Grats to the Mac Community (Score:3, Informative)
As for the WinXP UI shell on Linux? Why? It's not particularly great. Now, the Mac OS/X UI on Linux... that would be nice.
Re:Grats to the Mac Community (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, you're right that Microsoft isn't writing drivers for all these different devices, but let's look at a couple things. First, I never need to load drivers when I'm using my Mac. The drivers are pretty much always included in the OS. Working on a Mac, you'd hardly know there's
Waiting a little longer (Score:2, Redundant)
How long do I have to wait?
Re:Waiting a little longer (Score:5, Funny)
Me, I'm waiting till they upgrade the iMac line. If the new iMacs offer better graphics, I'll be getting one. If not, I'll be getting a PowerMac.
At the start of the year, I didn't want a new computer. Then the mini came out, and I thought I should get one 'cause they're neat. And then I thought I should get an iMac, because I'd have to get all the peripherals since I currently have a PowerBook, and besides, the mini wouldn't be much faster than what I have now. Now, I'm considering a PowerMac.
I hate Apple more than Microsoft. Microsoft's a big evil corporation, but I don't want to buy anything they make because it's all crap. Apple's a big evil corporation, but they make really cool stuff and turn me into a consumer whore. That's really evil.
Re:Waiting a little longer (Score:3, Insightful)
Best example so far: Netinfo. I have no idea what this thing is or how it works, other than that it's rudely replaced all the things I'm familiar with for networking-type-stuff. ("No entry for netinfo in section 5 of the manual." Dammit, Apple, where's my man page?)
Re:My copy (Score:2)
My 400 MHz G3 iMac (with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB HD) is still running MacOS 9.2.2. It would barely run Tiger. And Tiger would break my old UMax scanner.
Re:My copy (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My copy (Score:2)
Re:My copy (Score:2)
OS 10.4 Tiger. It's not good.... (Score:2, Funny)
(ducks and runs for cover)
Re:Grrrrreeeaat! (Score:5, Informative)
If it's your whole machine that's crashing (i.e. kernel panic) then look to bad or under-spec RAM first, not the OS. OS X machines are very particular about RAM.
Re:Grrrrreeeaat! (Score:4, Informative)
Run the hardware test suite. This will identify any failing RAM by slot for you.
Needs at least a Pismo and you need special wifi. (Score:2)
That could possibly mean that there will be a hack to install it on your older hardware - but don't hold your breath.
If I recall correctly, the Lombard came out sometime in 1999? In PC terms, that's the equiv of, say, a P2 400 laptop. That was *top end* in 1999 for mobile systems. XP doesn't run too badly on those, either...
That said, XP doesn't do a lot o
Tiger Requires a Firewire machine (Score:2)
I'm sure the Xpostfacto folks [macsales.com] are looking into how to get Tiger to run on older machines.
Re:Wifi ? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.
You will find that a lot of older hardware works, just not as well as you would hope.
YMMV.
Re:6PM? (Score:2, Insightful)
Tiger is the beast?? :-( (Score:5, Funny)
This can not be good.
It's the speed increase, stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)
But the nicest thing about OS X updates is that they continue to improve performance on hardware across the board, including older supported hardware. My G4 1.33GHz is noticeably snappier than it was on Panther.
On the other side, can you even fathom someone uttering the words "Wow, that new version of Windows really makes my P3 fly!"
Re:premium PDF? WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:premium PDF? WTF? (Score:2)
Try moving your mouse down from the PDF link about 40 pixels and clicking on that link instead.
Re:Panther still being sold with new Apple machine (Score:3, Informative)
Apple has also been known to send NFR CDs for things like iLife when a new version cones out, sent to the retailers so they can stuff the boxes they have in inventory, but I haven't seen them
Re: (Score:3, Informative)