Unofficial Survey on Mac OS X 10.4 Upgrade

pdksh · Aug 15th, 2005, 11:56 AM

I have been using 10.2 and 10.3 for sometime on a couple of g4 macs. I started with 10.1 but only lasted a few hours. In my opinion the upgrade from Mac OS X 10.2 to Mac OS X 10.3 was worth it. The performance increase and Quark Extreme added a lot of value.

10.4 has widgets, I don't use Konfibulator. I tried Konfibulator but never liked it.
10.4 has upgraded to iChat, i use MSN and I won't pay $200 for a web cam (iSight)
10.4 has the automator, I really don't think i'll use it
10.4 has Safari with RSS, why won't apple release a version of Safari with RSS for 10.3??? I have FireFox with RSS and I don't use it...

Now if you have a G5 with problems and must go to 10.4 I can understand.

Can anyone speak to performance increases or other reasons to upgrade to 10.4. I do know apple will drop support of 10.3 like they have for 10.2 so one day I will have to go but...

bryanc · Aug 15th, 2005, 12:15 PM

I'm running 10.4 on my 667 MHz TiBook, and it's about the same, performance-wise, as 10.3 was. However, I'd never go back to 10.3. Spotlight alone was worth the upgrade for me.

I never used konfabulator either, but I now have 7 widgets that I use all the time. The RSS aggregator in Safari is really nice... I never bothered with RSS feeds before, but they're very convenient in Safari.

I've also found a few uses for Automator... nothing world-shaking, but handy.

Being able to mouse-over a word and get a dictionary definition with Ctrl-Apple-D has also been handy on several occasions.

And I've noticed the frequency of annoying networking glitches is less with Tiger as well.

Still, I think the biggest value of 10.4 is yet to emerge: all those core-frameworks is making software development vastly easier, and that will result in a lot more good software... but it will require 10.4 or later. I'm personally acquainted with only one development project that will use these frameworks, but I'm sure there are many more out there.

So, if the user-land features of 10.4 aren't important to you, and you're happy with 10.3, you may as well stay with 10.3 until software you want to use that requires 10.4 starts appearing.

Cheers

jdurston · Aug 15th, 2005, 12:24 PM

I've noticed the Tiger UI to be much more responsive than Panther. It made my G3 B/W more pleasant to use. The actual speed of heavy duty tasks is about the same though.

I second that Spotlight alone makes the upgrade worthwhile.

krs · Aug 15th, 2005, 12:59 PM

I still have a need to use floppies.
The Teac USB floppy drive I use worked fine with OS 9; then with OS 10.2 everything slowed to a crawl - copying ten small jpg files took several minutes.
Just tried it with OS 10.4.2 and the speed is back where it was with OS 9 - only a few seconds. Seems Apple improved something on the USB driver end.
One complaint however - on OS 9 and 10.2 I could just drag the files from the floppy disk icon to a desktop folder to copy them to the Mac.
With 10.4 that no longer works - I now have to do a copy and then a paste...step backwards in my opinion.

jdurston · Aug 15th, 2005, 02:06 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by krs
	Seems Apple improved something on the USB driver end.

I've noticed that my USB D-link wireless "B" adaptor now works flawlessly in Tiger. I had no end of problems with it and Panther.
(DWL-122 think with 1.4.7 drivers from www.macupdate.com)

pdksh · Aug 15th, 2005, 02:16 PM

I had a dlink USB 11b adapter. I could not get it to work to save my life... I took it back, bought a PCI wifi card 54g and used the OrangeMicro driver.

HowEver · Aug 15th, 2005, 02:26 PM

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dona83 · Aug 15th, 2005, 03:13 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by bryanc
	Being able to mouse-over a word and get a dictionary definition with Ctrl-Apple-D has also been handy on several occasions.

Thank you.