When does Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger ship?

Dave's Answer:

Ah, I look in my crystal ball and it's still a bit cloudy, I must admit. Some rumor sites are reporting that the very latest beta release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has gone gold master (see Mac rumor badboy site AppleInsider, for example), but I don't know how much to trust their information sources, particularly since the rumor sites are embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple right now about trade secrets and confidentiality.

Update: Apple has announced that Tiger will be shipping on April 29th!

However, I can say that Tiger is really going to be a cool operating system update for Mac users, and while there are lots of things to like, I think people are going to be blown away by Spotlight, the new and powerful search engine. Imagine being able to search all the images on your computer by EXIF information, for example, or search by MS Word summary information, or PDF page count and creation dates.

Other noteworthy additions to Mac OS X include Dashboard, a cool widget overlay that's going to change how you work with information on your computer, Safari RSS, an elegant and powerful RSS aggregator (see What's an RSS Aggregator?) built right into my favorite Web browser, and Automator to speed up your repetitive tasks quite a bit.

As with previous major OS updates, Tiger is going to cost you some dough for the upgrade unless you buy a new Mac a few months from now. Retail price according to Apple is $129.99, but if you pre-order Tiger through Amazon.com there's a sweet $35 rebate and free shipping. You just have to place your order before 31 May. Here's a handy purchase link:

Buy Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger from Amazon for only $94.99

I'm looking forward to the upgrade, personally. That's about all I can say for now, but when Tiger does ship, I'll have more to share.

This article was originally written on April 4th, 2005, and has been updated with newer information

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