Horizen mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Announced
Posted : 13 April 2005
Apple today announced the release of their latest version of OS X. Dubbed
Tiger, it will be shipping from Friday, April 29 worldwide. Allowing international
time variations and and unexpected bugs I would wait til Monday before buying
and installing.
But for the rabid Mac addicts out there the likelihood of Tiger sitting on
the desk unopened is statistically approaching zero. Anyway at the very least
do a data backup and repair permissions before installing/upgrading.
Best install is always a clean install from a newly reformatted hard disk but this requires a fair bit more effort and reconfiguring everything from scratch, transferring data, mail, browser bookmarks, iTunes songs, iPhoto pictures, application preferences, etc. Most people don't bother. But I just thought I would mention it being the purist that I am.
http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/
Pricing is reduced from previous versions as it is selling for $199 inc GST. Jaguar and Panther sold for $229 inc GST retail. There is also a family pack, which is a 5 license version (for household use only) for $299 inc GST.
As with previous upgrades
I reckon this is a "must" purchase
upgrade.
---
Horizen Tiger Special On Site Install Offer
For those who want their
upgrade to go smoothly, if you order Tiger from me before April 29, I will
do a fixed
price upgrade, setup and
tour through
the
new features all for a fixed price of $120 inc GST. This would
make the bundle of Tiger including on site install $319 inc GST. After
that date
it will be
back to the normal hourly rate. Normal upgrades take between 1-2
hours so that is a pretty good discount. If there are problems on your
drive
that I have
to fix then that isn't included. As preparation you would need
to have all your data backed up first. Have to charge normal travel time
for
country clients
also sorry.
---
As a quick aside while I have your devoted attention... Adobe seem
to be introducing product activation with their new CS 2 suite.
This requires
you to not only
type in your serial number but also to activate the product by
Internet or phone. Otherwise it shuts down after 30 days. Like
Quark and Microsoft
have
been doing for ages. Also the local (international) version wont
be shipping until May some time. Anyone buying now gets a free
upgrade. See here
for
more info :
http://www.adobe.com.au/activation/main.html
---
And now back to OS X Tiger ...
Lots of new stuff :
Spotlight
RSS feeds for Safari
Automator
Dashboard
Widgets
Parental controls
VoiceOver
And more ...
http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/newfeatures/
Improved versions :
Quicktime 7
iChat 3
.Mac Sync
Address Book 2
Font Book 4
Mail 2
Preview 3
iCal 2
Safari 2 RSS
DVD Player 4.5
And more ...
http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/overview/
And the full list of what is in the box :
http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/techspecs/
They are listing as a minimum requirement to be able to install and use :
Macintosh
computer with a PowerPC G3, G4 or G5 processor
Built-in FireWire
256MB of RAM
3GB of available hard disk space (4GB if you
install the developer tools)
And we all know (and I strongly recommend) that you need at least 512MB to get best performance.
There is also a list of supported hardware :
http://www.apple.com.au/macosx/upgrade/requirements.html
Notable exceptions to some older hardware : Beige G3, original tray load iMac, original iBook (non firewire). If you have one of these Macs and want to run Tiger then time to upgrade. Realistically these are pretty old and slow machines and maybe time to jump into a Mac Mini or iBook. Certainly the price is right these days.
I have heard some rumours that it comes on a DVD also, so it might be that you need a DVD drive too. Although what Apple did with iLife is ship both a DVD and CD version, so this is likely the case here as they aren't listing it as a requirement.
Apparently Apple are also furiously working away at 10.4.1 - as expected. What would a new release be without a few bugs thrown in ! If you recall, OS X Panther shipped with major Filevault corruption issues and external firewire drive incompatibility. Anyway expect the tech forums to be full of fascinating anecdotes of "Tiger has blown up my ..., wont work with my ..., etc.". I bet Apple has tested it better this time but a few odd things always seem to crop up. But be best not to have your firewire drive turned on just in case ...
Possible new Macs next week, but until Apple announces them, it is anyone's guess if the rumours are fact or fantasy.