Everything Must Go! Tiger Worth the Price?

For most of us there is a sense of familiarity when yet another obnoxious car dealership ad comes on the radio. The ads are generally the same: A voice over guy who sounds as though he stumbled across a cache of amphetamines and a copy of “How to Talk Really Loud on the Radio” exhorts listeners to head to X dealership for the biggest sale of the year. Then listeners are hit with the “because” part of the ad. The “because” part of the ad explains why the dealer is having such a truly memorable sale and usually involves some plausible reason: over stocked, factory incentives, etc. The aforementioned “because” part is crucial owing to the fact that without that info we might think they just wanted to make a few extra bucks over the labor day weekend.

People, after hearing the 10,000th such ad, become justifiably cynical. They start to wonder: “Is the auto dealer really trying to save me some dough, or does he just want to sell a few more cars?”  Hence most of us wait until we actually need a car to buy one instead of following the, I am sure, sincere advice of the auto dealership. After all, I doubt have you ever been in the process of buying a car and had the sales guy pull you aside and whisper conspiratorially in your ear “Buddy, I’ve got to tell you, you’re doing this at the absolute worst time. Next week we’re selling this vehicle for a nickel.” Which explains why many people greet dealership ads with a more than trivial amount of skepticism.

With that example newly imprinted on our hippocampus we can turn out attention to Tiger. Apple is touting Tiger (unsurprisingly) as the greatest system ever. Apparently Apple thinks 10.4 is something so great that if you don’t pre-order the bundled box of software for guaranteed April 29th delivery you’ll spend April 30th being laughed at by all the smart folks who ratcheted up their credit cards bills to be part of the first wave. This leaves us with a question: Is Apple using the same methods as car dealerships to move a little extra product? Or is Tiger a truly significant upgrade?

The answer to the first question is obviously yes. In fact it is expected. We have become jaded and cynical enough of marketer’s claims by this point that if Apple didn’t claim Tiger was the greatest operating system of all time people would shy away from the thing. For example if Apple said Tiger was “pretty darned good” you undoubtedly hear analysis along the lines of the following: “Expect Tiger to be a very minor upgrade, even spokespeople in Apple’s employ are low key about the release calling it only “fairly nifty.” So the folks in the marketing arm at Apple are in a conundrum, every release has to be the most important release ever and contain hundreds of must have new features …even if they aren’t really “must have.” So given that not every release is as great as Apple would lead us to believe the question becomes how often have the releases lived up to the hype?

Let us constrain that discussion to post OS X releases for the sake of brevity. In it’s earliest incarnation OS X was a beta release. Sure it was a beta release Apple got people to actually pay thirty bucks for but it was still a beta release. Keeping that fact in mind the release of 10.1 was a significant upgrade. On the other hand OS 9 was still the operating most commonly used and compared to that OS 10.1 (Puma) lacked quite a bit. Puma was the computer equivalent to dry shaving with a dull razor. Sure the razor scrapes hair off your face but the process is slow, painful and the results are less than ideal.

Jaguar, OS 10.2, was everything Apple would have you believe. Jaguar made OS X useable by most folks and included some highly useful programs and features. For example Jaguar added Quartz Extreme, iChat and spring loaded folders (the secret is using tiny springs I hear). Jaguar also made OS X feel much faster than it had in 10.1. If this was your yardstick to measure the validity of Apple’s marketing claims you’d undoubtedly call the goodwill spreaders at Apple headquarters the most honest marketers on the planet.

Your assessment of the veracity of the folks charged with getting the word out about the greatness of Apple’s products might have changed with the release of Panther (can we please stop with the cat names? Or at least include the munchkin somewhere down the line). With a finally enjoyable OS X version released Apple didn’t sit back and say “Ah, let us wait until we can come up with something really REALLY good.” Instead they released Panther. Sure it featured Expose but another major selling point, Font Book, is pretty weak. It also featured a performance boost but, in the end, Panther wasn’t $129 better than Jaguar. Many of Panthers improvements were already available via third party solution or were merely (bad joke coming) iCandy. Most people familiar with both Macs and PCs would say, with plenty of justification, that there was a lot more to XP service pack 2 than Panther. The argument is easily justified, XP SP 2 actually adds a lot of security to your Windows based PC, Panther added a chess game. Sure you can argue the comparison is unfair by noting that XP should have been secure from the start. I agree but from a value perspective XP Service Pack 2 was all over Panther.

So the final question is will Tiger be Cheetah or Jaguar? The magic eight ball says yes but that thing is only right about fifty percent of the time. Looking at the long, long list of new features, however, we see quite a few things to be very excited about. Core Audio and Video may not seem like huge improvements to the average guy but for programmers they’re huge steps forward. Spotlight could be very cool because, face it, OS X’s current search function is slow and somewhat unreliable. Safari RSS could be great or lame depending on the implementation. Actually with the sheer number of features it is easy to find something that seems completely lame (buy printing supplies) while also finding a things that are seemingly indispensable (automator).  Of course, that is the Apple way: throw a million features at the consumer and hope that like the auto buyer they’re impressed with the volume if nothing else. This time around I think you will be.