Siracusa on Tiger
April 29th, 2005
Fittingly, considering that today is the day Tiger (a.k.a. MacOS X 10.4) is launched, I’ve spent much of my evening reading John Siracusa’s Ars Technica review of the new version of the Best Damn Operating System for The Rest of Us.
Siracusa is as thorough as ever. Indeed, he’s arguably too thorough in his discussion of Tiger’s first, faltering steps in the direction of a BeOS-like file system. If you’re mostly interested in how Tiger will improve your life today, you’ll probably want to skip much of the middle third of the review. On the other hand, if you’re interested in the details of Apple’s metadata and graphics subsystems, Siracusa’s article is a fine starting point.
The general picture Siracusa paints is of a more responsive, more capable OS which (for the third major upgrade running) will run faster on your current hardware than the previous version. What more can you reasonably ask? I don’t plan to rush out and buy a copy of Tiger tomorrow, but I can’t see myself still running 10.3.9 a couple of months from now.
May 6th, 2005 at 9:40 am
What some folks might like is an argument as to why it is worth spending the five hundred dollar difference to get a Mac.
Myself, whose first computers were Macs, and Ses, are easily convinced. But even us need a reason to think about spending an extra %500 or so. It’s not as if clueful windows users really need to worry about viri, etc., so that dog doesn’t hunt. The argument seems to boil down to “we’re more cool in various ways, so long as you don’t mind missing out on 90% of programs.
Experiments have suggested this is not a conclusive advantage.