Tiger was $129, as is Leopard. Tiger family pack (5 licenses) was $199, same as the Leopard family pack.

Even OS X Server is the same price, at least in dollars.

but isn't £85 quid a hell of a lot for a point release/service pack?

Your price for tiger appears to be wrong. It retailed for $129, or $199 for a family license, just like leopard does.

The pricing for Mac OS X Tiger you stated is totally wrong.

In the UK, it was priced at £89, and in the US it was $129.

You're wrong about the price of Tiger.

I ordered a Tiger family pack on the day it came out and paid £139. The single user price was either £79 or £89 (can't remember) representing the exchange rate at the time. So, the new price is not significantly different (thought it is better).

However, compare with Vista where we Brits pay almost £1=$1 and it's a huge difference.

So is/was Tiger the iBook G3's end of life version of OS X? The system requirements at http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs/ sure make it look that way.

Any word on what Leopard features might work on a G3 with 384MB? Will it even install?

I should have been paying closer attention.

They might as well just rename Mac OSX "Linux Gauntlet 5" If the features wern't taken from linux in the first place then you'll want to bet your grannies socks they'll be there before Christmas.

.

"However, compare with Vista where we Brits pay almost £1=$1 and it's a huge difference."

Ballmer's Boys try to charge us Brits @ £1 = $1 for Vista, but there aren't that many gullible idiots.

Thankfully. (We don't want to encourage the greedy b@stards)

http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/

if your lucky enough to have a 'selected' serial number,

that said typically my (insurance replacement) Macbook Pro which I picked up all but two weeks ago doesn't have its name down on the list,

it also doesn't help that I'm in the UK where Apple UK Inc don't seem to give a hoot!

> but isn't £85 quid a hell of a lot for a point release/service pack?

It would be if it was a point release/service pack, but it's not. It's at least as much of a full OS upgrade as any Windows release (and more so than many of those). The point releases (such as the upcoming 10.4.11) are free, and typically released every few months.

Mac OS X's "point releases" are seen on the end of the version number given here, such as Tiger being released at 10.4.0 and currently being at 10.4.10. Those are free updates.

10.5 isn't a service pack, it's the next version of the OS and contains major changes and new features.

"but isn't £85 quid a hell of a lot for a point release/service pack?"

You're having a laugh right mate? Leopard is as significant an update as Vista was to XP... only it works. Don't get me started on Vista, its the bane of my life at work at the moment.

"Tiger was $129, as is Leopard. Tiger family pack (5 licenses) was $199, same as the Leopard family pack."

If MS used common sense prices like this for Vista, I might actually be willing to buy it.

..

..

Right!

But if they offered it for XP...

I just wish Jobs would FINALLY decide that it can make money selling OS's instead of just hardware. I have all the hardware I need to run OS X, except for that little chip...

http://input.media.euro.aple.com/apple/utd/macosx/index.php?lang=uk

Too much either way...

Apple's success is largely about their design, why would they want to make their OS run on a billions of possible PC hardware configurations? it would be a nightmare to test the OS and it would crash.

Apple's hardware is often much better than branded PC junk. My Mac Pro is very quiet considering it has 4 CPU cores. Apple uses a modern BIOS too.

I'm seeing people say this will be better than Vista and they should launch it without MAC hardware.

Really, they do NO compatibility runs because they DONT HAVE TO BE COMPATIBLE. They *know* exactly what hardware people are running.

Personally, I use XP on my 4yr old laptop (1.5centrino, 1gig ram) but Vista on my core 2 duo 2gig system.

Problems? It doesn't sleep properly (well, lately it has, but it's my only main issue at the moment).

Its worth pointing out, that whilst the £5 price drop isnt massive - as a student I have just ordered Leopard from Apple for only £50 :-).

Regarding the IIS error, take a closer look at that URL. You've mis-spelt apple.

The point release thing was a bit of a joke. Since in the span of time that MS has released 2 operating systems, there will now be 6 releases of OS X, it seems like the OS X releases line up with MS service packs.

Regardless of whether Apple has added more to their OS than Windows does for a service pack, it is not a whole new operating system in the least. It is a collection of graphical (ie entirely useless) tweaks and some features that almost nobody will use.

And from what I hear the Linux gui people had cloned most of the new features of Leopard's gui within weeks of screen shots and videos coming out online. Wooo...

I was actually looking forward to ZFS support, but it looks like they aren't announcing that. Must be saving it for server.

At least they didn't count each of 200 new desktop wall papers as brand new features like they did in Tiger...

Seriously, I'm finding it really hard to see anything in Leopard that's remotely interesting. It's the usual collection of eye-candy and "features" which are nothing more than rehashes of existing features, prettified so granny can use it.

"Does your desktop get cluttered?"

No, coz I use this neat little feature called directories. Yeah I know that's like sooooo 2006 man.

"Browse your files like you browse your music..."

Thanks, but I'd rather browse them like files, however since you mention it I'd really like to be able format my hard disk like I play the banjo.

"Combine Cover Flow with Spotlight and you’ve got one amazingly powerful search tool."

You mean maybe one that can tell me in one easy step where the actual file is? Or should I stick with locate?

"Browse, play, view, and page through your files. Without opening them"

Bugger me, you mean quick look doesn't even open the files? Somehow it just knows??

Moving on, nothing to see here.

"locate" isn't gonna help you determine which design comp you need to work on, nor will it let you see at a glance which stock photo you need.

Leopard would be worth the upgrade alone for Time Machine, let alone all the other features.

Mac hate is weak.

However DirectX 10 makes everything absolutely beautiful if you want to play games, and I know that my PC's drivers work absolutely wonderfully, and I can throw another stick of RAM in quite easily if I want, and I have a home OS that does EVERYTHING I want, with, in some ways, better memory use than XP.

Sleep is a bit dodgy still, doesn't re-initialise DirectSound properly for my USB sound card, so open apps using it have to be restarted, no biggy though.

'Apple's success is largely about their design, why would they want to make their OS run on a billions of possible PC hardware configurations? it would be a nightmare to test the OS and it would crash'

Success?

How long have Apple been in the business and still can't get more than 10% global market share?

This is why M$ walked all over them to become one of the biggest companies in the world. They accepted that people didn't want to be dictated to about which hardware and peripherals they run and try to maintain a decent level of backwards compatibility. If Apple had won the desktop it would have been disastrous for the hardware industry and stifled innovation losing us many hardware items that we take for granted now. It's so easy to sit there all smug going on about how well OSX runs, but even MS could have achieved that level of stability had they decided to only support a tiny selection of hardware and not bother too much about backwards compatibility. Lets see Apple release an OS that runs nearly everything and see if they can manage to get it to run as stable as windows does (yes it crashes but so does OSX and even rabid MS haters must accept that considering the amount of configuration possibilities, they really haven't done that bad a job with XP - Vista still not quite there but getting better)

I'm no longer fully up to speed on supporting Windows (hurrah!), but surely Windows service packs are necessary upgrades to fix serious bugs in your operating system? Whereas Panther, Tiger, Leopard are genuine upgrades of OS X. Maybe not major upgrades (or they would be OS XI!) - but, and this is important, you don't have to buy them, because OS X isn't broken. At home, my first generation Mac mini purrs along quite happily with Panther. There is no reason at all for me to upgrade the OS - it ain't broke and don't need fixed. When I buy my next Mac (the ole' PowerBook G4 won't last for very many more years) it will come with whatever version of the Apple OS is then extant. It won't be cheap, but I have every confidence that it will work out of the box, or, if I'm really unlucky, Apple will fix it with the minimum of hassle.

OS upgrades are not supposed to be exciting!

A fan, but no longer a boy, regretably.

I'm a programmer and I hate programmers too.

Good luck telling your mum to use "locate" when she can't find last year's photos of Benidorm.

"Yeah, Mum, just pipe it through grep..."

You should really look into OSX86 - pure genius. I can only imagine that they'll start work on an OSX 10.5 version of it, if they haven't already.

Oh and FYI, I'm not really advocating the rip-off of Apple. I've got a copy for the Mac, just not using it. I can guarantee people would pay for a copy if they took out that infernal chip-checking shenanigans

I don't care about the new stuff, but really want the fixes, specifically, will the desktop be scalable or not? assuming a fixed resolution monitor is just shit. Not allowing you to make stuff bigger is even more shit. Making me pay for a fix is irritating, but is it fixed? Us old folks with more money than sense and bad eyes need to know if OSX is going to get anywhere near what everyone else has had for a loooong time.

I have ordered a copy already. I enjoy using my Mac and resent having to use XP at work when I know I can work better and with less lockup situations on my home apple.

I like some of the new features, my kids use my mac and the extra parental controls will be used. The timemachine tool will help me deal with the way I use backup across some external drives and make restoration a cleaner process. All looks good and fun to use to me and I can't wait to get my paws on it.

I am a little worried that much of the simple style of Tiger will be lost in a reflective toolbar, which seems a little too much of a nod in the direction of style over function.

Looking forward to it with a slight concern over the super-candy look.

"It's so easy to sit there all smug going on about how well OSX runs, but even MS could have achieved that level of stability had they decided to only support a tiny selection of hardware and not bother too much about backwards compatibility"

Apple have broken backwards compatibility for Macintosh applications exactly once in 23 years, despite being on their third CPU architecture, when the Classic environment didn't make the leap to Intel in 2005. That makes them more reliable than Microsoft for this stuff - most DOS games don't work under NT/2000/XP, and as of Vista 64bit, support for Windows 3.1 and earlier apps is dropped. Though back in the day I remember that many of the Windows 2.x apps wouldn't work on Windows 3.1 anyway.

So what are you talking about?

I also think the success argument isn't necessarily valid. Apple are extremely profitable as they are, whereas trying to compete with Microsoft for ordinary PCs would probably kill them in an instant. Remember how much money they lost licensing OS 7?

Anyone know if it will be on sale at the London Expo next week?

....cool so when does the Service Pack from MS that turns all versions of Vista into just the one fully functional one that works on hardware up to 6 years old and with complete 64Bit support come out then?

Oh it won't....

As for the features being a waste, some are, some aren't.... i'm really looking forward to having 64Bit support (you know the part in windows where having a decent amount of RAM necessitates it as it can't recognise more than 3Gb and you need 2Gb to run Vista!) Time Machine will be great and very handy, Spaces great for people who do lots of different tasks, Stacks i'm not so sure it's essential but it beats having a Dock 3 foot long!

£85, i've ordered it.... that wouldn't even get you laughed at by MS for a copy of Vista, you know the one that replaced XP, that OS they've just made available again for OEM as Vista is causing issues for OEM manufacturers.

Del,

Although G3s won't be officially supported by Leopard, I'm sure there will be those who will be running it - however, I really don't think there would be any point.

From user reports, running beta versions on G3s has been a dreadful experience - and an extemely unstable one. Given the minimum RAM is 512MB, your money would be best spent elsewhere.

>> So what are you talking about?

You miss the point.

Windows supports hardware from hundreds of vendors for motherboards, chipsets, CPU's, graphics cards, sound cards, LAN cards, USB chips... the list is endless.

Yes, Vista has some hibernation and suspend problems, but it works fine on the majority of PCs (including mine). All you need is a crap sound card driver, written by someone in Timbuktu, and of course its going to cause problems.

Its the price us PC users pay for being able to change graphics card, sound card, power supply, CPU etc., and choose from umpteen different manufacturers and suppliers.

Apple, however, have an almost total monopoly on the core hardware. This gives them a SIGNIFICANT benefit in terms of testing and support. The downside? Go try build your own PC, get it to run OSX, and sell it to the public. The fact that Apple will sue your arse off is perhaps very telling.

And this is why Apple is stuck at (a very vocal) 10% share. If you don't mind restricting your choice, I'm sure Mac suits you.

just pre ordered my copy and ive paid the princely sum of £70.50 including vat and delivery.. ah the benefits of working for a big bank that has a deal with apple

must say im slightly disapointed by the fact theirs only version, feel kinda left out seeing as the MS crowd get to choose from half a dozen versions of vista **SUCKERS!!!!** lol

"Lets see Apple release an OS that runs nearly everything and see if they can manage to get it to run as stable as windows does"

No no no!

The major reason that I run my studio on OSX is because of the stability which comes (in part) from dictating the hardware. I know that the system has had thousands of hours of testing on the same hardware combination that I've got. I cannot afford a crash in the middle of a session.

I do run 4 different general purposes OSs almost every day - OSX, Windows, Linux, RISC OS. I do this because none of them are the best at everything. They all have their strengths and weaknesses and I just use the best one for each task.

"How long have Apple been in the business and still can't get more than 10% global market share?"

So what? they're still in the business, still profitable, who gives a monkey's if they're not the biggest in the market? They're still providing me with what I need. So long as they keep enough of the market to stay in business that's good enough for my purposes.

I hope the reflective dock thingy can be turned off...

UK - url - guessed it as I couldn't find it.

http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/

Pit annoyed as I bought a macbook pro in March as I couldn't wait any longer for Leopard and I'm now having to pay the full price for the upgrade, surely it could be staged and say a 50% discount if you have bought your kit in the last 6-12 months bearing in mind how late the release is.

True Josh it probably won't, but you've missed the point entirely. If spotlight is a tool to search for your files, why is it so unreasonable to expect it to be able to tell you where they are at a glance?

@Evil Graham

Yeah and god forbid she's not sure which dfsc_00001.jpg file it is, but knows she's saved it in a folder called Benidorm. It's all well and good making tools that are simple to use until they sacrifice features that might be useful to anyone above 'granny' level, especially when one does not detract from the other. Simplicity and power do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Goods:

1)iCal and iCal DAV for sharing family calendars and assigning appointments and tasks to family members

2)Updated parental controls (the current ones are ok, but leave a bit to be desired)

3)Proper syncing of To Dos and Calendar appts. via mail to my iPhone

4)Time Machine to eliminate my manual monthly backups of every family member's machine

5)iChat for screen sharing

Bads:

1) Eye candy. Who cares? We are Mac users not Vista users.

2) Upped processor and RAM requirements. Um, while they added some new features doesn't it seem like most of the OS is the same, therefore shouldn't require new hardware??? The old computer 400MHz G4 I just handed down to my 1 year old isn't supported. Hmmpf

Unknowns:

1) Will iSync finally work with a damn Motorola Razr V3???

My macbook's bluetooth died on me last week i took it in to the store in Solihul and they replaced it for another macbook which makes me eligible for the discounted upgrade. £5.99 isn't a bad price at all for the new cat ;)