Conventional wisdom in the technical world is that you should not buy a brand new major OS upgrade first thing. There are a number of good reasons for this:
However, if you haven't upgraded yet, maybe you've waited long enough. Check the compatibility checklists to see which of your applications are incompatible. If you have two computers, consider upgrading one of them. But why? Only a couple reasons which may or may not be compelling for you:
- Once the OS is widely distributed - it gets far more testing with different configurations and uses and bugs are inevitably found. If you wait until at least the first revision which is probably coming out in a week or two, Apple will have a few of those bugs fixed and you'll be able to start out with a more bug free system.
- Some third party software makers won't be 100% compatible on day 1 of a major release. Even though compatibility, judging by the published compatibility lists (which you should check by the way), are showing high levels of compatibility, a favorite or even crucial application for you might not be compatible - yet. Good compatibility lists already exist such as the one at Macintouch, so check them before you throw the switch.
- The bleeding edge early adopters like me will learn a bunch in the first few weeks of Tiger's release and you can benefit from their knowledge.
- If you are operating in a mission critical, rush sort of environment where there's no room for error or new learning curve - early adoption is a bad idea.
- You can't find stuff on your hard drive. If you have a number of things you've been looking for and not finding, you might want to upgrade so that you can use Spotlight to find them. Even if you don't, it may be that in the first week of using Tiger, you'll find some stuff you've been looking high and low for. And that value may be high. High enough to outweigh the downsides to upgrading early.
- You are curious and excited about playing with the newest version of the coolest desktop operating system on the planet.
- You want to learn Tiger early because you will be sharing your knowledge with the slow adopters and want to start up the learning curve.
- There's a second computer available that's running Panther that you could use if you can't get a particular function to work in Tiger.
A reasonable middle position, if you are eager to upgrade, is to wait until the first upgrade, 10.4.1, which is rumored to be in the works and expected to be out some time in the latter half of May. However, if you have some of the reasons above to upgrade, you don't see compatibility problems that concern you on the list and you have some kind of backup plan if you run into problems, go for it!
Here's my situation. I have 3 Macs. (1) A dual 867 PowerMac running a recent version of Panther which I rarely use. It's kind of a backup computer right now, (2) A 2 ghz dual PowerMac that I use pretty regularly for heavy lifting and (3) my Powerbook that is my main computer.
I upgraded my Powerbook as soon as Tiger was released. I checked the compatibility list on Macintouch and it looked OK for what I use. About a week later, I upgraded my 2 ghz PowerMac. I've run into some little glitches and questions where I needed to research the issue to figure out how to move forward. But I'm really enjoying my new powerful operating system and getting better with it every day. To me, I'm getting the payoff I was looking for by being an early adopter.
I have bootable clones of both Tiger machines (immediately prior to the upgrade) stored safely and am keeping current backups of those machines. It's nice that there is another machine handy running Panther if I should run into a problem and so far I haven't had to touch it for anything.
Don't just cross your fingers and throw the switch. But if you do a little homework and consider what I've told you here and still want to go ahead with it. You have my blessings. ;-)