2 Tiger Or Not 2 Tiger
 

Okay, now that Tiger's been out for a while... is it worth the upgrade? Honest opinions. I played with Tiger at the local CompUSA, it seems pretty cool, but it's hard to demo an operating system in 10 minutes. Here's my current setup. I've been thinking about selling it all on eBay and just buying a new G5 w/Tiger... blah blah blah

I trust the minds on this forum... what say you?

A few people have gripes with Tiger, but I have noticed real speed improvements and had a flawless upgrade. You won't notice the 200 extra improvements, but Spotlight, dashboard and the dictonary functions really come in handy.
If I were you I would perhaps consider selling the old clam on ebay, they still get about £200 if your lucky, might be worth getting a 12" Powerbook, I have got one and I have no complaints with it. But a New G5 would be a real step up from your ibook! :D

Thanks for your $.02 Photek. I think you might've misread the web page though, I got rid of the iBook a while ago, that's why it's in red. I'm thinking about selling everything and starting over with 1 G5 and later adding a Laptop...

Anyway... glad to hear Tiger seems snappier than Panther. I think Panther seemed a lot snappier than Jaguar... Jag was a little snappier than Cheetah.

i will definitely state "to tiger"

And Tiger does have nice added network support for more proper access to other resources such as windows machines and servers, and as other said... it is snappier... Even less beach balls than with Panther, which had improved on this quite alot compared to Jaguar.

Productivity Wise: Automator makes my world go around now. I use workflows to move, copy, resize, rename, etc. It feels like my computer thinks for me due to the Finder Plugins I've made. Automator is a app that will grow endlessly with more upgrades to make otherwise tedious tasks simple and fun. I find I am creating workflows everyday that just make my life so much easier and more organized.

Information Wise: Dashboard allows you to instantly access information that you could spend fifteen minutes on the web finding. Plus widgets are simple enough to make. Custom Widgets can grab any sort information at the touch of a button.

Functionalty Wise: Spotlight gives you incredible control and command of all the files at hand. Smart folders using spotlight let you organize your thoughts, projects and information like I never even dreamed before.

Tiger is far and away my favorite upgrade, I highly reccomend it. You and your computer will thank you.

(I know I'm towing the company line but what can I else can I do. I LOVE Tiger!)

Just be sure to check the reports and make sure the printer(s), applications, and pci cards you have will work. In addition, make sure you have a really good backup so you can get back to a working system when the install fails or some program you need does not work. Personally I have found that features of both my Canon i850 and Epson R200 are no longer available in Tiger. I also get kernel panics with my SCSI card installed. Others have not experience these issues and/or do not care about the features I am missing, so that is ok for them, but not for me.

bummer about the printer... I have a Canon S800 printer... I hope it doesn't suffer the same fate, along with my N670U scanner. Thanks for the opinions... I leaning towards just buying a new G5, rather than spend the money for the upgrade... and then end up selling the eMac.

to tiger indeed

To Tiger I say.

Ordered it 2 hours after it was announced, installed it within 30 minutes of getting it, loved it 99.9999999% of the time since that.

Only bit I don't love is Mail 2.app, its v-e-r-y slow for me, and this is slower than Mail 1 was on 256MB ram, and it has 1.256GB ram now...

Tiger or no?...
 

I never considered myself to be an old fossil but have been loathe to upgrade from Jaguar (iMac G4 800 with SD and 512mb RAM) or a new mac without proof positive of the benefit. Apart from the (unfortunate) move towards USB2 on many new peripherals (incl. digital cameras and external hdds) I am not tempted to upgrade my hardware.

Regarding Tiger... I have heard that one cannot play mp3 files downloaded without upgrading to QT Pro. This sounds faintly ludicrous as QT is for movies and iTunes for mp3 but I wondered if there is any truth to it or any similar restriction which is NOT present in earlier versions. To clarify, is there anything in terms of function that Tiger and its apps CANNOT do (without upgrading to QT Pro) that earlier versions could?

On an entirely unrelated note if anyone knows of an 802.11g replacement card for an internal original Airport slot (in the base of my iMac) please do let me know. An old thread on this site has pointed me in the possibele direction of a Buffalo WLI-CB-G54A (thanks to anthlover) but if anyone has actually done this with any 802.11g card successfully please let me know.

Hoping to wring as much life out of my iMac as possible.. :)

I have gotten a pretty good increase in performance with Tiger. The machine seems snappier doing almost everything.

I like most of the new features. I use several of them regularly (Automator, Spotlight, Dictionary). Overall, I'm pretty happy with most of the new features that I have used.

I have had no actual problems. I have had a couple of odd things happen, though. I am now experiencing the chirp. I don't think I even heard it on this machine before. At least, I think I would have noticed it.

Also, I was looking forward to trying the built-in monitor rotation. I recently upgraded to a Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Edition (with 256M). I had used VersaVision with it under 10.3.8. I can't figure out why the option doesn't show up in the Displays preference panel. Not a big deal, though.

All the applications I use either worked fine or were updated shortly. I guess I would have to vote 'to Tiger'.

Paul

As usual, I think the "to" or "not" depends on what one wants to do. If you do just a little email and web surfing, plus, maybe, an occasional word-processing document, you can stay with Panther and not miss anything; heck, you can be at OS 8.1 and do all that just fine.

So, cameranerd74, what exactly do you do on your computer, and what benefits would you be seeking from an upgrade?

Hold down option as you click "Displays" in the system prefs.

I tried that but it doesn't work on my machine.

Try command, I think someone somewhere said that works. Strange though, you have an ATI card and it doesn't rotate...

A lot! Everything from image editing (photoshop/illustrator), to homework (word, powerpoint), to web surfing (firefox, safari), to email (mail), to music making (garageband), and just about everything in between. I'm currently a photographer by day, IT student by night. I'm going to graduate in less than 6 months, so If I'm going to buy a G5 (or anything for that matter), I want to do it while I still qualify for an Apple Student Discount. I got a FULL schedule, so it seems like every time I sit down at my computer, I'm in a hurry.... so there's another argument for a hardware upgrade to match the new OS.

That doesn't work either. I thought I had tried this previously. But I wanted to try it again before I told you. I probably need to move this to a new thread.

Right, shooter, start a help request if you haven't already done so.

I have a gripe w/Tiger, and it was annoying enough to make me revert to 10.3.9:
With several apps open (3-5 or more, all Tiger-compatible and no heavyweights) it became pretty painful to switch between apps - a delay of several seconds (sometimes 15+). There was also a long delay between adjusting the volume keys and seeing the bezel pop up. I didn't spend much time debugging, but I usually have Quicktime open maybe that's the culprit. I did make sure that Spotlight was not indexing my system into the dirt.

I did a clean install to a newly formatted disk.

Anyone have any ideas on this one? Thanks...

iBook 700Mhz
640MB RAM

Too bad you didn't feel like spending more time debugging. If you had started a help thread on this, we might have been able to track down what was causing the problem. It seems likely that it was some system "enhancement" that wasn't fully compatible. I've seen a few reports of slow volume adjustment, but nothing about such slow application switching. What you describe sounds like what you would get with a lot of disk swapping - as if you didn't have enough RAM - but you seem to have enough.

(Edit: hadn't seen the Spotlight reference)

It's often as easy as opening Activity Monitor to see what's soaking up the cpu or memory. I've had a few occasions where some widget was the culprit; closing the culprit restored things to normal.

Wait a minute....
 

After yesterday's news I'm not sure if a G5 is the right way to go. Maybe I should just opt for an iMac or a Mac Mini. That way I get to Tiger and don't have a huge amount invested, so in a year when the Intel-macs start shipping I'll be able to justify one of those. Hmmmmmmmm. ;)

Note that as far as I understand, the first year will see only the lower-end Macs (e.g. Mac Mini) replaced by Intel-based machines. The high-end machines will likely be the last ones to switch over. So if you are in need of the power of a G5 PowerMac, you might have to wait longer than a year to get an equivalent Intel-based replacement.

Why buy mac at all? Buy an opteron based system, run Linux, get most of the SW for free, and get 2x the performance of the G5 and a REAL 64 bit OS! With even Tiger, I will have to spend more than the cost of the above to make my peripherals work again on my Dual 1G G4. With the x86 version I also have to replace all of my SW or run in emulation which would be far slower. I have been a 20+ year loyal fan of Apple... but no more.

Two words (or three letters):
OS X

True, Jobs did say, "There are a lot of PPC products in the pipeline." However, they're selling the Developer kit for $999 (which includes a Pentium4-powered PowerMac), so it kinda makes me wonder what's really in the works. The fact that they'll be providing backwards compatibility for PPC is nice, but I wonder how long until PPC macs are relics.

I'm not sure what the provision of that developer-kit Mac is implying about what will be "in the works". Jobs made it clear that that machine was just a hacked together development prototype and was not a product and in fact was really just on loan to developers - they have to return it in December 2006.

You could perhaps extrapolate from previous transitions to see how long that might be. E.g. how long after OS X first shipped was it before OS 9 was no longer supported on new Macs? How far before the Tiger ship was the shipping of the newest Mac model that wasn't supported for Tiger?

I think there's some good discussion to go on here... I should probably start a new thread. ;)

Yeah it's really fast and much more stable, the only problem IMO is on PowerBook G4s it causes the fan to come on alot regaurdless of what you're doing

This is absolutely false. I have a huge collection of .mp3's and have not (and will probably never) upgrade to QT Pro, and can play all any .mp3 I own. I have even added some to my collection after upgrading to Tiger so it's not like it's only the old ones work.

What I want to know though, has anyone else noticed a slow down in scrolling (I'm using the two-finger method on my trackpad) when reading RSS feeds in Safari's new feature? It's somewhat annoying. Switching to a standard webpage returns scrolling to normal.