Paul Thurrott is a Dick
In his review of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”, Paul Thurrott displays his ignorance and inability to edit his own material in grand fashion.
Tiger isn’t a long-term play, however. Despite its lengthy development time, and promises of ever slower Mac OS X upgrade releases in the future, this new system isn’t a big enough upgrade over previous OS X releases to warrant much excitement. Once you get past the few major new features–primarily Spotlight and Dashboard, neither one of which exactly changes the competitive landscape very much–there’s very little real meat in Tiger.
Easy for him to say. Sure, on the surface, Tiger doesn’t look like much has changed. Underneath, however, many of the Unix tools that make up the Darwin layer of OS X have been completely rewritten. Tiger includes 64-bit memory addressing, which Thurrott mentions, but obviously doesn’t consider to be a very big deal. Take a look at how long it’s taken Microsoft to release their 64 bit versions of XP and Server and one might reconsider this as a major feature. CoreImage which will do for images what CoreAudio and AudioUnits have done for audio production on the Mac is, for the graphical user, going be very big addition.
I grant that Windows users enjoy poking Mac users with sticks. This is a given and usually results in various levels of siege warfare between the two camps before some linux zealot jumps in and the two sides can redirect their burning oil at him. In this case, Thurrott goes to some pain to say he’s an alternative OS kind of guy. He even had an Amiga (or “several”!), which makes this brand of ignorance even harder to swallow. Yes, the release of a new version of OS X comes with a certain degree of event-related marketing, but that ignores the fact that for many users, this new operating system version will be on-par with a system upgrade in terms of the performance benefits they will see. Add the whiz-bang special effects of Dashboard and Spotlight and you’ve got yourself a cool new system.
Even more confusing, at the end of his article, Thurrott concludes:
Apple Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is the strongest OS X release yet and a worthy competitor to Windows XP. Though it is marketed by Apple as a major release, Tiger is in fact a minor upgrade with few major new features, more akin to what we’d call a service pack in the Windows world.
Make up your mind man! Take a stance! Either it’s a worthy release or it’s an upgrade. I can’t decide if Paul’s deriding Apple for making the user pay $129 for an upgrade ($199 for the family upgrade pack) or congratulating them for their cool operating system. Overall, he seems pleased with it.
Maybe I’m making too much out of him calling this a “minor” release. I just don’t think he is aware of a lot of the hidden features included in 10.4, and that’s sloppy writing.
He also states that for most users, it’s the hardware, not the software that makes Apples appealing. Again, I take issue with that. Without cool software, the hardware would simply be well-designed PC hardware. It’s the software that really make the Macs what they are.
I’m hungry. I think I’ll get some lunch…
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