Jan 30 Jun 05

On the other hand, I’m getting extra value out of Tiger right now. If I had to still wait for Tiger today, I wouldn’t get that. Fine, it is sometimes a bit rough around the edges. But I wouldn’t want to wait more months for the mythical perfect product. As long as I get updates..

Dan Hellerich 30 Jun 05

I have mixed feelings about this. I’ve only had Tiger for a week… and I do notice some slowness that I didn’t in Panther. I don’t think they’re “pulling a windows” by introducing a new iTunes. They probably have a Tiger team and an iTunes team, so Apple’s resources that pour into iTunes features don’t take a hit on what the OS guys are doing. What does waste time and energy is developing two Tigers at once… I bet for every querk in Tiger, they fix it in both the PowerPC version and the Intel version, which will make updates take longer to develop, and the original push out a little less perfect. I do like having the features now, and trust Apple to get around to fixing things - and feel they do that much better than Windows Updates.

Levi 30 Jun 05

Sure Tiger has it’s problems but so does every other OS out there. Has anyone used Windows lately? I use Tiger and XP daily and I cannot believe how much better Tiger is.

Peter Cooper 30 Jun 05

If Tiger is anything, it’s a memory hog. Panther totally flew on my machine with 512MB of RAM. Tiger was a swapping nightmare. I’ve upgraded to 1GB of RAM and now it’s pretty good again, but it definitely does suck up that RAM (and it’s not just Dashboard, but the Spotlight processes, the kernel itself, Safari, etc).

Kevin Ballard 30 Jun 05

Dan: They’re not developing 2 tigers at once, from the very beginning they’ve had a team that simply makes sure that all OS development was platform-agnostic, and now it’s simply more public. NeXTStep was platform-agnostic (it ran on 4 different platforms), and OS X is simply continuing that tradition. They don’t have to code everything twice, they just have to make sure that when they twiddle bits, they check for endianness, and when they accelerate things, the use Accelerate.framework. Things like that.

And I disagree that Tiger is a memory hog. Yes, new OS releases often require just a bit more RAM, but I found that running Panther on 512MB was much too slow for me, so Peter, it’s no wonder you were having issues with Tiger on 512MB. I’m surprised you felt that Panther was fine with that.

Oh, and I also don’t see why people are disabling Dashboard. It’s not exactly a memory-hog. Each DashboardClient process just takes a couple MB. Keeping 5 widgets open for me is like keeping one reasonably simple app open. And if you don’t want any resource usage by dashboard, just don’t open any widgets. You don’t have to actually *disable* it unless you think that you’re going to forget and open some widgets, or something like that.

Alex 30 Jun 05

If anyone actually bothers to remember, Panther had quite a few problems for the first few versions. In my experience so far, Tiger has been more stable than 10.3.1, and that goes for the new iLife too.

I even get a few more FPS in World of Warcraft somehow, this is probably to do with improved opengl stuff…

Martin 30 Jun 05

Haha, welcome to the real world, where complexity is a reality, and not something avoided at all costs… :-)

Brad 30 Jun 05

Everyone has a different Tiger experience; I think it depends crucially on your setup. I’m running it on an aluminum 15” G4 PowerBook with only 500 MB of RAM and have absolutely no complaints…no crashes, no incompatibilities so far. iPhoto works fine. That said, I’m not very impressed with Spotlight (Google Desktop on my Windows machine is much more thorough); it overlooks documents that are sitting right there in my document folder with the same exact name as the search I entered. I’m also steamed at Apple for not giving out the fine print about the processor and internet connection speed requirements for multiple video chats in iChat, since that was one of the main reasons I upgraded. The new mail app feels a bit lethargic compared with the old one. But the system itself has been totally stable for me and it was a seamless transition on my machine.

Don Wilson 30 Jun 05

That’s surprising that Apple will try to index a flash memory card.

Jesper 30 Jun 05

Dashboard isn’t a memory hog if you don’t use it - all Dashboard widgets are initialized when you first activate it and will continue running in the background (although good-behaving widgets will stop doing whatever it is they do that’s not completely vital once hidden).

Alan 30 Jun 05

Alex, I wasn’t clear with what I said. I meant to say “with no way to turn it off” for external media, but thanks for the tip. :)

Matthew 01 Jul 05

The worst is the removal of the basic “find” tool. I have my external drive excluded from Dashboard. (I don’t understand why people are saying you can’t turn it off for external drives- Its in the privacy tab of Spotlight prefs).

The problem is when I want to find a file in my backup on my External drive.

I dont want Spotlight to index my backup drive, I’m sure you can understand why. Apple-F under the finder uses Spotlight, they need to change it to how it was back in Panther.

Dan Boland 07 Jul 05

Matthew, I couldn’t agree with you more, but mainly because I turned Spotlight off because it’s slow. But in doing so, I’ve turned off the only Find feature in the OS. The simple Find window from Panther was perfect.