Who is still on Tiger? And will you now get SL?

[OldCorpse]

I'm still on Tiger (10.4.11). That's because I'm on PPC macs only (iBook and mini), and Leopard was the first OS release that was actually slower than the old OS it replaced (unlike f.ex. Panther was faster than Jaguar, and Tiger was faster than Panther on older hardware etc.). Leopard is bloated compared to Tiger, and far more buggy upon release (and delayed, because even Apple themselves admitted they pulled the engineers off Leopard development, to throw them at the iPhone). In fact, compared to my 2 friends on Leopard, my 10.4.11 is still far more stable (they have endless problems, especially with wireless and internet connections, and so on). In fact, one can see Snow Leopard as the OS that Leopard should have been, had it not been done half-a$$ed and hurried sloppily. So they are going to release SL with "no new features" - just Leopard as it should have been in the first place.

Tiger has been rock solid for me. The problem is that my hardware is getting old (3-4 years), and I need new hardware. I consciously boycotted Leopard - I simply decided to skip the 10.5.x releases. Now is the time to get new hardware, and with it, Snow Leopard. I hope it will have proven worth the wait. Here's what I'm hoping for:

1)Stability - yes, I know any .0 release will have some initial bugs, but I'm hoping it won't the be the horror 10.5.1-2-3 was.

2)Speed increases. I'm hoping it is significantly faster and not as bloated.

3)That they fixed a number of issues with internet connections being dropped, with Time Machine being wonky, with Spotlight still useless after all these years, with Finder finally being more than a toy and a few more annoyances.

So, who else here is on Tiger with no real experience of Leopard? And do you plan on getting SL? I'm thinking of getting some hardware late October or early November, maybe by then we'll have 10.6.1 out to fix some initial bugs.

 

[Sky Blue]

We've installed 10.5 in about 90 PPC Macs, all have been more responsive than they were with 10.4.
Were you doing an upgrade or an erase and install?

One can see Snow Leopard as the OS that Leopard should have been, had it not been done half-a$$ed and hurried sloppily.

One can't see very clearly.

 

[OldCorpse]

We've installed 10.5 in about 90 PPC Macs, all have been more responsive than they were with 10.4.
Were you doing an upgrade or an erase and install?

I never even bothered installing Leopard on my macs - I have an iBook PPC 1.33Ghz 1.5GB RAM, and a mini PPC 1.5Ghz 1GB RAM. But it is commonly acknowledged that Leopard is the first OS X that's slower on older hardware, whereas every other iteration kept getting faster - I guess Leopard is simply a more demanding OS and older hardware cannot keep up.

And as to Leopard being late and sloppy - this is officially acknowledged by Apple: they admitted that Leopard release was delayed because engineers were pulled off to work on the iPhone - that's the official statement from Apple. So, if they were late due to engineers being pulled off, how good a job do you think they did compared to Tiger or Panther, were the engineers gave it their undivided attention and full manpower?

 

[iBookG4user]

1)Stability - yes, I know any .0 release will have some initial bugs, but I'm hoping it won't the be the horror 10.5.1-2-3 was.

I've used both Tiger and Leopard since they came out and never saw the "horror" of 10.5.0-1-2-3 that you seem to think it was. I really haven't ran into many bugs at all and Leopard is a very stable operating system, it hardly if ever crashes on me. I haven't had a single kernal panic in a long time on the 5 Macs in the house that are on Leopard. Programs crash about as often as they did on Tiger.

2)Speed increases. I'm hoping it is significantly faster and not as bloated.

In my experience Leopard was about the same speed as Tiger, for fastest results you'll always want to do an erase and install.

3)That they fixed a number of issues with internet connections being dropped, with Time Machine being wonky, with Spotlight still useless after all these years, with Finder finally being more than a toy and a few more annoyances.

I've honestly never had any networking trouble on Leopard, my internet was running slow for a while but that was a router problem and not related to Leopard. And I don't understand what you mean about Time Machine, Spotlight and Finder. Spotlight works very quickly (much faster than Tiger), Time Machine works great for both recovering single files and doing reinstalls from backups. And what new features do you want in Finder?

 

[velocityg4]

We've installed 10.5 in about 90 PPC Macs, all have been more responsive than they were with 10.4.
Were you doing an upgrade or an erase and install?

I never even bothered installing Leopard on my macs - I have an iBook PPC 1.33Ghz 1.5GB RAM, and a mini PPC 1.5Ghz 1GB RAM. But it is commonly acknowledged that Leopard is the first OS X that's slower on older hardware, whereas every other iteration kept getting faster - I guess Leopard is simply a more demanding OS and older hardware cannot keep up.

And as to Leopard being late and sloppy - this is officially acknowledged by Apple: they admitted that Leopard release was delayed because engineers were pulled off to work on the iPhone - that's the official statement from Apple. So, if they were late due to engineers being pulled off, how good a job do you think they did compared to Tiger or Panther, were the engineers gave it their undivided attention and full manpower?

I found Leopard to be quicker on a G4 466mhz I have lying around.

I actually found Tiger to be a big slowdown after Panther. On an iMac G4 I used to have since the RAM was 512MB.

On any old Mac with 256MB RAM anything above 10.2 is a big slowdown.

 

[Cinder6]

I never even bothered installing Leopard on my macs - I have an iBook PPC 1.33Ghz 1.5GB RAM, and a mini PPC 1.5Ghz 1GB RAM. But it is commonly acknowledged that Leopard is the first OS X that's slower on older hardware, whereas every other iteration kept getting faster - I guess Leopard is simply a more demanding OS and older hardware cannot keep up.

Then you can't really talk, unless you've had a lot of personal experience with other Macs that did run 10.5.

And as to Leopard being late and sloppy - this is officially acknowledged by Apple: they admitted that Leopard release was delayed because engineers were pulled off to work on the iPhone - that's the official statement from Apple. So, if they were late due to engineers being pulled off, how good a job do you think they did compared to Tiger or Panther, were the engineers gave it their undivided attention and full manpower?

That's some faulty reasoning. Leopard was delayed, as you said, because they pulled engineers to work on the iPhone. That does not mean, however, that Leopard was simply an afterthought in the eyes of the developers. The fact it was delayed so much suggests that they took their time; if Apple had pulled engineers, yet still delivered Leopard on schedule, then you might have a case that they did their work sloppily (or rushed).

 

[OldCorpse]

I've honestly never had any networking trouble on Leopard, my internet was running slow for a while but that was a router problem and not related to Leopard.

You're lucky then. Look at the forums, there are far more people with connectivity problems under Leopard than there ever were under Tiger.

And I don't understand what you mean about Time Machine, Spotlight and Finder. Spotlight works very quickly (much faster than Tiger), Time Machine works great for both recovering single files and doing reinstalls from backups. And what new features do you want in Finder?

The problem with Spotlight is not speed, it's finding stuff. Very often it can't for me. Files and folders I can pull up, that Spotlight can't find. If I can't rely on it, then it's junk to me. Time Machine I see a lot of complaints about corruption - but have no personal experience, just hoping they fixed in SL whatever was wrong with TM. And Finder - really, I'm hoping for a re-design. Moving files and folders is such an ordeal under Finder - I even prefer the Windows system much as I hate to admit that. At least with the tree system I can see at a glance exactly where a folder needs to go from one drive to another, without having to drill down and open endless windows as it's under Finder. Or at least there should be a "move" option under the right click, so I don't have to click and hold while moving the mouse. The OSX way of doing all this is retarded. Why am I always limited to the stupid "frame at a time" system when I want to view the file structure?

 

[Amdahl]

But it is commonly acknowledged that Leopard is the first OS X that's slower on older hardware, whereas every other iteration kept getting faster - I guess Leopard is simply a more demanding OS and older hardware cannot keep up.

I predicted that before it came out, and many thought I was crazy. Leopard is slower because it does more than Tiger (preview icons, for example), and Apple ran out of gross inefficiencies in OS X to eliminate, with the notable exception of Spotlight index lookup times. Everything else became a liability.

So, if they were late due to engineers being pulled off, how good a job do you think they did compared to Tiger or Panther, were the engineers gave it their undivided attention and full manpower?

For PPC, there was also the problem that they were now developing for the Intel chips, which had 2MB to 4MB caches, while only the best G5s had 1MB per core, while older G5s had 512k per core. This means they did things that didn't hurt Intel systems, but could cause things to start to drag on PPC. Graphically, they added the bigger shadows on each window, which impacts performance, since they have to be calculated everytime a window updates under the shadow, the reflections, and the transparency. Each one is no big deal, but add them all up, and you can feel it. Except on a Quad G5 with ATI X1900... That still moves quick.

 

[dukebound85]

We've installed 10.5 in about 90 PPC Macs, all have been more responsive than they were with 10.4.
Were you doing an upgrade or an erase and install?



One can't see very clearly.

uh leopard definitly slowed down my ppc macs compared to tiger

 

[decksnap]

We've installed 10.5 in about 90 PPC Macs, all have been more responsive than they were with 10.4.
Were you doing an upgrade or an erase and install?


One can't see very clearly.

I would disagree with that. 10.5 is less responsive on every machine I've put it on, which is admittedly only five or six, but still.