Tiger - What's the Verdict?

[sharkbait]

New Mac Mini w/Tiger

Tiger is working well here, big fan. New to Mac too. Ordered my Mini the day Tiger was released. 1.42G/1GB RAM/80GB/AP+BT. Please don't lecture - I have a great monitor/wireless kybd/mouse and the mini was for me for a bunch of reasons. Arrived from China Monday via FedEx with Panther preloaded and Tiger disk in box, I upgraded immeadiately. Very good performance on Tiger with most of my problems being small and having to do with my learning the MAC way and fumbling with Iphoto to get things set up the way I want and giving up my old Windows ways. I have 24G of music and 6G of pics loaded on an external 250GB drive-works fine. My biggest problem is that the OS has locked up a few times. Granted this is usually when I have about 10 things going on at once and have been hopping around from app to app, but I am unable to get it back when it locks up and am forced to power off/on. Feel like I'm doing something wrong when I do that. Overall the Tiger experience is great. Setup was so quick and I have done more config of equipment, networking, s/w install and setup with such success that I can't stop smiling about how good it feels to leave Windows behind. I've played with Mini's in the Apple store in Honolulu and am glad to have 1G of Ram - it really runs smoothly and VERY fast in my opinion.

Update: I should have mentioned how easy it was to network and copy files from my work (DELL) Laptop running Win XP - it took maybe five minutes. Same thing with so many other things that would have taken hours in my previous life.

 

[Dahl]

I have Tiger in a box next to me and I really want to install it, but I think I'll wait a week. I just hope the update is coming mid may as rumored.

I want to install.... Agghhh...

It's like the pool is warm, but I don't trust the people already in.
Maybe I'll fold under peer pressure before the night is over.

 

[Blurg]

Everything's good here

I finally got my Tiger today from Amazon, I wasn't going to install it until 10.4.1 but I couldn't resist

I did an Archive and Install, and luckily everything seems to have gone well, I'm really liking it. Spotlight is amazing, as is Dashboard. No problems importing Mail, and I'm probably one of the five people who likes the new look But then again, I also like brushed metal, so call me crazy

 

[bousozoku]

I'd received my copy from ADC today and installed it on my PowerBook, which has a lesser function at the moment and can be rebuilt quickly.

I noticed a huge improvement in throughput, but I suppose that will be lessened by fixes in 10.4.1 as usually happens. Getting it right is certainly more important than getting it wrong quickly.

I haven't really noticed a lot of differences but the stripes are quite pronounced again. I liked it the other way but oh well. As long as it's quick and accurate.

 

[MyLeftNut]

Performance issues

Hi all,

Minor performance issues here. Things have been great but lately checking the activity monitor shows a hell of alot of root processes going on, although they dont seem to be taking up any memory, the monitor shows the system memory sometimes sucking up 50% or more CPU cycles making things very slow and annoying...Im not sure what it is...any ideas?

BTW running PB 17 RevC 1.5Ghz 1Gig RAM Tiger 10.4 + Lacie FW external drive 200G.

 

[whooleytoo]

I think the faster Mac you have, the better value you'll get out of Tiger. My Mac (800MHz G4) is probably right on the threshold - I won't see much benefit from Core Video, Core Image or all the benefits of QT7; and Spotlight on my machine is sloooooow.

Major glitches I've experienced:

- USB bus hangs when I hot-plug a second mouse in.

- Several widgets/apps are either completely unresponsive or very slow. Particularly the Stickies widget (doesn't accept any text), iTunes widget (takes 5-20 seconds to respond to a button click), Camino (unable to enter text into any forms).

- Spotlight very unreliable. For instance, typing "Graphicc" didn't find GraphicConverter, which has been sitting in my Applications folder in spite of it being there for several days. Also, after "hiding" a folder (using the Spotlight preferences) and "unhiding" it later, I still couldn't search for files in that folder, either in Spotlight or the Finder's search.

Minor glitches:

- Several UI glitches.

- While overall performance has improved, there are far more 'spinning pizzas of death' than on Panther.

Pluses:

The developer tools are great fun to play with, and offer some great functionality - particularly Core Data, Core Image and better performance from QT7, Quartz 2D Extreme. I can see some great apps appearing in the next 6-12 months.

 

[Dahl]

OK, I finally installed Tiger and I have had zero problems so far, but I still have to launch several pro apps like After Effects, Photoshop, Maya and Illustrator.

I really like the apps everybody loves, Spotlight and Dashboard. I'm also really looking forward to trying out iChat. I want to see how a 3way video chat holds up. Another cool thing is how Jabber now works with iChat, so you can use iChat for all your chat programs.
Mail looks a bit out of place, it's odd how the gui looks so different than the rest of Apple's apps. I wonder why ?