Mac OS X 10.4.3 will weigh in at around 100MB and include more than 550 fixes and improvements, although unconfirmed reports have pegged this number at more than 1,000 when smaller, undocumented changes are included in the count. The latest seed added tweaks to CoreGraphics, CoreImage, and OpenGL, as well as iChat and WebKit, among other improvements.
we will see q2de? and maybe opengl 2 too?
well, i hope
Because 10.4.2 has been terribly buggy. A month ago, I had a crazy time where my computer would crash off and on. Could not find the issue. Finally it fixed itself. What a head scratcher.
BTW, am not happy with the speed and browsing of Safari these days, and am thinking about a switch to firefox.
A month ago, I had a crazy time where my computer would crash off and on. Could not find the issue. Finally it fixed itself. What a head scratcher.
Did you check the system.log in Console.app? That is what I ended up doing, and every time it went down (conveniently, I was either sleeping or at work) the log reported a kernel panic and something concerning CPU 0. I never fixed it (it hasn’t done this for a while) but I did submit an error report every time I rebooted.
Why was this post voted down? Remember folks, DON’T mod something down UNLESS they are trolling. If you simply disagree say so in a comment, but don’t vote them down.
Well said.
Is a fix for whatever bug is preventing me from reading/writing multi-session DVDs on my mac. This seems like pretty basic functionality these days to me.
I found out it is in fact a bug over here : http://lists.apple.com/archives/discrecording/2005/Sep/msg00002.htm…
If I’m going to have to buy the next version of OSX to get this I’m going to be mighty pissed.
I am waiting for this bug patch with more ferver than I did Tiger.
Even as a big Apple supporter, I must say Tiger is pretty disgraceful. The bugginess is simply unacceptable. If would be shameful even for Microsoft.
The company I run usually cuts over to new Apple software as soon as it is released. (We’re only about 40 people, so we can manage it)
Thankfully, it took no time at all to see Tiger as the bug-ridden rush job it was, and stayed with Panther. Sadly, we will never trust Apple again, and will always wait for 6-8 months before upgrading anything. Yes, Tiger is that bad.
But I am hopeful that 10.4.3 fixes the issues. I hope it is true that there are over 1,000 fixes in Tiger–it certainly needs it.
I have been using Tiger at home, and when 10.4.3 is released I am wiping my drives and starting over…yes, Tiger is that bad.
It pains me to write this as a hard core Apple guy. But Tiger really is that bad…
i have currently only one problem when i disconnect my mobile photo/phone from the usb connector.
i use Tiger for playing WoW (3D), email, browsing, NeoOffice, etc…
no problem. Tiger is not bad.
what do you do with your Mac ?
I am actually afraid of this darn patch.. at least on the server side. My three tiger servers (after a lot of work) seem to be running fine. There has been so many issues with updates from apple on the server side I am afraid to even think about updating any.
I suppose the backup/update testing server is going to get a good workout soon enough.
You whiners always show up everywhere, whining away about this or that not working at all. Be specific. WHAT is buggy about Tiger? What makes it so terrible?
I’ve been using Tiger for for 4 months on a Mac Mini 1.42 and 12″ iBook, and I’ve only noticed one relatively minor problem. Have you been deleting things you don’t think are useful over in /System/Library? 🙂
Why do people mod these down? I don’t get it! He’s expressing his opinions and experience, he’s not trolling.
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I had some initial problems when I installed the first Tiger and ended up removing it and going back to Panther. In all fairness, though, I must admit the problems were caused by 3rd party software I was running in Panther that was not compatible with Tiger. When the 10.4.2 update came out I took the plunge and installed it. I was unable to connect to the Internet after the install but that turned out to be that I had updated the firmware in my Airport Express and it would not work with 10.4.0 anymore. After rebooting into Panther, DL’ing the combo update to 10.4.2 and then rebooting into Tiger and installing the update it connected up to the internet without a hitch.
Anyway, my point is that most of the problems I encountered with Tiger were because of the way I have my system configured and some of the software I choose to run. And as bad as those problems may seem at times they are nothing compared to the problems I had when I was running Windows up until a couple of years ago. I have never had the system fail to restart after an update in OS X. When updating Windows it was always hold your breath, cross your fingers, and hope it restarts without hanging.
When 10.4.3 comes out I intend to backup my system and install it. Not because I expect any real problems, but because it is the intelligent way to do it. After all, that is why they make backup programs. And, no, I have not found Tiger to be “that bad”.
Bwhaler is clearly a troll. He’s posing as an apple user and supporter solely to bash Tiger. Read through his message carefully and you’ll see the usual anti-apple troll pattern.
I’ve been using Tiger for months on my powermac G5 and it’s great. No crashes and no bugs.
Nice try Bwhaler.
Wrong. I am not a troll. And it’s cute that you claim to track my threads and notice trends in them, but this is laughable it is such a lie.
In fact, I am typing this post on my new 17″ PB, and my company bought 7 new laptops laptops. (They were refurbs, but the point still holds)
It’s OK to give Apple a hard time when they deserve it. As I said, by pushing Apple to give us their best, we win. Hell, Microsofties win too since it gives Redmond something better to copy. But honesty from customers is a good thing.
10.4.3 is the largest patch in Apple’s history. This is a fact.
I know every OS has bugs, but we expect more from Apple.
And please grow up and understand we are all entitled to our opinions.
Hmmm, I’ve been with OSX since 10.0 and I don’t think Tiger is much different at this stage of it’s development than any other major version of OSX for the same time. Don’t forget Panther is available as 10.3.9. Yes it’s very solid and after 10 releases, that is exactly what you would expect.
Tiger IS only at 10.4.2, by the time it gets to 10.4.9 I’m sure it will be solid as a rock. Then people can complain about how buggy 10.5.0 is.
Same here, working in a design office, after upgrading to tiger the “Leonardo-Cards” we use to manage upload to some not well equiped, via isdn, newspaper-agencys wont work any more.
So we had to downgrade again.
Hope there will be more support for older third party hardware in tiger soon.
You, sir, are working for Microsoft. The very tone of your message, with its hyperbole and lack of substance, proves it; not to mention the rather ridiculous claim that you are a “hard core Apple guy”.
I’d love to see some examples of the “bugginess” you’ve experienced with Tiger. Come, share with us.
I’ve been using Tiger since day 1 in a mixed-platform enterprise environment, I can can count the number of *serious* bugs the engineering team has discovered on two hands. The biggest issue is with automatic proxy configuration. The others are incredibly minor quibbles.
I look forward to 10.4.3 as much as the next Mac user, but I have to say that Tiger has been more stable and bug-free than Panther since the initial release of 10.4.
Yeah, smart guy, I work for Microsoft.
That’s why I said, I still wouldn’t use Windows unless Apple fell off the face of the planet.”
That sounds like someone from Microsoft marketing. (Well, now that I think about it… 🙂
shees, i dont have ANY problems at all with Tiger.
Neither do I.
I’ve been using Tiger with my new Mac since it came with it earlier this year. I’ve had absolutely zero issue with the underlying OS itself other than some strangeness I could directly tie to the few misbehaving 3rd party apps I’m fond enough of to put up with.
iChat, however, has still had a strange bugged video chat that I hope gets fixed one day, since despite having all the ports proper and everything how it should.. I still get denied when trying to conference with friends. Considering that’s one thing Adium can’t do, I’m pretty much forced to rely on iChat and that’s iffy at best right now. 10.4.2 was supposed to fix this..
obviously if your running a hacked x86 version it will not work properly
Being a recent convert I was surprised you can’t actually find a file (or text in Mail) feeding the Spotlight only some partial data. For example finding a document named “Lock” by providing only “ock”, so that it also can find other words such as “Dock” and “Sock” for example. Seems it’s possible to do with some scripting, but has anyone figured if it’s possible to feed some query to Spotlight directly? None of the wildcards – “*”, “?”, “$” work.
I don’t know what you’re doing because I’ve just put in Tunes and everything from iTunes through to configuration files (that didn’t have Tunes in their name, but in the actual contents) – I don’t know what has gone pear shaped when you tried to search.
It’s necessary because my experience was that OS X 10.4 is the less stable OS X.
“shees, i dont have ANY problems at all with Tiger.”
I take it you don’t use the mail app then… it’s buggy as hell!
I had Panther for a year and it felt solid, Tiger feels pretty flaky in comparison.
Now to be fair I used Panther from 10.3.3 onwards while installed Tiger when 10.4.2 came out so let see what 10.4.3 brings in terms of stability.
Use it (mail) every day without a problem. Seems that problems are not universal, which may be worse. Anyway I seem to be one of the lucky ones.
No problems at all with Mail.
This cannot be the same OS and indeed company everyone was talking about with such enthusiasm a week or two ago, can it? Then we were reading how cool it all was, how it was the BMW or maybe the Ferrari of computing. How Apple was not, no way, a company like any other. How Jobs only took $1 a year, and the whole lot of them were driven by perfectionism of a sort seen nowhere else. How there really was no alternative.
Now we read that the OS is still full of bugs, that it would be disgraceful even for Microsoft, that people are going to wipe their hard drives and start over.
It is really interesting, because I don’t get the impression these guys are trolls, they seem to be just reporting their honest experiences. So which is it? Enquiring minds really want to know.
As one of the Apple Loyalists who came down hard on Tiger and Apple in this thread, I will respond.
I think there are a few things to consider:
1. True Apple fans give the company a fair, balanced assessment. Yes, the bias is there, of course, but we praise Apple when warranted and let them have it when they fail. By being honest when Apple falls short, we are keeping them honest and pushing them to be better. Apple (or Microsoft for that matter Apologists hurt the cause.
2. I would still use Tiger over any flavor of Windows or Linux. It has been a rough 6 months with Tiger, sure enough, but I don’t worry about viruses or spyware. The litany of article in the past couple of weeks about failed MS patches remind me why I stay away from that side of the industry.
3. Apple is still one of the few companies truly innovating in the industry, and so they have a lot of support from like-minded creatives and engineers. No, Apple is not perfect, but their batting average crushes that of their competitors. And of course, Apple has been updating their OS every 12-18 months, vs Windows where we are on the back end of a decade since an update. (And the update is pretty much a copy of OS X and Sun’s Glass)
It’s OK to support a company but give them tough love when needed. It’s not a contradiction. It’s true loyalty.
Ahh, I see…so when Apple fixes its OS it’s a “new release,” whereas when any other OS does it, it’s an “update?”
Another example of the distorted minds of Mac “apologists,” which is exactly what you are, whether you admit it or not. The troll about Windows was particularly revealing…copy of OSX indeed. Never mind the fact that they’re two entirely different systems with different purposes.
“Ahh, I see…so when Apple fixes its OS it’s a “new release,” whereas when any other OS does it, it’s an “update?” ”
You are quibbling over two terms that mean essentially the same thing. Who cares what it is called. And coming from someone who used a MS OS for about 20 years, I am no Mac “apologist”. I have Tiger up and running and with very few problems that are not of my own making. Would I go back to Windows? Not on your life. I would turn to Linux instead. As I mentioned in another post, the biggest problem I had with the first release of Tiger was caused by 3rd party software I chose to install. And there do seem to be a lot of anonymous posters here. Any chance of a screen name?
“It’s true loyalty”.
Sounds more to me that you’re truly delusional.
First off apple doesn’t have the support of engineers. It’s Windows 2000/2003 that have the support of engineers. Windows 2000/2003 has proven itself in the field as a capable high performing stable workstation OS.
Some of these bugs that I’ve seen simply wouldn’t be acceptable by engineering doing work on their computer.
I’ve not noticed anything and the few gripes that I had with the previous release have gone away. But it is true that 10.4.2 was out by the time I did the upgrade. It probably addressed the bulk of the potential problems
Of course there are bugs. I myself have had no problems whatsoever apart from User Interface bugs such as scrollbars that do not always completely disappear and app focus behaviour problems.
But, compared to the XP SP2 machine I am forced to use 3 days a week, Tiger can easily be called flawless.
Yes, Tiger did have a few bugs I knew about in the first release. But they have been fixed in the updates since then.
But these are just the bugs I saw.
Currently I do not have any problems whatsoever. But then I do not use Apple’s Mail or Safari. (Firefox and GMail)
Some might have more problems because of third party add-ons, or who don’t maintain their Mac properly.
“Some might have more problems because of third party add-ons, or who don’t maintain their Mac properly.”
Computers don’t really need maintenace, XP, linux or OSX. Sure, if you have a virus, spyware or a broken driver to a peripheral then you need to get rid of them, but that is not maintenace, that is emergency first aid. IMO.
…just a nitpick on the use of terminology…
Now, ontopic – I suffer from a bug in Tiger that I have not seen reported anywhere else (not really looked hard for it either) so I can easily believe that there are a lot of other ones wich I have not seen myself that cause problems for other people, not needing to blame their problems on addons or a mishandled computer.
Anyone have a link to a well organized Tiger bug database? Scanning forums is so tedious.
when infection by malware is a regular event, or checking for it must be done regularly to make sure you do not get any, that is called maintenance.
It’s only a regular event when you’re an idiot, and/or use IE.
“”Some might have more problems because of third party add-ons, or who don’t maintain their Mac properly.”
Computers don’t really need maintenace, XP, linux or OSX. Sure, if you have a virus, spyware or a broken driver to a peripheral then you need to get rid of them, but that is not maintenace, that is emergency first aid. IMO. ”
Actually, I believe his use of the word “maintain” and not “Maintenance” makes all the difference here. Every OS requires that certain things be done to maintain it. At least if you want your system to operate at peak efficiency. Routine cleaning of files and programs no longer needed is the first that comes to mind. There are many others. In this respect Tiger is no different than XP. Much of this is done routinely in the background on OS X.
I suppose your idea of maintenance then is just reformatting and reinstalling Windows every six months?
You, sir, are an idiot, and it’s clear you’ve never been responsible for maintaining even a dozen workstations.
Get a little more experience before opening your cakehole, junior.
I don’t experience any problems with Tiger at all! I’m sorry some of you are having issues, but looking at it logically it *is* software made by fallible programmers who have to contend with a multitude of different users at varying levels of experience (or lack of it); this being the case, all that different hardware/software mixed up with user input usually equals some kind of bugginess. Even after saying all that, I do find Mac OS less buggy (by far) than Windows or even Linux, so I’m not comaplaining.
The update will be interesting, that’s for sure!
Since i’ve installed Tiger, I see that spinning color wheel on my Mac mini all the time. And most of the time, I can’t do anything about it, it just freeze with the spinning wheel. I have to turn the Mac OFF.
I don’t know what’s doing this. I use Mail, FireFox and MSN Messenger 5. A bit of Photoshop and Word/Excel. But most of the crash I see with USB device (memory card reader). If I forget to EJECT a card before removing it, spinning wheel of hell and crash the system. This is something that WindowsXP handle much better.
Wanna know why you got modded down as -1?
It’s a mounted device that you forgot to initiate a command to eject(unmount). For all the idiots out there that forget to drag their mounted devices into the Trash this will happen: IT’S UNIX.
Have no fear: I’m sure they’ll make a workaround to probe the USB device more often and upon finding the mounting table has changed due to not being able to map the drive it will run a back process that satisfies the conditional that is currently in a WAIT STATE until you properly eject your devices.
It’s not a VCR or DVD system that has a few managed states flashed onto memory.
«It’s a mounted device that you forgot to initiate a command to eject(unmount). For all the idiots out there that forget to drag their mounted devices into the Trash this will happen: IT’S UNIX. »
IDIOTS? Hey, Windows XP does that one better than OSX, who’s the idiot? You’re telling me that it’s UNIX the idiot in this instance.
Like you NEVER forget to unmount a simple memory card before unpluging it…. right…
my biggest issue with Tiger is Finder. wanna crash it? connect a network drive, unplug the cable and then try to access the drive. beach ball fun.
my os x server trainer said he doesnt recommend an apple os until the x.x.3 release. i’m beginning to agree.
can you extrapolate on your usb problems a little more? it seems like my phone (E815) requires you to sync within a few minutes of pluggin it in via USB, if you wait any longer, you’re screwed. I can plug the same phone into my linux box and connect without any problems at any time.
are you having similar problems?
By far the most problems I have had with Panther or Tiger are with MS Office. The only program that has crashed and actually lost part of the file I was working on is Word. Open a .ppt in Powerpoint and switch back and forth applications; Powerpoint always becomes unresponsive. Plus it takes ages to move from slide to slide. I use Keynote demo instead, opens and views files quicker and navigates slides instantly.
Otherwise Safari is sometimes slow, but no other problems around and I do use most programs constantly. Major upgrades come with bugs. It would be reasonable to expect more recognition of the problems by Apple, but people shouldn’t be overly critical, it is after all great. Looking back at Windows years it NOWHERE NEAR the problems I had CONSTANTLY.
On a general note, the general issue of software/code quality is huge and should definitely be looked into sometime soon.
Take a look at this site:
http://www.dshadow.com/software/unlockupd/
It’s a daemon that checks to see if lookupd has crashed or hung because the normal process that does this won’t detect it. Once lookupd crashes or hangs, there goes the system – you can’t launch anything without lookupd running (oddly enough – why does finder need to make critical calls to lookupd? Why does it need to call lookupd to launch a terminal, text editor, etc? But, the truth is that it does …) Plus, it hangs the finder – you can’t even force-quit anything or select something to reboot.
It never happened to me in 10.3, but it’s nailed my computer twice in Tiger, and once I was on a business trip – that was utterly disgraceful. I had to *re-install Tiger* when I got back. I even spent the $49.99 on a tech support call to have one of Apple’s highschool tech support guys tell me that I needed to re-install the system (they claimed they never heard of this bug). That sounds like MS and Windows 95.
OSX claims it is as rock solid as Unix and all the rest, but being posix compatible (or paying a Unix licensing fee) doesn’t make an OS solid – disclosing and fixing bugs immediately is what makes it solid. When I was on the business trip I was talking up OSX Server as the platform to run a nice, expensive piece of software that we were thinking of buying – I would hate to have Apple tell them to re-install OSX on a rack of shiny new x servers because of a bug in lookupd. 🙂
Anyway, this is a rant, but there’s no question in my mind that Tiger has been miserably unstable. If you poke around the web, there are plenty of others who will vouch with me.
“…there are plenty of others who will vouch with me.”
And there are probably more that won’t.
I’ve had some issues with Tiger, mainly the Dock crashing and restarting now and then. Rarely, Finder will lock up as well and need to be restarted, as well. Other than those two issues I have not had a problem with Tiger.
Hi you guys,
How many of you have had problems after you upgraded from panther to tiger? I would recomend that you do a clean install of tiger instead. I’ve had no problems at all with Safari or Mail. I agree that 10.4.0 was buggy. It did seem rushed but they 10.4.1 and 10.4.2 were released very fast after.
This cannot be the same OS and indeed company everyone was talking about with such enthusiasm a week or two ago, can it? Then we were reading how cool it all was, how it was the BMW or maybe the Ferrari of computing. How Apple was not, no way, a company like any other. How Jobs only took $1 a year, and the whole lot of them were driven by perfectionism of a sort seen nowhere else. How there really was no alternative.
Now we read that the OS is still full of bugs, that it would be disgraceful even for Microsoft, that people are going to wipe their hard drives and start over.
It is really interesting, because I don’t get the impression these guys are trolls, they seem to be just reporting their honest experiences. So which is it? Enquiring minds really want to know.
Dang, you caught us!
I have to say that I never did learn to like OS X and now, with Tiger, it turns out that it’s hell in a hand basket. This thing is heading for the wall in such a hell of a hurry that I hope it doesn’t crash before Vis… Leopard is released.
Seriously, if ever there was a time when I wanted to be in a different place, it was now!
… after a while the tone settles down a bit.
Are there bugs in Tiger? There’s a few things I frown about. It would be disingenious to say it was a bad system. I can’t complain. I have a few questions on specific stuff [sending a photobook, for some reason, doesn’t work for me – it proves to be a showstopper, but it’s nothing critically wrong in the system I would imagine] but otherwise, even when using Mail extensively, it’s doing fine.
I’m happy driving the Tiger. Do I want known bugs resolved? Hell yes! Would it stop me from using it in a professional environment? Going with my current experience, not at all. YMMV.
I’ve been driving a Mac since 7.5.1. A quirk here and there in the present system is NOT going to put me off from using one. Bugwise, Windows XP is vastly superior in its offering of quirks and vulnerabilities. And it doesn’t come nagging because I have:
– unused icons on my desktop
– updated software available
– disconnected my network cable
I’ve never liked using a Mac more than I do today. What is the alternative? The Linux family, very smart, very exotic, nothing much in the way of day-to-day applications, Windows… If Windows was the only alternative to Tiger, I’d rather not have a computer than having to go through the insufferable pain of having to use one. I can really do without the drama.
There’s vastly more fun in reading books.
What is hilarious is that this reply has been set to -2, presumably to stop anyone from reading the original note which is quoted in it.
Such fanaticism must be counterproductive. I should imagine pretty soon there will be a rule in all forums where Apple is discussed – immediately lower your threshold for browsing to -5, and just read the ones marked in red, because that’s where the thought will be found.
Anyway, modded down or not, thank you for a reasonable and good humoured reply.
I have no idea whether its fanatacism or not but it certainly is perplexing that so many comments have been marked down for no reason that I can see. There’s no name calling, no off topic remarks, no inflamatory comments, In fact this who discussion is one of the more civil ones I have seen. Very odd.
You seem to be right about comments being voted down simply because someone disagrees with it. In that case perhaps a positive vote would help to bring the comments back up to the level they should be at. No one should be voted down simply because they dared to politely disagree with someone else.
No OS is perfect. If it were there would be no need to update it. Tiger has been very good to me since I put it back in last month. Much as I liked Panther, Tiger has some features that Panther did not that I find very useful.
Thank you all so much for posting.
This is a real eyeopener and it will definitely change my recommendations. I have had problems with my Mandrake 10.x installations – not in use, just the upgrades (whether done by clean installs or not), but I never had anything like what is being described here, and I don’t know how I would cope with it. The need to reinstall the OS from scratch just because of using the Finder? What do you do if you’re trying to support this sort of thing and you get a phone call, get in a car and start driving?
I read this thread thinking, thank heaven they all so far have had financial constraints and/or existing hardware, so they haven’t listened when I told them Macs were a serious possibility, and would just go in and work. Not something I’ll be saying again for quite a while!
X.4.2 corrected all the issues I had with Tiger.
It make mail stable (note that I didn’t tried to import – what was a major unrealiable feature).
Concerning safari, I switch to camino, nicer interface than firefox(aggressiv white -yeah yeah, theres themes). Safari is slow, the interface as well as the page loading. Even on a 2ghz G5.
I run a zope server on it, develop in python, run virtualpc with multiple instance of windows for testing, play game, music, mail, office, chat (adium no ultra$ for italk), sync bluetooth phone, use bluetooth headset + skype/gizmo.
System is rock solid.
what hitch me most, it’s the inconstency of the home/end delect/insert pagedown/pageup keys.
And some little other thing I am used to in Windows/Linux.
Though, there’s an problem with openGL in some game, it make objects shaking, I hope it will fix that.
But anyway, even if my system work like I want it to, a new update is well welcome.
Never had a problem with any version of Tiger. But then I run DiskWarrior regularly as well as Cocktail.
It’s a daemon that checks to see if lookupd has crashed or hung because the normal process that does this won’t detect it. Once lookupd crashes or hangs, there goes the system
The lookupd bug was a nasty one yes but disconnecting from and reconnecting to the internet would force it to restart.
However, I’ve not experienced that particular bug in a while now, it looks like they fixed it in one of the security updates.
There are a few bugs remaining but mostly minor things.
Hi…
I must say switching from linux and to OS X 10.4, because my old laptop died, has been a real pleasure for me. I miss some of the ease of updating my sotfware, but I have never felt it was unstable or buggy. Well I have turned dashboard off because it is a memory eater. And I do not think that feature is something special at all. But overall the system is stable to me. I run it on a fairly new powerbook. That was my two cents
“I miss some of the ease of updating my sotfware”
What distro of Linux were you using? “NOT fame bate a sincere question.”
If it was Debian or Debian based, its an understandable reaction. Either to a move to XP or to OS X. But you’d also have the same reaction if you moved to a Linux rpm based system.
> If it was Debian or Debian based, its an understandable reaction. Either to a move to XP or to OS X. But you’d also have the same reaction if you moved to a Linux rpm based system.
Only if you don’t know about tools like fink, darwinports, version tracker pro, etc.
Could apple possibly consider making these updates a more regular event, perhaps have 10.4.2.1 etc.
This way they could fix the bugs sooner (rather than waiting for a big patch) and they could release smaller updates that will download sooner.
I have a dial-up connection here and it’s not reliable at all. Downloading 100Mb updates is not fun. Especially so since the downloads don’t continue anymore since I updated to 10.4.1 and I have to start over if it stops when my computer goes off line.
10mb downloads would be easier to deal with.
I think I won’t bother downloading it at all, because I don’t have serious problems that warrant it. (Unless there are serious security problems or something).
Regarding smaller updates, it makes testing alot harder as that one component is isolated from the rest of the other system, in regards to not only updates that could be required in future, but the fact that not all fixes can be done in one go – meaning, you’d end up with fixes being corrected by one patch, then buggered up by another patch.
Atleast in the case of the ‘grand unified fix’, there is the ability not only to make a big merge for new hardware they release, all the updates are together and able to test the impact of each fix on the rest of the operating system environment – if they change something *here*, will it impact on something over *there*?
Re:RE: Tiger buggy? “computers don’t really need maintenace, XP, linux or OSX.”
Yes, computers should be maintenanced. It’s a machine that should maintenance at least month or bi-monthly. Programs like Disk Utility(repair permissions), Onyx (cleaning) and Disk Warrior (check structure of file directories) should be apart of your maintenance process.
…just nitpicking on other people lack of information.
Re:RE: Tiger buggy? “computers don’t really need maintenace, XP, linux or OSX.”
Yes, computers should be maintenanced. It’s a machine that should maintenance at least month or bi-monthly. Programs like Disk Utility(repair permissions), Onyx (cleaning) and Disk Warrior (check structure of file directories) should be apart of your maintenance process.
…just nitpicking on other peoples lack of information.
But it was slow and buggy. Crashed every three seconds and I could’ve converted another Mac user to the straight club ( the group is very small ), while waiting for a window to re-size.
It was so horrible I just installed Linux.
I see many comments here having a bad score. Each of those comments are because someone said something bad about Tiger.
I LOVE OSX, but you can’t go blind and think that OSX is bug free. It’s not by hiding the problem that it will get fixed.
Grow up a little.
I preferred Panther over Tiger. But I like to remain at the leading edge of releases so… any problems I have are my own fault because I cannot wait for the next major bug release or until the version is stable. Oh well!
🙂
Looks like you got marked down because you dared to protest scoring. 🙂 I agree with your remarks. It is unfortunate that many people don’t want to hear anything bad about their favorite OS what ever it might be. I can crash Tiger, but then I have never met an OS I couldn’t crash. That doesn’t make Tiger bad. Anyway, you are correct in your assertion that the problems will not be fixed in a timely manner if everyone turns a blind eye to the defects.
I’m hoping they fix the memory leaks with Tiger – its just frustating to see your machine down to 10MB of free RAM with 700+MB just sitting there inactive and not being released by the system without having to restart the machien to get it back. Quality control with 10.4.3 needs to be top notch.
Anon
Actually Inactive memory is eligible for reuse. To all intents and purposes it is already free. If a process needs memory it can get it from “Free” or “Inactive” memory. Once you understand that, you can look at your memory graph and breathe easier.
Disclaimer: I upgraded from Panther. This is a dual 1.8GHz G5 with dual internal 250Gb drives, a Miglia AlchemyTV DVR PCI card, Bluetooth, Wifi, an Airport Express hitched to my stereo (and formerly, a USB printer), and acting as the print server for my LAN.
Mail: few problems. Its features are mediocre compared to Thunderbird, but it imported several years’ worth of Outlook Express mail correctly and Spotlight indexes its contents.
Spotlight: Needs to have a faster response time after I type the third character in the box. This Mac’s indexed regularly and optimized with DiskWarrior monthly.
VPN/PPTP: I’m having trouble with PPTP authentication on a particular server, but I’m starting to think this is not an OS X specific problem. There were some rough spots with PPTP when Tiger was first released, and for someone working from home this is unacceptable.
Home/End keys: poster above is absolutely correct. There’s no reason why these keys shouldn’t work inside text entry boxes.
Final Cut: video imported from any other source than DV results in losing audio sync over time if the KHz isn’t exactly 48.000KHz. This would be understandable except that QuickTime Pro has no such problem editing videos with much looser KHz ranges, and the fact that Apple’s preferred DV camera (Canon) is documented as actually delivering 48.001KHz which Apple’s own import frameworks deliberately detect and compensate for. Since FC is a framework around QuickTime, this is hard to understand, and irritating to people intending to convert VHS to DVD without having to dub it to DV first.
The OS 9 Finder was recolorable, fonts were configurable, and generally customizable. The OS X Finder isn’t even skinnable, and in five years hasn’t been written in Cocoa yet. Applications demonstrate multiple conflicting UIs, skins (Aqua/brushed metal/whatever iTunes is now), and the simplicity of the original Finder is gone. That Finder interface was designed by three people and kept tightly consistent in behavior to the extent that you could accurately guess how an application worked without reading the manual.
Windows sharing and printer sharing do not advertise themselves to the network the way the Sharing panel say they do: in both Linux and XP I have to use the Mac’s router-assigned IP as the base URL to find these resources.
Since CUPS requires remote Windows computers to configure Mac-connected printers as PostScript devices, it would be friendly to mention which PostScript drivers bundled with Windows support color (the drivers for Apple printers do not, but one of the HP drivers does).
Burning a CD/DVD can be done in the Finder, but erasing a rewritable has to require an application?
The LaserWriter Plus fonts bundled with every release of MacOS since ~1987 quietly disappeared somewhere between Jaguar and Tiger with no explanation. As someone with ten years’ worth of documents that use them, I’m not amused, and Microsoft’s crap-awful imitation of Avant Garde isn’t an acceptable substitute. Ditching an obscure Indeo AVI codec is one thing, but fonts?
The Finder can show thumbnails of JPEG2000 files despite an absence of applications that actually use the format (shame), but rename a .jpg to .jfif and watch it go blank on you.
Thumbnails and movie previews are a time bomb with networked volumes. If a web page takes forever to load it shouldn’t hang the browser; thumbnails and movie clip panes should likewise be tied to timeouts and run as background processes instead of spinning beachballs everywhere.
Leaving .DS_STORE cache turds in every remote Unix volume I mount is impolite. The fact that I can’t see them to delete them before unmounting is even worse. Either create them locally in a folder under my user (the way they work in browsers) or give me an option to not create them at all.
.Mac is a WebDAV server with no proprietary extensions. Open the spec to work with other WebDAV servers and quit pretending .Mac will be any more Net-reinventing than AppleLink was.
Subdirectories of a particular age dating back to the late 80s have different *actual* names than their apparent ones, much like the way Windows95 handled long filenames with a separate ~8.3 version. You won’t discover this until trying to fileshare on another OS, and “My Resumes” is a folder named $M67%WEFD.
FWIW I’ve only seen kernel panics twice between Jaguar and Tiger. With Jag, it was unplugging a USB WiFi dongle before shutting down, and with Tiger (yesterday) it was unplugging a USB pendrive before unmounting it. Actually, to Tiger’s credit what I saw was the familiar shaded rectangle, but the text never appeared and it cleared itself up in two seconds.
FontBook: Hey, thanks for giving us the opportunity to organize fonts into categories. Now show me an application which actually cares and makes it useful.
iLife: the last time I checked, Quicken was more useful to me as a life app than GarageBand. Buy Intuit, unify the file format, features and codebase between platforms and make heroes of yourselves. Banks have told Intuit they represent about the same share of their users compared to Microsoft as Apple does, and if Intuit goes under you’re screwed (try getting GnuCash to compile with Fink under Tiger).
Core: because text rendering is now handled by the GPU, I get unexpected variation in bold font weights on the screen.
Tiger doesn’t suck, but its improvements over Panther compared to Panther v. Jag are underwhelming: most are framework-based and invisible to the end user. Swell, video got completely virtualized to the GPU. Video compression is still being handled by the CPU and H.264 is damned slow to encode. On the subject of H.264, why is it playing games with saturation?
“Tiger doesn’t suck, but its improvements over Panther compared to Panther v. Jag are underwhelming
Underwhelming? I think spotlight is the best feature added to any OS in many years. It completely changed the way I acces my files. And MacOS X 10.4 was the first OS with this feature. I wouldn’t call it underwhelming.
Actually, there are a number of BeOS users who’d like to take issue with who invented the idea of hooking automatic indexing into calls to the filesystem.
http://www.google.com/search?q=beos+spotlight
Some accounts are that the Apple expatriates who created this kind of filesystem and searching for BeOS were reabsorbed into the Apple Borg Collective, where they essentially ported it back to OS X:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/001480.php
Give Apple their due, but don’t drink too much of the Kool-Aid.
I was just curious and no trolling. I swear. Take it whatever way you can. I have been looking to get a quad proc powermac with dual 30 inch displays. I am gonna use it mostly for video editing and graphics work. The price is greatly affordable IMO than other x86 offerings and looks cool to boot! I know OS X is a huge step forward and is a very forward looking OS. And it is based on UNIX to boot!
Now XP does my job fine. Theres a lot of softwares that are out there and it runs fast, no crashes…but the occasional problem with spyware. I was wondering why people who are Mac users trash the heck out of a topic when the topic states “Slew of MS updates released on Tuesday”…when you guys yourselves are admitting Apple did a hurried job…..and are getting 100 mb updates!! Sure I know that the update frequency from Apple is not as high as MS but still how many mb of updates have Apple relased for Tiger already? And yet we find people still complaining about bugs! Isnt it kind of biased? As an end user seems to me that apps are crashing on OS X because of bugs that are inherent to the OS itself. From my experience Windows doesnt crash unless its crappy drivers…I am not saying XP is the greatest but at least it doesnt crash…my experience.
Once again. No flame intended. Just an opinion I am trying to explain. I know Tiger does not suck. But neither does XP. Sure it dont have all the bells and whistles of Tiger but I can still get my work done just as fast!
Truthful post like yours aren’t welcome here. Start trolling or you might get banned from the site.
Everyone always tells you that upgrading over one version of MOSX to the next is fine and dandy.
In my own experience, I’ve found that the people who continually have issues upgrade from the previous version and did not do a clean install.
I, myself, always do a clean install, and have had few if any notable problems with Tiger. I’ve done this with every version of MOSX since 10.0 and will continue doing this. Yes, it’s a bit of a pain, but the time spent is well worth it.
Some things you can do to ‘help’ yourself with clean installs.
1. separate your user accounts from the system drive. Either artition the drive or get a second drive to house your user accounts on. This way, you only have to blow away the system and not your documents! Once the new system is installed you can update your actual account path with NetInfo Manager and chown/chgrp/chmod the files to fall in line.
2. keep your application install media handy and definitely archive any downloaded updates you’ve applied. Most applications are cinch to install.
3. make a disk image of your completed install in case you ever have to restore it. (good idea to disk image the previous install in the off chance you need to revert).
4. have fun.
That may be true to some extent, but in the end, most people that have a actually problem that is really bugging them, have done this. I’ve done it multiple times, nothing.
I think the problem is OS X is not windows. Just as rebooting OSX is rarely the answer, re-installing isn’t either. While this is semi-true for windows, it just doesn’t hold for OSX. OS X doesn’t tend to suffer from small minor random things that are so easily triggered and fixed with things like reboots. If it has a problem, it’s a well built problem that requires a real fix from apple.
When people are using windows and say “windows sucks, I have this problem blah blah” for one it usually means their not using XP, and if they are, it’s probably do to there hardware or a setup. Since there are so many people running windows and any real issues are well know that most people can hear a problem and discount it from being a actual windows problem.
OSX is different, there is very little hardware excuses. Even if you do change stuff your pretty limited, there isn’t a ton of video cards out there, and the range of ram they accept is not all over the map. So it’s hard for someone to cause a hardware problem. Plus all the possible hardware setups for OSX are rather limited compared to the windows world, so if you have a specific issue, and it’s hardware, your going to find a list of people with that exact issue. Thats in general the difference with OSX. If someone states they have a problem, they probably really do and it is a OSX issue. Most are widely know, like the safari memory leak. Some might not suffer, but its most definitely known there is a problem. Same for a bunch of other stuff. There just isn’t enough setup variety for peoples problems to be tossed and its usually easy to find others with the same problem if it really is a problem.
I like OS X, but its had plenty of issues. And Tiger definitely spawned a lot of problem. Overall my winXP setup was more stable thing my mac, but at least with apple I expect it to get the bugs worked out quicker. Since its well known what they are. Verses windows world were it may never get fixed since who knows if anyone else has that setup causing that problem.
Brad makes a very good point. This is the interesting and puzzling thing about the whole thread. It has been strongly argued here and elsewhere in the past, when writing about OSX on Intel, that the great benefit of closed hardware is that the environment is controlled. This, they say, is why Apple cannot and should not release the OS to non-Apple hardware.
It is quite unlike Windows, where the hardware is open and consequently the range of possible configurations enormous. And the OS supplier has no quality control over hardware components.
However, what he is saying is, in practice, it doesn’t seem to be working out like that. OS X in practice is less stable than his XP installation. The difference is, the instabilities are rather more fundamental. This seems to be what comes out of the whole thread and the other reports.
This did not use to be true with Classc. In the early days it seems to me, we had just about no hardware incompatibilities, we had plug and play right from the start, and we had an OS that was predictable and well behaved to a degree that Windows users before W2K could only dream about. I do realise it had to be replaced, and that a Unix base was probably the right answer.
If he is right, the instabilities will get fixed faster. It will be interesting to see. The fact that they are happening at this level of severity so late in the cycle is not, however, very promising.
To test this idea for my self, I merely upgraded my G4 iMac from 10.3 to 10.4. Where as, for my G4 PowerBook I did a clean install (reformatted drive and all). What was the difference? Surprisingly enough none, at least that I could see, however for my own sake, I agree that you should do a clean install with any OS and I have Windows (2000 and XP), Linux (Kubuntu) as well as OS X (10.4).
//when infection by malware is a regular event, or checking for it must be done regularly to make sure you do not get any, that is called maintenance.//
No, that’s called stupidity, generally caused by ignorant users. It takes literally 15 minutes to completely secure an XP box from malware/virii/worms/trojans/etc.
My XP Pro box has been running for 3+ years … with, in that time, a total two BSOD’s (because of my overclocking).
No virii. No malware. No other issues whatsoever.
The real blame _is_ on Microsoft, because they don’t educate their user base very well (and, of course, because their bundled products are iffy) — but that doesn’t mean XP can’t be just as stable as any other OS.
“No, that’s called stupidity, generally caused by ignorant users. It takes literally 15 minutes to completely secure an XP box from malware/virii/worms/trojans/etc. ”
The stupidity is on Microsoft’s side. WHY should they have to educate their users. WHY can’t they just configure Windows to be secure out of the box (other than bad passwords like “password.”). There is no reason they should have to tell them how to secure Windows. If Microsoft isn’t smart enough to do it themselves, why should Joe or Jane user be any smarter?
Personally I junked Windows a long time ago. I do support it at work but I get PAID to do that. At home I use only Macs now. My “enjoyment” time is limited. I don’t like spending time fixing or securing the computer I’m using. I want to make movies, write stories, make music as well as surfing the web and e-mailing.
Note that I haven’t upgrade to Tiger yet. I’m still at 10.3.9 and am watching to see how 10.4.3 turns out. If it sounds like they’ve got all the major stuff fixed I’ll move my two Macs over to it.
I installed Tiger on a Quicksilver 733 Mhz and a PowerBook G4. In both cases, I did a clean install and migrated over previous settings. I have a second HD in my QuickSilver and I have a Lacie external drive for my PBook. So far, I have not experienced any problems and I have dutifully applied all the updates. Before updating, each time, I ran MacJanitor and repaired permissions using disk utility.
In contrast to the bugginess reported by others I found a few nice surprises. Classic applications have fewer bugs now (these apps were designed to run under System 6.0 and 7.1!). So much so, I have ordered a classic application-since none of the new Os X only applications come close to the utility of the earlier ones.
Overall, very pleased with Tiger. If you are still using Panther-no need to fret. I used Panther on my PowerBook and Tiger on my Quicksilver for a long time before upgrading it and I had no problems going back and forth between the two.
No major problems with Mail with the exception that it prompts me for my keychain password once in a while while sending out mail.
JagWire users can kiss steve’s ass, and iTunes updates for panther.
Tiger has worked fine here since the day it was released on my 3 Macs, iMac G5 (upgraded from Panther), Power Mac G5 (fresh install), PowrBook G4 (fresh install). I’ve had 0 problems with mail.app, I’ve found spotlight to be an amazing add on, I can’t wait to see it integrated even further in Leopard. I’ve used DarwinPorts since I started using Mac OS X for all my F/OSS ports, and for upgrading of software I use Version Tracker Pro, the only 3rd party system tool I installed is Anacron for Tiger (why isn’t this part of the default install?), and like I said it’s all been good. I’m definitely looking forward to 10.4.3 though to fix those bugs I don’t know I have, I’m sure we will all see some nice performance increases when this update is ready.
have been using tiger since the day it was released on. have it installed on a 1.3ghz powerbook and a 1.4ghz mini . i use mail almost every hour to check my email have not had any problems with it. the one time i did have a problem was when my powerbook started over heating but it was from a poorly coded dashboard widget. i deleted the widget and everything was fine.
Been waiting for this so long.
I didn’t know apple had called out specific issues with the Powermac G5 1.8s, but being the owner of one, I can confirm it’s been a bit of a turd. At least around the 10.3.7 timeframe it stopped randomly powering itself off, or turning all the fans to full blast.
To bad ever release since has made is slower and slower.
The big things for me I hope it fixes is.
The safari memory leak. Having a browser hit 1 gig of memory usage in less then a day is not acceptable. If you don’t have safari memory leaks, consider yourself lucky since so many do, I think those who don’t are ones who actually close safari often enough to never notice.
Then the other biggy is for them to fix DNG support in OSX, it’s been a lie about it being supported since it only has worked for a few people with just the right model camera, when it shouldn’t matter at all what camera you have. I expect they fixed this to be able to put Aperture out, since otherwise it won’t work for probably 1/2-3/4 of the RAW shooters in the world.
Also hope something happens to make USB work right. At least half the time the computer doesn’t see my ipod, or other devices when hooked up. I have to unhook my printer a few times every time i use it. Yet the mouse and keyboard keap working, go figure. This is something that seamed to go to heck in Tiger too.
The only bug I’ve found in Tiger was on my flatmate’s PowerBook when I managed to accidentally drag the Network icon out of the Finder sidebar.
He never worked out how to get it back.
Surely this shouldn’t be possible?
You can put it back from the Finder preferences.
Under the Finder menu, select preferences and then select the Sidebar tab and you can select what is and is not seen in the sidebar.
I have noticed very few problems with Tiger on my Imac (bought it with Tiger and upto 10.4.2 currently). Current problems I notice:
1)When I plug in USB drive, and go into SLEEP and back out, the USB drive gets messed up. If you try to access drive, you will get hung in the endless beach ball.
2)Safari crashes from time to time (this is with 5 windows open, each with like 10-20 tabs). Firefox seems to be slower to browse with then Safari, but Opera is not bad.
3)Samba never seemed to see the Windows network correctly, I use the “Connect to Server” to get to my Windows machine, since browsing the Window Network seems to not work correctly.
But thats about it. I use Mail and don’t have problems. Most of my applications I leave open all the time also (so would notice memory leaks, only leak I have found was with a Dashboard widget using tons of memory). Like others I don’t use dashboard since it did seem to use a lot of memory (mostly because you have widgets running you barely access along with the others you use).
Now about it in comparsion to Windows XP. Windows XP is not bad at all. I give respect to Windows XP for the fact it runs as well as it does on so much different hardware. But the common issues I notice will all computers is how it hangs alot where you can’t do anything (like when it will do a screen refresh [all the icons reload] the display, or when you access the network and it hangs the system, etc), and how it always seems to write to DISK even when you got free memory (I think the memory system just sucks). Ohh and also SLEEP mode sucks badly in Windows XP, on Tiger I am in and out of SLEEP in 3 seconds, so I never power off my computer anymore. I think these things will be fixed in Vista. I think Vista is basically bringing Windows up to par with Tiger. That is why I got Tiger now, and given the few bugs, I am very happy. I hope as updates are released they become fixed.