The new Mac OS is coming out very soon, named “Tiger,” or Mac OS X v. 10.4. While its feature set seems less dramatically improved than past upgrades, one of the biggest benefits appears to be speed–this reviewer reports an almost doubling of speed on her G4 Powerbook. If this is true, then it would be a very nice upgrade for me–my old G4 (which I’m keeping until a big upgrade of the Powerbook line comes from Apple) is getting a bit sluggish, though much of that is probably due to the fact that I haven’t reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled my OS and apps in two years or so–that’ll slow any computer down.

New features in Tiger include Spotlight, a new super-fast file and content search feature (integrated into the Mac Mail app as well), Dashboard (which is a copycat of Konfabulator), which allows you to use mini-apps called “Widgets” for easy access to content and controls. You might also find Safari’s RSS reader or the “Automator” script-builder to be useful as well. But the speed increase and search upgrades are the real improvements made here.

Tiger is due to come out sometime in April, maybe April 15th, and its announcement is supposed to be in the next few days. If Apple acts as it has in the past, then new Mac purchasers can get a free upgrade to Tiger if they buy their computer after the announcement to Tiger is made.

Of course, OS X is already a hell of a lot better than Windows XP, which was released in October 2001 and has had only minor upgrades (mostly patches to numerous security holes) since then. The new Windows OS, code-named “Longhorn,” is scheduled to come out in late 2006, but many doubt that it will be released on schedule. And when it does come out, it will not be a really great upgrade, either–already, just to make it possible to maybe reach the end-of-2006 deadline, Microsoft had to axe Longhorn’s most awaited feature, called “WinFS,” a new storage and file system that would theoretically speed up Window’s file browsing and search features, which still, to this day, use decades-old DOS technology. Not only did Mac OS X rework their system long ago, but the OS release of Tiger is most likely going to be even better in file handling and searching than what WinFS will deliver whenever it comes out.

In short, to get Longhorn will be to get what the Mac has had for years. And most of the other improvements in Longhorn are so technical or business-related that the common user won’t find much that excites them. Primarily the graphic user interface changes (read: eye candy) are what will make the most difference for most people–and that was kind of like what happened with the switch to XP. It was essentially just Windows NT with new colors. And one feature of Longhorn, called “Palladium,” is hyped as a “security” feature, but mostly it is designed to keep big companies secure from you. It is reported to look at what you have on your computer and severely restrict your use of any file or program which is not verified by Microsoft as being fully paid for, and possibly even make it very difficult for competing and open-source software packages to operate on your computer. What’s more, Longhorn, originally planned not to be backwards-compatible, will require users of XP to get upgrades (possibly more kludge-like) to their OS in order to use the software that Longhorn will encourage.

In short, Longhorn promises to be a slick-looking but far-behind-the-Mac OS that essentially serves businesses, not you, and may be more trouble than it’s worth.

The one down side about the Mac is that while you get a lot more great innovations and improvements on a much more regular basis (once every year or year and a half or so, as opposed to once every five years with Windows), you also have to pay $100-130 or so for each upgrade if you want all the improvements immediately. Of course, there’s no guarantee that Longhorn won’t be just as expensive–some are talking about the possibility of a new “subscription” payment method, where you pax X number of dollars every year to use the OS. And presently the Windows upgrade price is about $200. So you can wait to get better features at the same time on the mac for half the price of Windows, or you can get Mac OS X upgrades as they come out and pay maybe 50% more than you would for Windows–but you’d have much more functionality much faster.