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Tiger on TMO - Tiger: Think Evolutionary, not Revolutionary
by , 12:20 PM EDT, April 29th, 2005
It's been more than eighteen months in the public eye, and has taken center stage at every major Apple event in the last year. Like the opening act for a sold-out headliner, it's been used by Apple CEO Steve Jobs to delay satiating the crowd's anticipation for Apple's new hardware announcements. It's been heralded as the most significant upgrade to Mac OS X ever, its hype aided by the extra half-year Apple has made its fans wait to breathe new life into their Macs.
Yet for everything that Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has been made out to be, there's an awful lot that it simply isn't, or that it at least won't be for a lot of people.
My take on Tiger in a nutshell follows: with more than five years of Mac OS X development under its belt and already three major upgrades to the operating system, there simply isn't as much room on the surface for Apple to improve the general day-to-day experience of using a Mac. Accordingly, the major improvements to Mac OS X that Tiger brings to the table are primarily under the hood and not so much in the form of new features that you'll wonder how you ever lived without.
Let me make it clear that I'm not downplaying the significance of these accomplishments -- the technical details of which I'll spare the average reader (Ars Technica does an excellent job of touching upon the major points for those interested) -- but rather to point that Tiger simply isn't as wide-reaching a Mac OS X upgrade as others have been.
Tiger isn't like 10.1 Puma, which actually made Mac OS X usable and added such obvious features as DVD playback. It's not like 10.2 Jaguar, which delivered a substantial performance boost and really started to set Mac OS X apart from the competition. It's not even like 10.3 Panther, which brought all-new technologies like iChat AV to the table.
From a usability perspective, Tiger is very much an evolutionary upgrade, even if its underpinnings are more than that. Spotlight is nice, primarily for its speed in my opinion, but whether meta searching is all that Apple, Google, and Microsoft believe its cracked up to be depends on how you already sort and organize files on your Mac, or don't. (In my experience, Mac users generally have a much better handle on where their documents and other user files are on their computer than Windows users.)
Dashboard is certainly slick and the ripple effect that adding new Widgets does to your screen (on systems that support Tiger's new Core Image graphics technology) will impress your friends again like the original Genie window minimizing effect, but Dashboard is not a new concept. It's arguably just the best implementation of such an idea to date, a trend that Apple has gotten better and better at ceasing upon in recent years.
Spotlight and Dashboard may be the two most highly publicized features out over a purported 200 to grace Tiger, but they're also on a very short list of new features that actually deliver something for almost everyone.
I noticed this when showing off Tiger to a friend of mine, a recent PC Switcher who uses her iBook for the same list of basic tasks many people in her shoes do: word processing, Web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, music, and photos. In trying to demonstrate to her how superior Apple's engineering efforts are and what a sound investment she made in picking up an iBook, I quickly noticed that beyond Spotlight and Dashboard, I didn't have a whole lot to show her. Apple's iLife '05 upgrade delivered more for her than Tiger does, and even that upgrade seemed rather marginal from the iLife '04 package that shipped with her system.
What we're left with in Tiger is a list of new features whose value is highly dependent on how you use the system. This may not seem like a novel idea, but it's a departure from previous upgrades.
Mail 2.0 seems to be a solid upgrade to Apple's e-mail client, but only if you used it to begin with. Chances are if checking your e-mail with your Web browser is what you're accustomed to, Mail 2.0 doesn't deliver any compelling features over Mail 1.x for encouraging you to use a proper e-mail client. If you're more of a power user who enjoys Bare Bones Software's Mailsmith, Mail 2.0 won't switch you back to the Apple camp. Similarly, if you're a Microsoft Entourage sort of person, you'll probably stay that way. In fact, if you're in an environment that relies on Microsoft Outlook, you'll have to.
iSync supports many more devices, but both Address Book and iCal have received only marginal updates. The ability to share your address book with others is handy, but I'd rather have seen an easy way to synchronize Apple's Address Book with that of Microsoft Entourage, Palm Desktop, or other third-party applications added to Address Book.
If you're in the minority and subscribe to Apple's .Mac Internet services, Tiger packs improved support for syncing your data with .Mac servers and other Macs. If you're not interested in .Mac, then none of that makes a difference to you.
iChat AV's much-touted three-way video conferencing is every bit as cool as Mr. Jobs has demonstrated time and time again, but I can't shake the gut feeling that hardly any Tiger user will actually use it, especially on a regular basis.
Safari 2.0/RSS is the best Safari to date, but as an RSS reader it pales in comparison to more robust readers. Its best purpose may be to introduce the world of RSS feeds to those surfers unfamiliar with the technology, but RSS is still too much and too geeky for the majority of users I know.
Automator is similarly geeky. It's not as niche as AppleScript -- and many of us probably remember that AppleScript was supposed to be scripting for the rest of us -- but I believe it will still be too techie for most.
QuickTime 7 and the new H.264 video codec is a very compelling technology upgrade, but it can't really be considered a Tiger feature since versions for Panther and Windows will soon be available. The improved performance of the new Cocoa (fully Mac OS X-native) version of QuickTime Player is one of the best parts of the package.
Perhaps it's not fair to dissect each new tangible feature of Tiger and say they're not terribly compelling in and of themselves, but even when Tiger's parts are taken as a sum of the whole, the upgrade is lacking on surface.
I consider myself a power user of Mac OS X. I'm not a developer, nor do I pretend to be on weekends, so Apple's new take on APIs with Tiger means about as much to me as how India is faring in cricket this season. Yet between the gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of storage I work with on a daily basis, I find Tiger's intangible refinement to be its most compelling feature.
Whereas Jaguar took working with Mac OS X on a daily basis from a tolerable experience to an enjoyable one, and Panther smoothed its corners by making tasks like viewing or moving hundreds of files many times faster, so too does Tiger deliver that same polished feel. Applications seem more responsive, the Finder feels snappier. Getting info on a file is now almost instantaneous, the way it was back in the Mac OS 9 days. Calculating folder sizes takes just a second or two, not twenty. These may be small refinements, but for seasoned Mac users like me they make all the difference.
Perhaps the most overlooked new feature -- and one that I find most impressive -- of Tiger is that its system requirements remain pretty much unchanged from Mac OS X 10.0. Somehow Apple's engineers have continually managed to pack more and more features into the operating system while improving performance at the same time, an approach that many other companies should try to emulate.
Tiger may not be as compelling or dramatic an upgrade in my eyes, or for other users, as Apple's engineering efforts may want it to be, but it represents the first step towards the future of Mac OS X as a whole. Having nailed down the majority of users' needs so well between 10.0 and 10.3, Apple has shifted its focus to laying the groundwork for expanding its reach and securing its OS dominance into the future.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Observer Comments
Fri Apr 29, 2005 12:34 pm Subject: Good Article
Yes, this is very true. OS X is becoming like Photoshop. It's such a great program that there simply CAN'T be an upgrade that's a "MUST HAVE." To have a MUST HAVE upgrade means that there's something wrong with the current version, which isn't the case.
I want Tiger because I'm a geek who likes cool new features, but I can see how a lot of people might take their time upgrading. I think Tiger will be a MUST HAVE for software developers and professional media makers but for everyone else the choice is a little more open.
breathe not breath
Agree with the general line of thought except Spotlight/Smart Folders will be significant for me, as I have many files and especially emails that can be associated with many projects/subprojects. Now they can easily appear in multiple folders, and I no longer need to make aliases or remember where the real file is (when the real file has been updated).
It will also allow me to better organize my photos outside of iPhoto.
I respect Chaffin's opinion but this review isn't even in the same continent as John Sircusa's massive review on arstechnica. It's so in-depth(100 pages and pics) that you likely won't need to read many other reviews because they will tend to gloss over the features without having any deeper knowledge.
This review is one of those "well 'I' can't see the value in Tiger" type that doesn't really give you any more info that you could have found on Apple.com.
Siracusa will tell you what Spotlight does well and where it could improve. He'll tell you about a feature(Quartz 2D Extreme) which isn't enabled yet but will likely be enabled in a future update that will speed your GUI noticably.
You'll read why Quicktime 7 is more than just a new codec and see a nice picture that contrasts the "old" Quicktime with the new one.
I'm not coming down on this review that hard but I'm just saying that there are few exceptional writer/reviewers covering the Mac Web and Sircusa is one and Gruber from daringfireball is another.
Evolutionary is a misnomer because everything in live is evolutionary. What makes something Revolutionary is the ability in hindsight to see the changes and shifts that emanated from an evolutionary change.
Tiger is indeed Revolutionary in my opinion because I can peel the cover back a bit and see that there are plenty of new things that will indeed make it hard for me to go back to any prior OS than Tiger. If you doubt me go peruse Sircusa's article and try to comprehend as much as you can.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 1:47 pm Subject: Re: Poor Review
Quotehmurchison wrote:
Tiger is indeed Revolutionary in my opinion because I can peel the cover back a bit and see that there are plenty of new things that will indeed make it hard for me to go back to any prior OS than Tiger.
But I think that's the entire point of this article. The fact that you have to "peel the cover back" is what makes this one a little different.
Of course people like us are going to upgrade and we're going to love all the new features. But people like my mother just don't care about peeling anything back.
Back with Jaguar I could honestly say "mom, you HAVE to buy this upgrade" and she would. But with Tiger I start babbling on about Spotlight and Dashboard and she's like "yeah...that sounds nice, I'll get around to it eventually."
I think that's what he's trying to say here. For the casual computer user, Tiger is something to "get around to eventually" instead of an instant buy. That's what he means by it not being "revolutionary."
Fri Apr 29, 2005 1:49 pm Subject: What do you want?
Looking at Tiger is like looking at a car. You don't know really what it offers until you sit in the seat, mash the gas pedal and drive it.
Nothing in Tiger has been left alone. Everything has been improved in some way. Everyone has pain points in computing. You must ascertain what yours are and see if Tiger helps allay the pain. If it doesn't then wait. Simple as that.
Sorry Misha but I think you couldn't be more wrong.
I think that Tiger is an amazing new version of Mac OS X. I think that Tiger has more new features that I value than any release of Mac OS X since the original 10.0. I think this shows Apple is accelerating it's pace of innovation.
I could rebut your editorial line by line but that would be a long effort (and I have a day job). But I will start with just the first line when you said that Tiger has been in the public eye for more than 18 months. Wrong, please check your facts. Tiger was publicly introduced at Apple's WWDC last June. Less than 12 months ago. And I will end my brief rebuttal by pointing out that you barely made mentiuon of Spotlight. I thin Spotlight is a revolutionary feature that will continue to evolve and change how we use computers for many years. Nothing in Windows. Mac OS, or Linux, IMHO, in the last decade has been as impactful except perhaps instant messaging.
The cool thing is time will tell. We'll see whther you are right or I am within months. Until then I respect your opinion but completely disagree with it.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 1:55 pm Subject: Re: What do you want?
Quotehmurchison wrote:
What do you want?
Well I want Tiger, but that's not the point.
The point is that Panther is still a perfectly viable OS.
There have been LOTS of OS's in the past where a new one made the previous one obsolete.
Like Windows ME to XP.
Or OS X.1 to X.2.
Yes Tiger is better, but Panther is still good. It doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes a new OS makes the old one look "bad" by comparison, but I just don't see that here.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 1:55 pm Subject: Always room for improvement
Some tech didn't make it in the 1st release namely
Java 1.5 and OpenGL 2.0
Quartz 2D Extreme isn't enabled yet and this gives you a boost in your display speeds. It'll be enabled when Apple updates in the future.
Tiger has a lot of spit and polish that Apple doesn't hype. I'm sure people will love it.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:49 pm Subject: Everyone's entitle to their opinion
That's what makes the Internet great but I disagree as far as the "need" to peel back the cover. People want to gloss over Spotlight like its basic but it's not. Imagine if iTunes just stored everything in a directory but didn't give you a way of quickly searching. You'd know where the artist/album/song title would be but you wouldn't be fast at accessing your music.
Spotlight extends the very thing that makes iTunes to the whole system. Even the most well organized person can benefit because while we know where "WE" like to put our data the OS is storing data where "it" likes to and finding that data easy is usefull.
Dashboad widgets are cool but it's a judgement call on if the right widet that makes you happy is available. I tend to like stuff like widgets for currency conversion, units and measure conversion, dictionary/thesaurus lookup etc. It's like having a portal of your favorite webtools. What could be wrong with that?
Automator isn't difficult. If you can plug together building blocks like you did as a child you can automate tedious stuff like renaming those damn IMG_1234 photo files coming from your camera and thousands of other niggling things.
BTW a whole dictionary is embedded in the system. Control click a word and choose a finder plugin(contextual menu choice) for the definition. No internet requried.
Math geeks. Check out Grapher...remember Curvus Pro...there it is and you don't have to pay $20.
Mail 2.0- Who doesn't want a good email client? Inline Jpegs that you can do a slide show in or send to iPhoto.
Safari 2.0- Faster. nuff said.
Tiger "is" evolutionary because there is so much change from the outside to deep inside it will take some time for he regular layman to grok just how "revolutionary" it really is.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:52 pm Subject: Re: Everyone's entitle to their opinion
Quotehmurchison wrote:
...it will take some time for he regular layman to grok just how "revolutionary" it really is.
We're saying the same thing. The only difference here is that what you've said here is my main point whereas I guess you don't think it matters as much.
But overall I agree with everything you've said in all your posts.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:53 pm Subject: You haven't answered the question
If you want to stay on Panther then that is what you'll do but It seems rather odd that you don't "see" anything in Tiger compelling. Could it be that you don't "want" to see anything compelling?
"Good enough for me" is fine in this scenario. I'm just trying to gauge why people make the choices they do for operating systems. What motivates them to move forwared. Typically I'll here "It doesn't have any features I want" but when prodded for what potential features are missing I find that many "don't know"
such is life.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 2:56 pm Subject: Re: You haven't answered the question
Quotehmurchison wrote:
If you want to stay on Panther then that is what you'll do but It seems rather odd that you don't "see" anything in Tiger compelling. Could it be that you don't "want" to see anything compelling?
Look, that's the exact opposite of what I've been saying.
Just to be clear: I WILL be buying Tiger, I AM looking forward to it, and I DO think all the new features are awsome and will change the way I use my computer.
The Mac in 1984 was revolutionary. One could accurately argue that everything since has been evolutionary.
I'll admit that OS X was revolutionary, but that brings me to my main point: revolution is usually painful, and most people's lives are far worse during and immediately after a revolution than they were before. It takes a long sorting out process - evolution - after every revolution before the benefits begin to acrue to the average person.
So, the comments near the end of the review about the evolutionary benefits -smoothness, responsiveness - of Tiger are what makes me want to upgrade.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 3:58 pm Subject: Apple Employee/Stockholder
hmurchison,
Are you an Apple Corporate mole?
Why are you so passionate about an OS based on a review article?
Do you have a beta copy of the OS?
Are you that intimately familiar with the software that you feel compelled to defend someone else's review?
What is the motivation of your posts?
Very suspicious indeed!
Good review. I'm actually one of those few who's going to stick with Panther. Why? 'Cause I have the rockingest, stablest, fastest Mac I've ever had. I'm productive as all get out. Of Apple's "200 new features" there are two that interest me. The parental controls sound good, and it sounds like they may have finally fixed the (fucking) Finder.
But like the reviewer, I don't find anything else compelling, certainly not compelling enough to fork over $130 clams and lose a day getting everything back up and running under the new OS. I mean, when was the last time you lost a document? I really wonder who these people are who are so jazzed about Spotlight. I actually did need to find an email yesterday, searched in the find field of Mail.app and found it in two seconds. So tell me why I want a whole new search engine again? And Dashboard? Puh-lease, sounds like a retread of Sherlock (which I love, again, don't really feel the need for an update, though I'll admit the Dictionary sucks, maybe Dashboard's is better?).
Oh, and you know, I was just video chatting with two friends and we really needed to add somebody else to the conversation. As if.
Tiger sounds like a developer release, with not much to offer "regular" or even "power" users. I'll wait till the next one, if it offers more actual improvements. If not, I'm happy as a clam with Panther.
Fri Apr 29, 2005 6:23 pm Subject: Scores in the spinning beach-ball game( Tiger:1 Panther:1)
Quotation from
Tiger Leaps Out in Front
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG (Wall Street Journal)
http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050428.html
"The only significant problem I noticed was that the computers seemed to run into slight, but greater-than-normal, delays from time to time. Certain functions, like Spotlight searches and the updated Safari Web browser, were very fast. But with other tasks, I noticed more spinning beach-ball icons, Apple's symbol for delays, than I had with the prior Panther version of the Mac operating system.
In particular, the built-in e-mail program, Apple Mail, was slower. There was a perceptible lag in opening a new e-mail form, beginning a reply, and displaying the drop-down contact list that appears when you begin typing in an e-mail address.
Apple acknowledges it will need to tweak Tiger to eliminate the delays, and it promises to address the problem within a few months. It might be wise for users with older, slower Mac models to wait until then to upgrade to Tiger."
Add to this other reported comments about Tiger breaking third party apps. gives rise to concern about unwelcome interuptions to the daily workflow,
so I also stay with Panther for the time being.
But what about those early reports post WWDC 2004 that had us all fired up thinking that Tiger would deliver significant speed improvements?
"Like Windows ME to XP."
Windows ME isn't obsolete. There isn't one program I've needed or even had a passing interest in that it can't run.
Sure, it's a bug-ridden pile of flaming junk that I've had to re-install about five times, now, and there's a thousand words to describe how poorly made it is, but I just don't see how it's obsolete. Take a look at the adoption rate for Windows XP if you want to see how outmodded previous versions of Windows really are.
The largest revolution is going to come when developers start developing *for* tiger, not just on it. When the hard work that Apple has put in under the hood starts being used in applications written especially for it.
That' s when the tiger adopters mac-using life will start to change. I held off upgrading to Panther 'cos it didn't have anything that made me want to spend the money. Recently, more and more applications have started to appear where the developers have got to grips with the technologies introduced with Panther, and the new features that resulted were what made me consider upgrading. Tiger was just round the corner, however, so I waited for that instead.
I can't wait to see what software the creative likes of Brent Simmons and the delicious software crew make of Tiger in four months time.
QuoteSmall White Car wrote:
Look, the exact opposite of what I've been saying is true.
Just to be clear: I WILL be buying Tiger, I AM looking forward to giving money to Apple because they demand it. With each new OS comes a mandate from Apple - use it, or Steve Jobs will be dissatisfied. Sure he won't threaten me, I just gladly obey his orders without thinking!
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