A Layman's Review of Tiger Preview

[BrianKonarsMac]

If Apple wanted the whole world to to have a beta version of Tiger, they would mail everybody a DVD with Tiger on it. But they didn't.

Your say Apple is not making any profit off of this? For the most part, I agree, but even though Apple might not make any profit off of this, it WILL hurt Apple if Apple just gave away DVDs like you want them too.

Why?

Because people whould rather have a buggy beta version of Tiger as their main OS, then pay 129$ for the final version.
(even the beta version of Tiger is more stable than that POS OS M$ calls 'XP')

If Apple wanted the whole world to have a beta of Tiger, mailing that many DVDs would bankrupt them.

who said anything about mailing out DVDs to people? they are not making a profit off the demo, it's that simple. if people feel the need to look at beta software, and it's widely available via P2P and BitTorrent, and isn't hurting Apple's profits at all who really cares? When the "gold master" or whatever the hell you want to call it of Tiger is released, and then becomes widespread over P2P and BT then you can bitch. I don't know anybody who wants a half ass buggy beta of Tiger as their main OS, but apparently you do. I personally would rather just pay $70 and have the CDs (or DVD? i hope, but doubt) so I can do clean installs whenever I feel the need.

personally downloading the beta is a waste of time, but if someone feels the need to do so, that is the meaning of P2P, being able to share data and information. as long as your not sharing software that companies make a profit off of, what harm are you doing?

 

[BrianKonarsMac]

Back to the UI. Apple does need to instill some consistency here. Brushed alu windows sometimes spawn aqua windows and perhaps vice versa. That is too jolting(or perhaps revolting). Dammit Steve make up your mind or give us the option to move to an all metal UI or all Aqua. Hell I think SJ would engender good will if he actually assisted Themers with an API or toolkit so they don't have to cause instability by hacking the OS

yes someone finally understands!! either we are both crazy, or i finally know i'm sane.

 

[musicpyrite]

If Apple wanted the whole world to have a beta of Tiger, mailing that many DVDs would bankrupt them.

who said anything about mailing out DVDs to people? they are not making a profit off the demo, it's that simple. if people feel the need to look at beta software, and it's widely available via P2P and BitTorrent, and isn't hurting Apple's profits at all who really cares? When the "gold master" or whatever the hell you want to call it of Tiger is released, and then becomes widespread over P2P and BT then you can bitch. I don't know anybody who wants a half ass buggy beta of Tiger as their main OS, but apparently you do. I personally would rather just pay $70 and have the CDs (or DVD? i hope, but doubt) so I can do clean installs whenever I feel the need.

personally downloading the beta is a waste of time, but if someone feels the need to do so, that is the meaning of P2P, being able to share data and information. as long as your not sharing software that companies make a profit off of, what harm are you doing?

First of all, when I said mailing DVD of the beta version of Tiger, there are many ways to get Tiger (or any other prorogram) to the public. You colud offer it for download on Apple.com and that would cost nothing. (except for the pice of bandwidth)

The second thing, Apple may not be making a profit of Tiger, but it will loose profit because it's on p2p and BitTorrent. Apple looses money because there are some people that are willing to use a beta version of 10.4 rather than spend $129 on a final version of 10.3. There may not be that many people doing that, but it still takes away from Apple's profit.

 

[paulypants]

Select is only $500.. and I don't think they require a test or anything, just the payment.

...and student select is 99$ a year

 

[Gymnut]

I think there should be poll amongst Macrumors members to whether they would rather use a beta version of 10.4 as their main operating system over spending the $100-$129 for a retail version of 10.3. Count me as one that would NOT.

 

[musicpyrite]

I think there should be poll amongst Macrumors members to whether they would rather use a beta version of 10.4 as their main operating system over spending the $100-$129 for a retail version of 10.3. Count me as one that would NOT.

Yea, there should be a poll, I think that is a good idea.

But for the most part, I think that most users (%90+) will choose Panther. Why? Other than the fact that the Mac platform is used for video/sound editing, photoshop, ect. a lot of 'average Joes' use the Mac platform for it's ease of use, they don't want an OS that crashes more than once a week. (that is even a high number for Mac users)

 

[rendezvouscp]

The second thing, Apple may not be making a profit of Tiger, but it will loose profit because it's on p2p and BitTorrent. Apple looses money because there are some people that are willing to use a beta version of 10.4 rather than spend $129 on a final version of 10.3. There may not be that many people doing that, but it still takes away from Apple's profit.

Wow, I didn't even think of that before. There are probably people out there that didn't buy Panther but now have a copy of Tiger. Ouch for Apple.
–Chase

 

[cb911]

The second thing, Apple may not be making a profit of Tiger, but it will loose profit because it's on p2p and BitTorrent. Apple looses money because there are some people that are willing to use a beta version of 10.4 rather than spend $129 on a final version of 10.3. There may not be that many people doing that, but it still takes away from Apple's profit.

i wouldn't say that Apple are losing money because of the copies of Tiger available on P2P and BT, those same people, if they'd use a beta Tiger over Panther, would just DL 10.3.4 as well. and when Tiger goes final they'll just DL it as well. i just don't want anyone kidding themselves that people will use a beta version of Tiger. these same people also want the unreleased 10.3.5 update, so they just want to play around with stuff, i doubt if they know what they're doing.

 

[swingerofbirch]

money issue

I believe that they would only lose money if the people who download the Tiger preview would have been willing to pay the $500 to receive it had it not been available to them online for free.

I would not have paid the $500. That doesn't answer to any questions of ethics, but it does answer to the question of whether or not they would lose money off of customers like me.

BTW, the $99 student developer dealie does not include all prerelease software (I don't know if it includeds Tiger), I tried signing up for it once but couldn't since I wasn't a full time student at the time. It's a good deal for the one time hardware discount you get. Otherwise with the regular education hardware discount you're better off buying from Amazon, since they sometimes take up to $150 off hardware prices, have no sales tax or shipping fees.

EDIT: I just remembered, I DID pay the $29 for Mac OS X Public Beta. If Apple were to charge for beta software now, they could hardly charge $500.

 

[Ajmbc]

Ok, the way I see it, no a layman will not appreciate a lot of the extra features Tiger will have. As someone who works in a large IT environment included Servers that are at least 90 percent Mac I welcome the changes.

Metadata is one thing Longhorn is boasting as having. If Apple can bring it out in a year before M$... more power to them. Perhaps a lot of you don't fully appreciate what this can do... but on a server with over a TB of data it's huge! And that's just one feature.

I have to admit I'm more interested in what the Server product will be capable of. Panther has helped and the addition of Kerberos authentication and other real world "this is what I expect a Server to do" ( AD integration, single login, etc) additions has helped. Also UNIX is a very powerfull Server platform and Apple is just starting to harvest it. Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!

Still until Apple makes a few more changes to the server product we will still have to run the Windows servers we have and every yearly review they'll send me off to keep my MCSE up to date...

Funny, I'll admit I got my job when OS X just came out and they needed someone who was M$ AND a Linux guy which I was and am to this day. Still the more I use Apple products the more I love them. I am a switcher and Apple needs to grab more guys like me to get Mac in the corporate environment and Tiger is headed in the right direction.

The fact that we run the entire agency (multiple locations, lots of users) with just 3 guys speaks volumes for Apple. In a Windows environment we'd need AT LEAST twice as many guys. Oh and my favorite is when someone gets spam from our domain (spoofed from field) and we get a call from another IT dept saying "you may want to check that user for a virus, just in case". I simple say, no their on a Mac, that's impossable

Here is a 'sneak preview' of Mac os X Server: Tiger. It looks pretty cool, functions as a blog server, an im server, and something oddly similar to Home on iPod called "Mobile Home Directories". Cool stuff.

Tiger Server 'Sneak Peak'

-aj

 

[benguru]

Wow

Wow, I noticed one of the server's new features was automatic blog hosting. I bet that they will either move it down to the sharing panel in the normal version, or add it in a later version. It sounds pretty awesome.

 

[Raiden]

People need to stop bitching about the non-devs using prerelease tiger.

These are the same people who gave you hundreds of screenshots of developer copies of Jaguar and Panther, that all of us ate up. These are the people who gave us all the fun reviews of new features of those OS upgrades that we stayed up all night to read.

Those are the same people who will be giving us new Tiger screenshots/reviews when new dev copies of tiger come out with more features.

So stop your bitching everyone, its not like apple is loosing money. Not only that, they are getting more hype for Tiger, and more advertizing of it.

 

[ibook_g4_user]

At this point, Tiger to me looks like a ".5" upgrade that I might have even considered not downloading.

If u think that then I can tell u that your wrong.

1. Tiger will bring more great under-the-hood features and APIs than panther or by the way jaguar did.

2. Spotlight is the biggest feature in mac os since 20 years ago when they invented the GUI, Spotlight is a cool new way to make really fast and superadvanced search on your desktop, u can have a map in a pdf file somewhere on your harddrive and then type a city in the searchbar and spotlight will find that city in the file within a second.
u can use metadata for smart folders instead of sorting, basicly u dont have to use a static folders again.
You can also use metadata for much more than that there is no end of possibilitys..SPOTLIGHT IS WAY BETTER THAN EXPOSÉ..in my opinion.

3. Dashboard will simply make its easier for the end user, its a new thing and its easy to critisize but it may be a new way for us to use internet.

4. Automatour will be a really powerfull feature, do ure job in a half minute instead of 2 hours, Automator will basically save your time so u can do other stuff in life.

5.CoreImage and CoreVidieo is Automator but for rendering, it will speed up all graphics (if use the newer graphics card who is supported), imagine doin rendering in real time instead of waiting 20 second for each? It will by the time be more integrated in the OS too.

6. H.264 and iChat will be really usefull, since u can talk to 4 people in highresoluton with will be really cool, with h.264 u can now also do videochat over the modem. U can also audiochat with a big group of people, cool huh?

7. Safari RSS and Mail 2.0 is really cool now and will be even cooler, Ive heard that Safari is much faster now and the RSS feature is really usefull, try it!!..Mail 2.0 comes with big changes too.

8. The rest.. check it out.. Here is a nice review of tiger

As a summary I would give 129 for only spotlight and automator.
Only non-devoloper underestimate tiger

 

[ibook_g4_user]

Hell I don't care if you download Tiger and check it out. Apple is well aware that with P2P and Bittorrent, Tiger was going to be everywhere.

Let's sum up Tiger right now in its PR form.

Everything you see in Tiger right now is basic. The UI hasn't been tweaked(that's usually the last thing along with optimization)

In fact when Tiger ships there may not be any huge featues that have you gobsmacked. But you will notice that Tiger enabled apps are suddenly doing cool thing. You'll notice that if iMove is MUCH faster and that iPhoto has a lot more effects and speed as well. You'll notice that apps suddenly have access to other application data (ie any app that needs to address something may pop up a list of all contacts in addressbook).

Tiger's features are going to be transparent in many ways. Applications will just become more full featured and faster. You will find that you can rely on your computer more because rather than each developer segmenting their apps into little islands that don't play well with others there will be a push to share as much data as possible making your life easier.

Search is never a big deal until you lose something vital. Spotlight is going to save peoples bacon one time or another.

OpenGL are goin to be a lot faster too

 

[mms]

At this point, Tiger to me looks like a ".5" upgrade that I might have even considered not downloading. This upgrade is uncharacteristically nonevolutionary, nonrevolutionary, and gimicky.

<sarcasm>Wow, we're already at 10.8 then?</saracasm>

I think you mean .0.5. If you're going to be criticizing a very early prelease version like that, at least get it right.

 

[cslewis]

As others have said, I have not been able to find anywhere near 150 new features. I realize there is a year to make tweaks to this OS, but I still find it incredibly underwhelming.

Did you ever pause to think that apple may not have included all 150 new features in this version of Tiger? I doubt apple would include EVERYTHING in a pre-release.