Real Kato Blog: Apple Watch: Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger"

With much fanfare and hullaballoo, Apple released its latest operating system upgrade on Friday.

As is customary for major Apple events, Mac fans lined up at Apple retail stores on Friday, to celebrate the launch of Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". According to an article I read, one elderly woman passing by asked, "What is this 'Tiger'?" When told it was computer software, she just shook her head and walked away.

Apple brings about a devotion that most other technology manufacturers can't even begin to understand. And what's more, the fact that 90% of consumers don't understand it either makes it that much more appealing for us Mac fans. We revel in the fact that we're privy to a secret: we know that technology can be elegant and beautiful, and not just utilitarian.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is a giant leap forward in operating system design. A lot of folks will talk about the glamorous features like the integrated system-wide search function, "Spotlight", and the desk-accessory-widget function, "Dashboard". But the real advances are under the hood.

For those of you who are technically inclined, I recommend this excellent article by John Siracusa over at Ars Technica. If you read it, you may get a sense of why Mac OS X is so much better than Windows, and even why it's better than Linux. (I'm not trying to dish on Linux; it's a marvel for what it is. But it simply doesn't match the technological complexity and elegance of Mac OS X.)

I'm not going to talk about all the new features, partly because I already talked about them before, and partly because there's been so much written about Tiger in the press already. As I predicted, the press is awash with bad "Tiger" puns. Here are a few examples, but be warned, you may be tempted to gouge out your eyeballs after reading too many:

- "Apple Unleashes Tiger operating system" - Knight Ridder Newspapers
- "Tiger Leaps Out in Front" - The Wall Street Journal
- "Apple's Tiger earns its stripes" - USA Today
- "Tiger earns its stripes for Apple" - Guardian Unlimited
- "Apple takes Tiger by the tail with free installation" - USA Today
- "Apple bares Tiger's teeth tonight" - San Francisco Chronicle
- "Will Apple's Tiger roar?" - San Francisco Chronicle
- "Apple lets Tiger out of bag" - AP Newswire
- "'Tiger' roars into stores" - AP Newswire
- "Apple sets Tiger free on public" - BBC
- "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright" - Wired News
- "Tiger unleashed today" - TheInquirer.net
- "Tiger hunts in 64-bit packs" - TheInquirer.net
- "The Cat's Out of the Bag" - UneasySilence.com
- "Apple's Tiger OS set to pounce in Singapore" - The Business Times: Singapore
- "Apple's Tiger set to roar" - SiliconRepublic.com
- "Tiger. It's Grrrrrrreat!" - Personal Tech Pipeline
- "Tiger Leaps Out in Front" - Walt Mossberg's Personal Technology
- "This Tiger purrs more than growls" - Seattle Times
- "Apple bares Tiger's teeth tonight" - vnunet.com
- "Tiger Server Roars, Too" - eWeek

It goes on and on. "Unleashed" seems to be the most popular metaphor. Oh, and when mentioning the Siracusa article, Macworld UK had an article entitled "Ars Technica pulls Tiger's tail."

Somebody please stop the madness.

The reviews are, by and large, positive. There are scattered reports of application incompatibilities. Notable ones are Microsoft VirtualPC 7, Roxio Toast, Roxio Popcorn, the Cisco VPN client, and Norton Anti-Virus. Hopefully we'll see some quick updates come out (though Microsoft will reportedly take two or three months to come out with a VPC update... grrr). You might want to check with the Tiger Vittles web page, which is one of many sites maintaining a list of applications and their Tiger compatibility status.

I personally will wait a while before upgrading my primary desktop machine, partly because I'm dependent on VPC7 for work-related stuff. For other Mac owners out there, I'd recommend doing a little research, and letting some of the early bugs shake out, before going ahead and upgrading.

One last bit of news... a company called "TigerDirect.com" is suing Apple for infringing on its trademark. Now, the fact that this lawsuit was filed one day before Tiger's launch makes it seem like a pretty transparent cheap publicity stunt. I predict that this lawsuit will go absolutely nowhere.

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