Laura and I were at our local Apple dealer – Bitznbytes in Concord – at 6 PM last night to pick up a copy of Tiger. Fortunately, there was no long line of loonies dressed as strange characters – no wait at all, in fact – walked in and picked up our copy, chatted with the staff, played with the computers and left.
Today was much too nice a day to spend inside playing on the computer – Laura and I worked in the yard instead – so I’ll devote a little time over the weekend to getting the machine backed up and set up for the upgrade. O’Reilly & Associates web site MacDevCenter like “Everything You Need to Know to Install Tiger and “Housecleaning Tips for Tiger” worth reviewing before you leap in.
As my iMac is primarily a desktop machine for NeoOffice/J documents, email, browsing, blogging and as a terminal into remote machines, I don’t have a lot of software installed on it, and so I’m going to try the lazy man’s approach of upgrade-in-place, rather than a Freemanize of “blow everything away” – partition, format and reinstall – that would be more appropriate for a more heavily used machine. If the install gets glitchy, of course. that’s always the last resort. Stay tuned.
Ars Technica has a review of Tiger here including what seems to be a well-deserved bash of the Mail GUI redesign and a great explanation of fine-grained vs. course-grained kernel locking. Ars Technica has also started a set of journal pages, including an Apple journal page appropriately named “Infinite Loop.”