Apple's New OS, Tiger: Roar or Roadkill?
Posted by Narasu Rebbapragada | Thursday, April 28, 2005 9:01 AM PT
Apple's fifth major release of
Mac OS X, also known as Tiger, hits stores tomorrow. Here's an overview of a few of its 200 new features, which explain why it just might be worth the $129 upgrade price.
The most talked about new feature is
Spotlight, a desktop search tool built right into the OS. "As quickly as you can type, Spotlight can search," says Chris Bourdon, senior product line manager for Mac OS X. Beyond searching by file name, Spotlight lets you search by content and even metadata, which is sure to pique the curiosity of digital photographers. If Spotlight searches as fast as Bourdon says it does, it means the end of painstaking file management--on my hard drive anyway.
Next up are Dashboard Widgets (above), which are cutely designed information-gathering applets. Tiger ships with 14 widgets for grabbing stock quotes, weather forecasts, flight times, and other essentials. Bourdon says that these widgets are not the same as Pixoria's
Konfabulator widgets. They just both happen to be called widgets.
Tiger's IChat AV allows multi-way video conferencing--with the caveat that you need a dual 1-GHz Power Mac G4 or a Power Mac G5 to initiate a four-person video conference. You'll also need a 384 kbps Internet connection.
The Automator lets you script repetitive actions such as batch resizing photos, batch renaming files, and just generally repetitive dragging-and-dropping. Apple says that Tiger comes with 175 prebuilt Automator actions and that
Automator is easier to use than AppleScript. We'll see.
Other features include built-in RSS support for the Mac OS X browser Safari, H.264 video support for QuickTime 7, and revamped Mail and iCal applications.
We'll be test driving Tiger shortly. Will it roar or end up road kill? Stay tuned to find out.
One advantage is that unlike Windows, one version will support a full 64 bit OS via lP64 (the same as Unix, Linux, Sun, SGI, etc.), and still retain full 32 bit support without any penalty.
With Longhorn, you will need either 64 bit or 32 verisions.
This is a big advantage.
With only one great featuer (spotlight), this is what we call Service packs on windows sides without the huge price tage.
What about the widgets..."Symbiot, a leading provider of intelligent security infrastructure management systems (iSIMS) and risk metrics technology, today announced the company?s commitment to a significant technical contribution to OpenSIMS in support of Apple?s upcoming release of Mac OS X ?Tiger? and Tiger Server. The contribution includes two new innovative Tiger Dashboard widgets that allow administrators to view real time attacker attributions and network activity"...could be useful?
Not bad for a "Service Pack?"
Look! another feature from a "Service Pack?"...
"Some of the most groundbreaking new Tiger features are barely mentioned in Apple's marketing. For example, the new parental controls let you, the wise authority figure, specify which e-mail correspondents, chat buddies, Web sites and even programs are O.K. for your children. Older children may find the "whitelist" approach overly limiting, but the design is otherwise clean, effective and beautifully integrated," Pogue writes. "(from the NYTimes)
Wait, another..."Service Pack featuer" High definition video...
...Experience high-definition video from the comfort of your computer with Mac OS X Tiger and QuickTime 7. Featuring an ultra-efficient, fully scalable video codec called H.264...
Not to mention that it is a Unix operating system.
This is not your father's Oldsmobile...or, I mean PC....
An un-discounted retail copy of Windows XP Professional costs $299 (source: BestBuy.com), and the last non-free update MS offered was in 2001. Two free updates, SP1 and SP2, have been released since then, and the biggest news from either of them is that they plugged a few thousand gaping security holes that OS X didn't have to begin with. (Okay, and wireless networking configuration got a lot easier in SP2).
An un-discounted retail copy of Mac OS X costs $129, and Apple has released updates containing roughly 200 new features each four times since Microsoft released Windows XP. The most recent of those had nine free updates in between (not counting security updates, of which there were a few more), each of which improved performance. stability, and features in several ways.
Tiger includes a new version of Apple's world-class XCode software development evironment -- something comparable on Windows will cost you hundreds of dollars in addition to the OS cost.
Yes, there are a lot of minor updates in Tiger. So? It's still a great improvement over Panther in many ways, including several very significant improvements (Spotlight, Dashboard, Automator, XCode, Core Data, Core Image, Core Video, browser performance up 80%, 64-bit virtual memory on G5s, and full support for Access Control Lists).
Furthermore, there are hundreds of features in OS X that probably won't even be in Longhorn. One-click setup of a web or FTP server? Those aren't even one-click in Windows 2003 Server. How about advanced font management tools? I could go on.
When MS releases a list of new features on par with that, and releases it for free as a service pack, maybe I'll start listening to all of this whining about a piddling $129 for an OS upgrade. Enjoy your four-year-old operating system. I hope Longhorn's ship date doesn't slip any further, and I hope you don't forget to complain when MS wants 199 of your hard-earned dollars for the upgrade.
I suppose you could make everything price-competitive by throwing in iLife. OS X + iLife is $208. According to BestBuy.com, the Windows XP Pro Upgrade is $199. I'm using that as a basis for my assumption that it will cost $199 to upgrade to Longhorn Pro (or whatever they're going to call it).
iLive is bundled with every new Mac, so this only evens things out for those of us that are upgrading the OS on existing hardware.
For $79, iLife gets you iMovieHD, iPhoto, iDVD, and GarageBand (it comes with iTunes too, but that's a free download, and is available for both platforms, so I'm not including it in my price comparison). Google's free Picasa can stand its ground next to iPhoto, but there is nothing available for Windows that is remotely close to the others at a competitive price.
Does MAC have now any killing Apps? Or all of them move to PC? Designers for example.
Bill Gates is pretty sure Tiger is worth the cost -- with the ideas he gets from Apple this decade, he's been able to announce to the media that the next decade will be a decade full of "innovations".
Innovations is what Bill calls it:
when he sees Navigator and builds Explorer,
when he sees Palm and builds Pocket,
when he sees GameCube and builds XBox,
when he sees Aqua and announces Aero,
when he sees Adobe Acro and announces Metro.
His coming decade of innovations will be based on things like Tiger and will look suspiciously like the previous decade of other company's inventions. It's easy to predict the future when you're feeding your captive audience with reruns.
Tiger's worth it now, whether you view it as a chance to get free of the monopoly or as better training for Longhorn than XP...