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.
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Article comments
1 - Person who loves Mac
I think you criticize far too much and you're constantly incriminating Tiger and calling it an "average" upgrade. Good luck with the attitude.
2 - a-[e]
A couple points. First, Spotlight isn't really an upgrade to the Find function. They're integrated, and Cmd+F retains its characteristic features. Spotlight is much more encompassing and searches almost everything--emails, bookmarks, images, contacts, calenders, etc. Spotlight really *isn't* " a great improvement from the previous version" because there isn't a previous version to compare it to...unless you're talking about some developer version.
You mention Safari RSS but fail to mention it has new functionality, specifically the RSS reader. Seems like that would be worth a mention.
Automator seems to be a nice step forward in making automation much more available to your average user. I haven't delved too deep into it either.
The new version of Mail.app is nifty, though I haven't played with it very much. The .mac synching is nice too.
There are also *many* more additions to the OS than what you list that may be more important for many users. See here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html
The Finder seems much faster as well.
Finally, I doubt Apple will drop the price on the upgrade. Second party resellers might, but the only discounts I've seen Apple offer are the education discounts. Places like MacMall and Amazon might though.
From what I've seen using it, 10.4 is a compelling upgrade.
3 - Mark Sahm
Person, what part of "I liked the upgrades" didn't you understand? Any criticism I made was more of whether Tiger was worth its price tag.
a-[e], thanks for your input. I summarized the features from the original Mac promo I received for Tiger so that common users like myself could get a quick read. I'm sure any developer or UNIX types will check out the 200 features page you linked here for more info. Peace.