Psychologists say that things like gambling are so addictive because they have an IRREGULAR reward system (unlike say, payout every third try, EVERY try COULD pay)
Anand tends to update in sorta random bursts, leaving us hopelessly addicted
Er, never mind on that last one. You just have to check "allow scripts to change images" under the Advanced JavaScript Options tab. Strange that it's not on by default. The first bullet still applies though.
A little off topic, but I didn't really know where to put this stuff:
- The RTPE (original linked one, not the beta) hasn't worked for me for quite a few days now. The categorie links just come up with blank pages. It currently says "Pricing was last updated 4372 minutes ago" at the top of the page.
- I don't know if this is a firefox issue or what, but your rollover images don't work for me with that browser. I have to switch back to IE whenever I want to check out one of your (extremely useful) overlay shots.
Talking about guides. I was very favoribly impressed with the discussion on Half-Life's GPU vs. CPU frame rates. Tom's Hardware has an excellent comparision of cpus. Would Anandtech be willing to do something like their Half-Life comparison on more video cards and organize it like the CPU chart? It would be useful in figuring out if a simple GPU upgrade is going to pay off. Based on your Half-Life guide, I've already figured out that upgrading my 9600SE will not be very helpful, since I'm CPU limited with my P4 1.7GHz.
I installed Tiger on my Quicksilver 733 Mhz, 1.25 GB RAM. Clean install after backing up previous OS to external Firewire-HD. Except for one bug after installation was complete, everything seems to be working fine-no crashes in Safari, but occasional crashes in Word and Canvas 9.0. After registration and successful automatic transfer of files and applications from another partition, the installer asked me if I wanted to proceed to go into my account. I said yes and at this point the screen turned blue and had one arrow-but no menus or anything else. There was no feedback as to what was happening-I suspect that it had started to index. I finally did a hard reset. It now booted up fine into Tiger. Initially, I felt the OS was stuttering a bit (possibly due to indexing process). Now everything seems to be running just fine-system feels a bit snappier than Panther.
One gripe is the washed out looking icons in the tool bar of Mail application. I noticed changes to the Keychain. Ripple effect is not present in Dashboard/Konfabulator rip off (graphic card not up to snuff?). Discovering new stuff everyday.
Spotlight: The search in Classic was also very impressive (in fact I would argue even faster). In Classic we could fine tune search using specific metadata.
Another general gripe about Os X: There is a lot more arbitrary change in UI and behavior from one version to another. Consistency is good and change for change sake is not, IMHO.
This is in contrast to Classic where once you learnt to use one version, all versions were just the same with the newer versions having a few more bells and whistles.
All in all I feel Tiger is a solid upgrade: Maybe a few bugs, but I would not call it rushed. Of course, no OS is in 'completed' form when shipped. The pursuit for perfection continues endlessly (for good reason!).
"Quicktime... very similar in quality and file size to Microsoft's WMV9"
Now that's an interesting review subject, (Anand, what do you think?)... ignoring the fact that quictime is winning the standards war because if fear of Microsoft by the Movie industry.
Don't forget that quicktime is an authoring environment - not just a player.
Quicktime7 & wmv9 on PC have good performance... can't scrub through wmv... quicktime 6 looks better when scaled... quicktime 7 is incredible ....h264.
Quicktime on Mac is excellent. Wmv playback on a Mac is so bad it's unusable. Wmv9 is not supported at all. When Macs are so often the platform of choice for content creation is that wise?
Microsoft have been backing off Mac support recently - just squeezing it out a little. Office for Mac is still there and OK - but recent tests at BareFeats showed excel running faster in Virtual PC on a Mac than the native version! I've got it but never use it because it's just too slow... however, so is 'Pages', Apple's new Page layout/WP app.
Apple Software for Mac and PC:
iTunes - parity
Quicktime - parity
Bonjour - parity
Even the ageing Appleworks is almost at parity (6.2 to 6.2.9)
Microsoft Software for Mac and PC:
Office: 2004 vs 2003 (XP)
Windows Media player: 9 vs 10
Messenger: 4.0.1 vs 7
Internet Explorer: Discontinued at 5.2.3 vs 6 (soon 7)
WMA: no planned support for DRM on Macs
WMV: no support for wmv9, abysmal performance of earlier versions
There's always been a lag - but it's getting worse.
He probably didn't mention "Quicktime's new standard" substantially, Pete, because it's nothing unique to QuickTime or Apple. It's simply MPEG-4 Part 10, also known as AVC, and is a format that competes with and is very similar in quality and file size to Microsoft's WMV9 (also called VC-1). Probably the main reason why he excluded it is that QT7 will be available shortly as a free download. Freely-downloadable components (such as new versions of Windows Media Player or DirectX) usually get their own reviews, rather than much mention in the reviews of the operating systems that come with them.
"It's not the best test in the world, but it is interesting that there is an order of magnitude of performance improvement of Tiger over Panther. I'm not totally convinced that this isn't a bug with the test yet however, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it just yet."
I hope by now you've read Siracusa's excellent review and in particular, the Quartz 2D Extreme section with an explanation of the technology and benchmarks.
It's unsurprising that Let1KWindowsBloom benchmark is 5-6x faster given that the GPU is doing the compositing work now...
#9
I 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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22 Comments
Back to Article
rock_eater - Monday, May 16, 2005 - link
...Anands blog is like a slot machine....Psychologists say that things like gambling are so addictive because they have an IRREGULAR reward system (unlike say, payout every third try, EVERY try COULD pay)
Anand tends to update in sorta random bursts, leaving us hopelessly addicted
;)
fricardo - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
Er, never mind on that last one. You just have to check "allow scripts to change images" under the Advanced JavaScript Options tab. Strange that it's not on by default. The first bullet still applies though.fricardo - Saturday, May 14, 2005 - link
A little off topic, but I didn't really know where to put this stuff:- The RTPE (original linked one, not the beta) hasn't worked for me for quite a few days now. The categorie links just come up with blank pages. It currently says "Pricing was last updated 4372 minutes ago" at the top of the page.
- I don't know if this is a firefox issue or what, but your rollover images don't work for me with that browser. I have to switch back to IE whenever I want to check out one of your (extremely useful) overlay shots.
Anonymous - Thursday, May 12, 2005 - link
no web blog update from Anand?kleinwl - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
Talking about guides. I was very favoribly impressed with the discussion on Half-Life's GPU vs. CPU frame rates. Tom's Hardware has an excellent comparision of cpus. Would Anandtech be willing to do something like their Half-Life comparison on more video cards and organize it like the CPU chart? It would be useful in figuring out if a simple GPU upgrade is going to pay off. Based on your Half-Life guide, I've already figured out that upgrading my 9600SE will not be very helpful, since I'm CPU limited with my P4 1.7GHz.Keep up the good work.
Hobbs - Friday, May 6, 2005 - link
Nice review.I installed Tiger on my Quicksilver 733 Mhz, 1.25 GB RAM. Clean install after backing up previous OS to external Firewire-HD. Except for one bug after installation was complete, everything seems to be working fine-no crashes in Safari, but occasional crashes in Word and Canvas 9.0. After registration and successful automatic transfer of files and applications from another partition, the installer asked me if I wanted to proceed to go into my account. I said yes and at this point the screen turned blue and had one arrow-but no menus or anything else. There was no feedback as to what was happening-I suspect that it had started to index. I finally did a hard reset. It now booted up fine into Tiger. Initially, I felt the OS was stuttering a bit (possibly due to indexing process). Now everything seems to be running just fine-system feels a bit snappier than Panther.
One gripe is the washed out looking icons in the tool bar of Mail application. I noticed changes to the Keychain. Ripple effect is not present in Dashboard/Konfabulator rip off (graphic card not up to snuff?). Discovering new stuff everyday.
Spotlight: The search in Classic was also very impressive (in fact I would argue even faster). In Classic we could fine tune search using specific metadata.
Another general gripe about Os X: There is a lot more arbitrary change in UI and behavior from one version to another. Consistency is good and change for change sake is not, IMHO.
This is in contrast to Classic where once you learnt to use one version, all versions were just the same with the newer versions having a few more bells and whistles.
All in all I feel Tiger is a solid upgrade: Maybe a few bugs, but I would not call it rushed. Of course, no OS is in 'completed' form when shipped. The pursuit for perfection continues endlessly (for good reason!).
Anonymous - Friday, May 6, 2005 - link
"Quicktime... very similar in quality and file size to Microsoft's WMV9"Now that's an interesting review subject, (Anand, what do you think?)... ignoring the fact that quictime is winning the standards war because if fear of Microsoft by the Movie industry.
Don't forget that quicktime is an authoring environment - not just a player.
Quicktime7 & wmv9 on PC have good performance... can't scrub through wmv... quicktime 6 looks better when scaled... quicktime 7 is incredible ....h264.
Quicktime on Mac is excellent. Wmv playback on a Mac is so bad it's unusable. Wmv9 is not supported at all. When Macs are so often the platform of choice for content creation is that wise?
Microsoft have been backing off Mac support recently - just squeezing it out a little. Office for Mac is still there and OK - but recent tests at BareFeats showed excel running faster in Virtual PC on a Mac than the native version! I've got it but never use it because it's just too slow... however, so is 'Pages', Apple's new Page layout/WP app.
Apple Software for Mac and PC:
iTunes - parity
Quicktime - parity
Bonjour - parity
Even the ageing Appleworks is almost at parity (6.2 to 6.2.9)
Microsoft Software for Mac and PC:
Office: 2004 vs 2003 (XP)
Windows Media player: 9 vs 10
Messenger: 4.0.1 vs 7
Internet Explorer: Discontinued at 5.2.3 vs 6 (soon 7)
WMA: no planned support for DRM on Macs
WMV: no support for wmv9, abysmal performance of earlier versions
There's always been a lag - but it's getting worse.
The_Necromancer - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link
Why so much focus on Macs???we need so more PC hard ware reviews.
Jon - Thursday, May 5, 2005 - link
He probably didn't mention "Quicktime's new standard" substantially, Pete, because it's nothing unique to QuickTime or Apple. It's simply MPEG-4 Part 10, also known as AVC, and is a format that competes with and is very similar in quality and file size to Microsoft's WMV9 (also called VC-1). Probably the main reason why he excluded it is that QT7 will be available shortly as a free download. Freely-downloadable components (such as new versions of Windows Media Player or DirectX) usually get their own reviews, rather than much mention in the reviews of the operating systems that come with them.Glenn - Tuesday, May 3, 2005 - link
Regarding the Let1KWindowsBloom test..."It's not the best test in the world, but it is interesting that there is an order of magnitude of performance improvement of Tiger over Panther. I'm not totally convinced that this isn't a bug with the test yet however, so I wouldn't put too much faith in it just yet."
I hope by now you've read Siracusa's excellent review and in particular, the Quartz 2D Extreme section with an explanation of the technology and benchmarks.
It's unsurprising that Let1KWindowsBloom benchmark is 5-6x faster given that the GPU is doing the compositing work now...
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.
tl - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
"I only wish that Apple would add support for find as you type to Safari,"You might want to check out AcidSearch:
http://www.pozytron.com/?acidsearch
Includes find as you type as well as extra channels for the Google search field in the toolbar.
Good review.
Anonymous - Friday, April 29, 2005 - link
Congrats on the big 8 Anand, keep up the fantastic journalism.