Do i have to move to leopard?

hi i'am using tiger right now (OS 10.4) in the future... is it necessary for me to move to leopard if i dont need or want the feature offered by it. would i still get updates like iTunes?

i am a bit confuse since i've been primarily a windows user... i only switched to mac since OS 10.4 launched. so i have only been using tiger.

 

You should be fine for now. You will continue to get updates for iTunes, Quicktime, etc. You may want to consider moving to Leopard in the next year or so but no rush at the moment.

 

Do you actually use the Mac OS or are you using it just for bootcamp to run Windows? If you are using the Mac OS then upgrading to Leopard will be the necessary down the line.

Firstly, if you are using the Mac OS there are developers that will be making Leopard only applications and will be optimizing their software for Leopard. The same holds true with Windows Vista. Gaming is optimized for DX10.

Secondly, if you are running Windows via bootcamp the version of bootcamp in Tiger is beta and is expired and won't be supported any longer. Bootcamp in built into Leopard and will only be supported this way. So don't look at just the eye candy in Leopard, it's all about future software and what you can do with Leopard over Tiger.

 

i dont use bootcamp. i dont use windows on my mac.

 

Well Leopard has some nice useful features. I wouldn't say it's necessary to upgrade at the moment, but in the future it more than likely will be, since certain apps will require Leopard, just like certain apps require Tiger or higher right now. There really is no hurry though.

 

I would upgrade by the end of the year if your computer supports it well, but no rush. The features are still being polished.

 

Mac OS X Tiger will continue to be supported by Apple for a while...so you don't need to worry about rushing to Leopard for software updates.

 

I'm new to mac so I'm not sure how support cycles work but if I was to guess, seeing how apple has been shifting engineers from one department to another for product releases, they are obviously far from being overstaffed which is why I would guess sooner or later you're going to start seeing them winding down support for 10.4+earlier and have the team concentrate exclusively on 10.5.

MSFT had a similar tactic with XP-Vista even though their reasoning was more financially-driven (my guess is they are not understaffed) to get more people to upgrade to Vista. Of course that didn't quite work out with Vista tanking and the bad PR that followed, so they have extended their support map for XP quite a bit.

I don't think apple is in anywhere near being in that position.

And whether that winding-down is going to happen next month, next year or later that would be anyone's guess. But there is no reason in my mind for someone not to upgrade to Leopard other than for financial reasons, which is a valid point in itself.

 

I have a friend that still uses 10.3, and he gets updates every now and then(just security stuff). When apple releases a product it pretty much works from the start, or there's major patches within the first few months.

I'm not sure how the HD movie thing on iTunes would work though. I assume with stuff like that, since the application doesn't really care about changes made to the kernal(to an extant) that it can be updated in the same fashion.

 

hmmm... interesting... i was worried because my MBP which is built on the late late october 2007 has tiger pre-installed. what i'm worried about is that i'll missed out on the "driver" update, that the MBP needs, because i'm having couple of issues with it, such as sound issues, but most notably is the video driver issues. so as apple seems still to support 10.3, will still continue to provide update for drivers on my MBP say... on the next 2-3 years or so?

thanks everyone

 

My IT teacher is still using Panther so I think Tiger will be fine.