Allow me to recapitulate:
MC Brown has a question, to whit: “Is Tiger worth the fuss?” What does MC Brown means by “worth” and “fuss”? He does not say, though it is reasonably certain what he means by “Tiger.”

MC Brown proceeds to express his shock that Tiger did not deliver the same immediate bliss as would a few hits of LSD. And MC Brown is disappointed in Apple because Apple failed to develop Tiger around MC Brown’s (unstated) needs. MC Brown was wishing SO HARD that Apple would gaze deep into his soul and develop a whole new operating system just for him. But it just didn’t happen.

Spotlight helps people find things in a whole new way, and beats Microsoft to the punch. But MC Brown already knows where all his things are, so Spotlight is obviously without merit. Dashboard add lots of little convenient Widgets, with the promise of many more third-party Widgets to come. But MC Brown is sad because the clock is too big. In fact, he can only fit four clocks on his screen! So, Widgets is obviously without merit. And so on.

Patrick, you may have missed it, but MC Brown discards Tiger with a few palsied flicks of his wrist. He gives not a moment’s thought to the (here comes a big word) IMPLICATIONS of Tiger.

In the end, MC Brown’s premise is ill-defined, his logic, solipsistic (love that word), his conclusion, myopic, and his overall tone, petulant. Kind of reminds you of a certain President, now doesn’t it?

[ADMIN EDIT: was that really necessary?]

Is Tiger worth the fuss? Yes, because Apple will make money from it and maybe even increase market share. If this is all that TIger achieves, it has earned the hype. But of course, Tiger does something more concrete: It has extended Apple’s technological lead over Microsoft, and in a very public way. This will not only attract new individual customers, it will attract more IT people, more governement, education and business buyers, more scientists and so on.

These are really bad arguments for consumers to buy Apple’s Tiger OS. None of you arguments explcitly specify how they will benefit the customer — only how it will benefit the Industry, Market, and Apple’s competitive edge on Microsoft. These are great reasons if you were for Apple, bad reasons if you’re a consumer.

Panther was a huge upgrade from Jaguar. Tiger doesn’t feel like such a huge upgrade partly because Panther was so good. Tiger is faster and has a few obviously nice advantages. I think that after I use this for another month or two I’ll find lots more to like about it.

In-context Google, Spotlight, and dictionary lookups via highlight/right-click are quickly becoming indispensable tools for me.

In-Finder slideshows are just an amazing tool for quickly scanning images prior to, and during building a graphics project. And, being able to select and slideshow images from a Spotlight search is just mind warping in its handiness… then make a smart folder of just the right images, as well? Outstanding.

I don’t know what you do for a living. But, I make my living doing image/video intensive documents for marketing and management communications purposes. The data mining and organizational tools in Tiger are proving rapidly to be the best purchase I have ever made on the Mac platform. I, quite literally, would not return to Panther for $10,000.

So, to each their own opinion, based on how much value the new features in Tiger deliver to them. To me, the value is large, and obvious.

It’s not surprising that some end users will say “Dashboard and Spotlight? Big whoop.” But for the propellerheads and developers, Tiger is a Really Big Thing(tm), because it provides an architectural framework for them to do really cool stuff — 64-bit coding, iSync services, SearchKit, CoreImage, etc. etc. etc. The only pity is that software to really take advantage of all these new toys aren’t here yet.

On the whole, Tiger is worth the fuss… for those who are thrilled by potential, who are willing to wait a little for the really cool Tiger-only apps that will be coming to us in the weeks ahead.

For those focused only on the immediacy and the superficial gloss, however… patience, young Jedi.

–R.J.

You declare, for instance, that Spotlight is “the sort of technology that will be used most by the same people who frequently lose their keys, utility bills and remote controls, rather than those who are relatively organized and know where to find things.” Well, Master MC Brown, I congratulate you and the other 27 people on the planet who have achieved anal-retentive nirvana. The great unwashed hordes out here, myself included, fit into your dismissive first category, those who sin by misplacing things from time to time.

I consul patience, my solipsistic friend. See how you feel after one month, six months, one year with the new additions. I have been using the same Powerbook for the past 2 1/2 years and I still find new capabilities in it. This is one reason I love the Mac so much. It seems to anticipate my needs and it waits patiently until I catch on or catch up.

Perhaps you were caught up in the hype and had unrealistic expectations. Perhaps were expecting that Tiger would deliver technology so magical that your life would gain instant karma. If so, I mourn bitterly for your dashed expectations.

Is Tiger worth the fuss? Yes, because Apple will make money from it and maybe even increase market share. If this is all that TIger achieves, it has earned the hype. But of course, Tiger does something more concrete: It has extended Apple’s technological lead over Microsoft, and in a very public way. This will not only attract new individual customers, it will attract more IT people, more governement, education and business buyers, more scientists and so on.

So be happy, not sad. Heighten your empathy and become one with the diverse Mac universe. And remember, Steve is watching over us all.

For example, although I do have a fairly structured system of folders set up for individual clients, projects and so on, there’s currently no easy way for me to tie in mail messages to those projects. Being able to use spotlight to search across documents, e-mail, images and everything else is a real bonus.

Sure, someone who has a rigorously-followed filing system probably *could* do it faster than spotlight, at least on a G4 powerbook. But if you’ve ever said to yourself “I swear this is where I put that document/e-mail/image…”, then Spotlight will make 10.4 feel like a whole new operating system.

However that is not close to being true. Spotlight purposly omits lots of items, including a lot of System fles. How about invisible files? Sure not everyone needs to find them but a lot of people do (developers, etc).

Not to mention bugs where it can’t even find files located right on your Desktop in plain view.

Tiger is supposed to represent a slowdown on the upgrade wheel which I appreciate but I will definitely not buy Tiger through retail.

I’m on a first generation G4 with Jaguar so I’ll probably wait for a revised mac mini that is able to make good use of the various ‘core’ technologies in Tiger (and comes with the iApps bundled).

Those core technologies seem to have a bright future. The rest of the under-the-hood stuff is very nice. It all goes to enhance the user experience both directly and indirectly. Windows compatibility, network diagnostics etc.

I agree that Tiger is seriously lacking real user visible features to warrant a major upgrade label although when you take a look at what’s changed behind the scenes it really is a major upgrade.

To counter that perspective more features should have been added that users could evaluate directly.

The install and re-install procedures are nowhere near the level they should be at after four major revisions for example.

And the Ars article goes into a lot of detail of stuff behind the scenes that you just don’t think about. Sure it’s cool, and yes, it’s there, but how much of an improvement is it, really?

The point is, now I’m using Tiger full time there seems so little that is actually useful from a day to day usage point of view. Yet Dashboard, Spotlight and the Mail improvements were supposed to be key enhancements for regular users.

As to spotlight ‘indexing everything’ and me still having to ‘navigate to it, and open it’, I don’t see how pressing the key combination of Spotlight, typing in the filename and then selecting it from the list of files is any quicker than me switching to the finder, clicking the ‘Active Work’ folder in the sidebar and opening the document. I’d wager I could do it faster by hand than by spotlight.

As to MAil. Yes, it’s faster. No disagreement there but that’s the only significant improvement I can see. And some things are slower – have you tried creating a new IMAP account? Mail sits there for about a minute talking a server just 15ft away doing god knows what. It now takes 2-3 minutes to set up a new account, over three separate dialog boxes. I used to be able to type everything into one box, no stupid checking and the whole process took 15 seconds.

You don’t do this frequently, I know, but why the hell should it take so long anyway?

in short, theres more, much more to Tiger than meets-the-eye via Dashboard and Spotlight.