I just wanted to chime in and let everyone know that the Tiger review is up. There's a lot more I want to talk about, including a bit about AnandTech's 8th year anniversary which was this past Tuesday, but that will have to wait. I'm completely worn out so I'm stepping away from work for the night. Vinney and I are going to grab some pizza and then mindlessly game for the majority of the night.
Enjoy the weekend folks :)
Enjoy the weekend folks :)
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
22 Comments
View All Comments
Keats - Tuesday, May 3, 2005 - link
"John Siracusa's excellent 21 page article at Ars:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars "
I second this... worth reading by anyone with a serious interest in the OS - No one writes reviews on the Mac OS like JS.
Jashin - Monday, May 2, 2005 - link
Great review, thanks!superduperjacob - Sunday, May 1, 2005 - link
#9I second that the Dictionary function is really nicely implemented and a very welcome addition! Note that it works throughout the system, and not just in Safari.
However, the dictionary looks up the definition of the word over which your mouse pointer is hovering when you press CMD+CTRL+D; you do not have to highlight text, and the definitions are updated dynamically as you move the mouse.
NETknightX - Sunday, May 1, 2005 - link
Great honest review!One thing I really like about Tiger is how they integrated the dictionary/thesaurus into the system.
In Safari, just highlight a word, then hit CMD+CTRL+D to get little popup definition.
methodical - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
agreed on quicktime 7.go to www.apple.com/quicktime and checkout the HD movie trailers. Checkout the quality vs filesizes. WOW. Basically running the same bitrates that current DVDs do!
one sweet thing they did is that scanning a movie is way faster... by scanning I mean grabbing the timeline/marker and moving it back and forth. super-fluid with DV video on my decrepit G4.
Pete - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
Hey Anand, I thought it was a great review as well; however, the absence of substanial comment on Quicktime's new standard was a little bummer. I took a trip to the Apple store to see it for myself, and I was quite impressed. Movie trailers in full HD on a 30" Cinema Display are pretty impressive; however, I think iChat is going to need to integrate the H.*** standard too. Anyway, great review. Keep up the great work!maharajah - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
Thanks for the "real" review.Almost all the other reviews out there were gushing about how great Tiger is.
It seems that most other reviewers just looked at Apple's marketing material, tried those features, then commented on it.
Yours is the first to highlight the rushed nature of Tiger with some of it's most apparent issues. It seems that your review is more from a users perspective, which I appreciate.
In fact if you look at some of the other mac forums, you'll see users start to bring up the issues you mentioned.
Jon - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
You're surprised that a new OS has bugs? Have you used Windows, ever?! It seemed like such a contrived thing to say, and you make way to much of the little things you found.Overall, a pretty weak review, at least from the POV of someone who was also in the Tiger beta program. Siracusa's review was much more like what I thought yours would be like. You didn't go in depth at all, just covered the things Apple used in their marketing material.
Oh, and Tiger should have started much faster than Panther for you. I'm not sure how you measured boot time, but in my experience, Tiger is much faster, especially on G5s. And you should really measure the time until the login screen appears. It's much more consistent between machines.
Endymion - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
Thanks for the review, Anand.Couldn't agree with you more on invasiveness. It's one of the things that I most dislike about Windows and it has been a great disappointment to see it creep into the Mac OS.
First, around OS 8.6 to 9, we lost keyboard power buttons... no more power button then Enter to shut down. The power button on the computer went from offering shut down to automatically sleeping. Apple want us to sleep machines - an environmentally unfriendly waste of a few watts x 25 million Macs.
Then the Shut Down from the Classic 'Special' menu threw up a dialogue instead of shutting down.
Later we started to see Windows style warning/confirmation dialogues in other places. It still doesn't give you the sense that Windows does, of Microsoft earning a cent for every click they put you through (just count the clicks for changing screen resolution on the two systems), but it is a definite trend for the worse - and it started before you climbed aboard.
Mephisto - Saturday, April 30, 2005 - link
Nice review Anand. Your reviews have a valuable characteristic: serious consideration of the Mac UI from a PC user's perspective. If your weblog readers would like the longterm insider's view they should read John Siracusa's excellent 21 page article at Ars:http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
If after that they are still hungry for more, and I think, Anand, you might fall into that category, then they/you can subscribe at Ars and download John's 106 page PDF on the subject.
John is to Mac reviewing what Anand is to Windows.
Disclaimer - I have absolutely nothing to do with Ars.