AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

Apple has a Tiger in its tank

Apple Computer is set to release OS X Tiger, it's latest operating system on April 29. Yesterday it announced updated Powermac computers, and the rest of its computers are expected to be speedbumped for good performance with Tiger by April 29 or shortly thereafter. If you are planning on buying a mac, make sure you are getting the speedbumped version. The lower end systems are expected to double their shipped RAM to 512 MB. Most will have graphics processors upgraded to ATI 9600 and 64 MB. This amounts to about a doubling of graphics performance.

The Tiger operating system itself is the single biggest operating system upgrade for Apple since the original OS-X. Tiger upgrades the internal workings to 64 bit computing for most processes, makes the graphics processor take over most of the work for the "eye candy" of the system. There is a "Spotlight" search technology that lets you search everything in your computer seamlessly. Finally, there are "widgets" a lot of small little helpful programs that you didn't know you couldn't live without.

Some would argue that "Tiger" is the next generation operating system that Microsoft hopes to deliver with "Longhorn" in late 2006 or 2007.

Interestingly, separately, Microsoft announced that it was planning on shipping a 64 bit version of Windows very soon. This is not Longhorn, this is a version of the current Windows XP but with some 64 bit processing implemented. This system has been circulating experimentally for two years, but has been criticized as being not very useful due to a lack of drivers and support for external devices. People who have been using 64 bit AMD 64 microprocessors have been using regular Windows or 64 bit Linux.

Macworld: News: Mac OS X Tiger to ship April 29