This review would have been posted on April 30… however I ran into some issues with the Mac OS X Tiger DVD. Since that post, Apple has added that you need a DVD drive on their Tiger requirements page. Too late for me, but so it goes.
Luckily, after waiting patiently, my OS X Tiger CDs (5 total) arrived in the mail yesterday via the Apple Media Exchange. All in all, it cost me $10 extra and 10 extra days from my original purchase.
Moving on, I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so I’ve seen the various upgrades over the years and OSX is, obviously, the most substantial of them all. While it took a couple of years to get every program converted over from Classic mode, the positives have steadily increased.
While this 4th ‘level’ of OS X has made some moderate improvement on its predecessors, it depends from what version you are upgrading from on how drastic your changes will be.
I installed OS X Tiger on a single processor 733 mhz G4 (Quicksilver) with 1GB of RAM, which falls processor-wise in the middle of the requirements Apple recommends. Installation from CD’s took 50 minutes to do the Easy Install. Set-up from there took about 5 minutes.
When I restarted my Mac, I was pleased to see that everything looked exactly the same. Tiger had, as promised, retained all of my previous settings. In fact, it looked exactly like v10.3 Panther.
But as I explored the landscape, I started finding the changes, so let’s move on to the highlighted features of the OS X Tiger update:
1. Spotlight (the upgraded Find option) Depending on the size your HD, Spotlight has to index your drive first before it can work. Understandable. I have a 40 GB primary drive, and an 80 GB slave drive. Indexing took 2 hours. Once it was finished though, Spotlight is a great improvement from the previous version. It is very Google-like in efficiency… going as far as finding a single word in a 300 page Word doc I wrote 2 years ago.
2. Dashboard (the collection of Widgets) If you’re a Classic Mac person, you’ll recall that a bunch of little applications used to live in the Apple menu in the upper right corner. When OSX came along, Apple got rid of that. Dashboard, however, is that classic Apple menu with OSX sensibilities. With a click, all of the widgets launch instantaneously on your screen. Address Book, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Live Weather for your zip, Calculator, and it goes on. Download many other free widgets online… which makes this a valuable tool.
3. Safari RSS – I’ve been alternating between Safari and Firefox for web usage over the past 6 months, and this version of Safari has fixed a few bugs. At least, so far. But nothing drastically changed.
4. iChat AV – Unless you have a digicam (which I don’t), this update is no different from the previous version.
5. Automator – Setting this up is a rainy day project. Automating tasks is nothing new, but is quite useful. It’s just the matter of stopping your life and setting up the tasks.
6. Quicktime 7 – I played a few MPEG’s and the options have improved from v6.5. Definitely a better media player than Windows Media or RealPlayer.
OVERALL: I liked the upgrades that OS X Tiger provided, but whether or not it’s worth the $129 price tag depends on where you’re coming from:
- If you are currently on OS X v10.2 or lower, I recommend upgrading to Tiger, because it will definitely increase your productivity and ease of usage.
- If you are currently on OS X v10.3 (Panther), you can probably hold off on upgrading until Apple cuts the price down a bit, or if you require it to run a vital program.