How do you explain the difference of driving a BMW to someone who has been driving a Toyota. Both of them are cars that take you from point A to point B at roughly equivalent speeds; both have an accelerator and a steering wheel and both use the same fuel for power. It’s the feel- the experience that makes driving the BMW so much more pleasurable and that is something that has to be experienced- it just cannot be described in words. This is the dilemma we’re facing today by looking at our first experience with Mac OS X 10.4 codenamed Tiger that Apple released a few weeks back.

Now before we go any further, we know that Apple dropped the bomb by announcing their switch to Intel CPUs in the next year or two. Luckily we’re not discussing the hardware, but, the Operating System. This review is based on version 10.1 of the OS which came installed on a PowerMac provided to us by Arab Business Machine Ltd. (Apple IMC - Middle East). Unfortunately, the 1.7GHz unit only came with 256MB RAM and a GeForce FX5200 graphics card- a bit too under powered for our taste. While we couldn’t do anything about the Graphics card (you cant stick a PC Video card on the Mac and expect it to work), we did upgrade the memory to 1GB- a configuration we’re more comfortable working with- at least in the PC World.

Although the unit came with Tiger Pre-installed, we decided to start from scratch and format and re-install to get a complete experience. Generally speaking, you’ll only be able to buy a DVD version of Tiger unless you request CDs directly from Apple, so make sure you have a DVD drive if you’re planning on installing Tiger. To boot from the Optical media you either need to select the DVD as your startup disk from your System Preferences or simply hold the C key while booting which is what we did. The installation screen came up and while someone not familiar with disk-formatting and OS installations will appreciate the no-brainer setup, we did manage to miss a couple of things such as the disk partitioning utility. The installation took about 30 minutes and five clicks in total.

Getting used to a new Operating system isn’t too much of an effort nowadays, however, being a long time Windows user, we had to “unlearn” a few things while make the Mac adjust to others that we’re comfortable with. The first such thing we did was switch to a five button mouse with the scrolling wheel. Apple only provides a single button mouse, and we can understand that it works well for simplicity’s sake, but we’re just too used to having context menus and scrolling using the mouse alone. Surprisingly, the five button mouse worked as well as we could’ve imagined and we highly recommend it for people used to PCs.