I got the Tiger Launch Blues... (1 Viewer)

[Lee Scoggins]

As Mac fans here know, today was the launch of Tiger's operating system. Well I thought it would be cool to line up early and see what these Apple releases were all about. I wwnt to one of the two Atlanta retail stores and about 40-50 people showed up around 5:00 for a 6:00PM opening of the store.

I figured if you stood in line you would at least get a crack at the better promo items-they were giving away an iPod, PowerBook, iPod mini, iSight so the hardware was pretty decent and the odds were good being a smaller store. We probably has 60 people around the time the opened the store. I bet that at least we could buy Tiger for below retail given that Amazon is offering $30 off rebates.

Well they let us in and the sales staff was really friendly and clapped for everyone standing in line and they started passing out the cards which you scratched off to see what you won...and they passed out Tiger. Well bummer #1 was Tiger was given out at FULL MSRP. Then the 60 or so who had waited in line for an hour started scratching off the cards and no one won anything but a $0.99 iTunes song. Bummer #2. This is a way to reward customer loyalty. They give away MULTIPLE iTunes songs in soda promos now????

Not a great showing of loyalty by Apple. No T-shirts, nothing...

The Tiger demos were fairly impressive but I decided to order mine from Amazon and save some money. I guess I order my free $0.99 song now. Big Whoop.

I would have least stacked some of the "prize" cards in the first 50 or so cards so the most loyal users would have a chance. And I would have created a big discount on Tiger to help build word of mouth loyalty from the Mac faithful. It really seems like we should have just waited until later in the evening when the crowds had died down. Likely the PowerBook winner will walk into the store at 11PM when all excitement and crowds are no more...

Any other Mac fans go to the launch tonight?

Did you win anything big?

What did you think?

 

[Pamela]

Lee, I was at the Tiger launch tonight at the Glendale Galleria and I was also bummed. Stood in a long line for an hour. Got my scratch off card. Yeah, one measly iTunes song. I have been to other launches and scored some cool swag. Not tonight. No shirts. No posters. Nada.

I did pick up Tiger, knowing full well it would be full retail. Fry's was selling it tonight for $109. I also got a new case for my Shuffle. Very disappointed in the whole thing. Oh well. As I was standing in line I thought, you don't see people standing in lines like this for the latest Windows OS!

I haven't installed it yet. Trying to figure out if I want to go clean install or archive and install. My PowerMac G5 is only 2 months old and I just did a clean install of 10.3 on my TiBook. The only thing holding me back from a clean install is that Quark limits the number of times you can install your software on a computer. After the limit you need to call Quark for permission to install it again. Don't want to go through that.

 

[Kyle McKnight]

The two things I envy about this thread...it mentions the apple stores that I'd really like to check out, and the fact that the full OS can be had for about $100. I wish WinXP was that price.

Is there an Apple store in Dallas? If so I may have to go check it out!

 

[Patrick_S]

Of course the store employees don’t know which cards are the big winners and if they were told to distribute the cards in a certain order and it became apparent big winners were always on the top of that order do you really think you would ever have a chance at winning a big prize? If so I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell you.

 

[SteveLa]

http://www.apple.com/retail

I don't know anyone that walks into an Apple Store and expects to get hardware or software on sale, especially something on day of launch with lots of media coverage and great word-of-mouth. I've never seen anything on sale at an Apple Store except discontinued items or floor items. I can almost always buy things cheaper online (software, DVD's, computers, televisions, etc) but there are times I want the instant gratification that walking into a store on launch date provides. Today was one of those days.

 

[Pamela]

Yes, it was! So what do y'all think? I have it installed in my G5 and it's currently installing on the TiBook. It seems pretty zippy on the G5. Right now I'm playing with the widgets. Some bugs, but having fun! I think the Automator will come in handy for me, especially when I have batches of photos that have to be converted from jpeg to tiff and from color to black and white.

 

[SteveLa]

I've only installed it on my desktop machine for now. Can't install it on my laptop until Cisco releases an update to their VPN client. First impressions are positive. The release is faster than the beta versions that I had tested. The Spotlight indexing in particular was significantly faster than in my previous testing. Automator is going to be a huge help. I've already set up a few smart folders in Mail. Being able to search those folders that are updated dynamically is going to be a big time saver for me. Mail.app did crash the first time I launched it after the mail conversion, but it was fine after I re-launched. Don't really like the new mail action buttons, though. One very sweet piece of eye candy is the RSS screen saver. It's pretty damned cool the way the RSS feeds scale to size as they rotate from front to back (this is a visualization best seen in person) but the best part is that as a headline pops onto the screen, you can press a number on the keyboard and Safari will take you right to the full story. Fantastic!

 

[Pamela]

I just installed it on my laptop and now, no wireless connection. I did a search and it is apparently a problem with others as well.

Too tired to deal with it tonight. I guess that's what I get for being an early adopter!

 

[Joseph S]

This is the first OS I don't have by launch since OS 7. The good news is I have a new BTO Dual 2.3 GHz on the way soon and a new 20" display. The bad news is they didn't come for free. :frowning:

 

[Thomas Newton]

At the Apple Store I went to, they added insult to injury by having mall guards check the contents of every Apple bag as the buyer left the store. Even if it must have been plain as day to them that the buyer had no possible chance to shoplift merchandise in the area between the cash register and the door.

 

[Thomas Newton]

There was a coupon in my bag for free Tiger Training or free Tiger Installation help (choose ONE). I don't know if that's a "launch night freebie" or if it's an ongoing Apple Store thing.

I think I would have preferred a black T-shirt (in my size) with a full-size picture or illustration of a real tiger on the front, and a "Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger" (huge X) on the back. My biggest problem with installation is going to be juggling partitions (AFAIK the partitioning utility does not officially support any operation other than "destroy entire disk"). And a T-shirt would have nicely elaborated on the theme "The cat made me buy it."

 

[Lee Scoggins]

I would have at least liked to see a T-shirt for everyone who stood in line...

 

[Glenn]

Hi Lee,
I didn't go to an Apple store but instead went to CompUSA. Here is my report.

CompUSA Stinks here in the south-side of Atlanta. CompUSA had an ad on their web site with a big sale for Tiger's release today. The local CompUSA had no information about this sale and only had Tiger installed on one Mac. I did not see Tiger even for sale at the store.

Since I had not printed the PDF file of the ad I had no proof of the sale. The employee looked on the CompUSA web site and didn't see anything listed there.

There were a small handful of people there asking about this sale and we all were disappointed at the lack of information and knowledge of the sale from the local folks. To bad that the company didn't do a decent job of promoting this. And they probably wonder why they had no sales of Tiger at thie store.

Glenn

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Glenn,

I find that CompUSA is terrible about communicating things to employees. I'm not surprised by your experience. At least the Apple stores have a cohesive message even if the prizes suck.

 

[Lew Crippen]

What makes you think that the most loyal users are the ones that queued up first? There are plenty of loyal users who have things like jobs that prevent them from standing in line before 6.

At the location I went to yesterday (in Dallas) there was already a line longer than 50 at 5:45. I'm pretty sure that many loyal users came in around 7 or 8.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

There has to be some correlation between those queing up early and loyalty. Most people can arrange their schedules to get out early Friday if they want to. At the very least, Apple could have passed out some swag to the first 50 or 100 people thru the door. I believe this is the first launch they did nothing - didn't Jaguar have T-shirts and Panther have dog tags?

The real problem Lew is that no one won anything major while I was at the store from 6-8PM. That clearly lets the air out of the bag.

On top of this, the removed Virex from the .Mac account even though a Tiger-compatible version 7.6 was just released. Plus, they could at least give us 1GB of space for $100 a year, after all you get free email that large these days....

You add in a lackluster PowerMac upgrade (no 3Ghz, no dual core) and it seems to me that Apple is a bit off these days...

 

[Lee Scoggins]

I have been reading a lot of Mac forum talk and most people were very disappointed with the launch parties. I think Apple missed a great opportunity here.

Fortunately Tiger is a step up in OS so it will still sell very well.

 

[Craig S]

Got mine at Fry's Friday night for $99. No lines, just a huge shelf full of lonely Tiger boxes. There's only one Apple store in Houston, and it's an hour away from here, so I guess the local Mac faithful all ordered theirs from Amazon...
Well, comparing XP to OSX prices is somewhat apples to oranges. Tiger is an upgrade. Yes, it's cheaper than the upgrade from Win 2000 to XP, but it's not as significant as that upgrade was either. It's mainly Spotlight, Dashboard, and a bunch of tweaks here & there. Don't get me wrong - I like it, it installed smoothly on my Mac Mini, it runs fine and the new stuff is cool. I just think it's a bit overpriced. Fry's deal helped a lot.

 

[Walter Kittel]

I would disagree with the sentiment that it is less significant than 2000 -> XP. It offers more than a bunch of tweaks. ( Quartz Extreme, Kernel extensions, and launchd for instance. ) Read the excellent ARS Technica review for what Tiger brings to the Mac.

ARS Technica Review of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

My upgrade went smoothly this weekend. Safari seems much more responsive and Spotlight is superior to Google Desktop in terms of how it organizes and presents information. Very, very happy with Tiger.

- Walter.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Walter,

Thanks for the ARS link. I have been playing with Safari 2.0 at the Apple store and it seems almost 75% faster than 1.3.

Spotlight is unbeatable versus 3rd party since it is tied in with the OS core. If you create a file, you have it indexed for Spotlight.

You really can't compare Apple upgrades to Microsoft since each major upgrade is very significant and only comes out every few years like a major OS event at Microsoft (95, 98, XP, etc.). This one is a very different OS with major changes to the core imaging and other wholesale type revisions.