Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / April 2005

I would suggest that judging Apple by the behavior of Microsoft is unfair
to Apple.

In OSX history, there has only been one blunder of releasing something
before it was ready, and as I recall that was fixed the next day or so.

It's hard to say what would have caused that without seeing any details.

Day zero release for me.  After all, all my important data is backed
up, but I expect zero problems when I upgrade.  They do a much better
job of QA than Microsoft does, so even if there is a "hotfix" patch
immediately after release, it's likely to be trivial "what-if" type bugs
or odd permutations of hardware and software that hadn't been forseen.
If you haven't been doing strange things to your system, I wouldn't worry
about upgrading it right away.

Dave Hinz

I tend to jump in on my personal machines, and have actually had very
little significant trouble. I 'd probably do the incrementall install,
too, although I'm very aware that there are other and perhaps safer ways
to do it ('clean', 'archive & install', etc.). The reason for that is
that I have no major issues with my setup today, and in such cases that
is what a "naive" user would do. It should work, I expect it to work,
Apple sells it for that express purpose, and if it doesn't, I want to
know and to find out why. So far it's worked every time, but YMMV.

However, I don't run a production machine. With machines that have to
perform income-generating tasks every day on the dot, I'd be more
careful. If not quite wait until the first point update from Apple, then
at least until a good number of user reports have come in and seem
satisfactory. Even then, of course, you're not 100% sure - you never
are, as you point out.

However, I'd _buy_ Tiger right away and install it on a spare partition
or something to test and play with. It'll take time for Tiger 10.4.1 or
10.4.2 to ship as retail packages anyway, so most probably you'll have
to install 10.4.0 and then update manually for quite a while anyway.

I jump in on my laptop at work, but hold off on the production Macs
until I've pounded on it for a while (a month or two). As a manager, if
I have to spend a day rebuilding my OS there's little productivity
lost. <grin>

I've been a Mac owner since 1988 and a user for a few years longer. The
only OS version I didn't install within a week after release was 8.0,
and that was because 8.0 offered almost nothing to anyone whose primary
concern was not eye candy. I held out until 8.1 which did bring
significant operational enhancements.

You will see people posting about problems with every system upgrade,
major or minor. As you acknowledge, it's not going to be 100% smooth.
That said, you always have to keep in mind that people who aren't having
problems don't tend to broadcast it. They're too busy playing with their
new toy.

G

I've never personally had a problem with a Mac OS system software
release.  The worst that has happened is that each release of Mac OS X
(10.2 and 10.3) have broken my installation of GNU Emacs.  After I
install the new system's developer tools and recompile it, everything
works fine.  I have no idea why Emacs is so picky, but it is (or at
least has always been for me.)

Despite this, I tend to wait for the first update anyway.  In this case,
that would be 10.4.1 or 10.4.2.

Although I like the description of the new Tiger features, I am content
to wait a month or so to see what people think of it first.

-- David

The OS has been tested extensively at Apple and by developers who paid
$500 to get seed access.  This is a pretty thorough test.

On the other hand, there are several orders of magnitude more users of
the Mac than there are developers.  Even with developers testing their
own products, and by implication, the products they use, there are going
to be configurations that slip through the cracks.

In general, if an app does not talk directly to hardware or the kernel,
the odds are that it will keep right on working.  Sometimes it is hard
to know whether that is the case for a given app.

For example, I have known for months that VPC's virtual switch would not
work with Tiger, and sent MS an email.  This makes sense, as they are
fiddling at a pretty low level to do that magic.  Given that they were
told, I was surprised that they announced such a long time until a Tiger
patch.

Other companies are already posting Tiger compatibility notices, a week
before Tiger ships.

So, you have to look at the apps you use, and any that are absolutely
critical, contact the company.

Do be aware that developers have not been given access to the shipping
version of Tiger.  If you buy and install it on Friday, you will see
that version before most of the people writing the software you use.  
That said, the changes from the versions that the devs _did_ get a
chance to play with are not likely to be that big.

[...]

Frankly, I expect to roll it out as soon as it comes into my hot little
hands.  Our clients are going to do much the same.  I might consider
putting it on an external hard drive, but other than that, roll with it.

Scott

I've ordered 10.4 and will install it when it arrives. But I remember
loosing a firewire drive with 10.3 and java with the 10.39 update. My
guess it will make little difference when you install 10.4, even bug
fixing 10.4 updates will probably just  introduce new ones :-(  For
example, take a look at
<http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20050427063736257>