Mac OS 10.4 'Tiger'

This is a no-brainer. If you live on the star known as Earth you will have heard of Apple's new OS nicknamed Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). What is the significant difference from Jaquar?

1. A new start: If you are one of the folks that had Panther, then upgraded to Jaquar, well what system do you think you ended up with? If you did a clean install (you did, didn't you?), then you still had legacy Mac OS Classic there as a big drive space hog. It was there waiting for the day you opened up PhotoShop 4.x or some ancient System 7 application. Tiger is not only helping you clean up all the rubbish you stashed on your hard drive all these years, but speeds things up, forces you to clean house, and makes you consider whether you want to bring all that old stuff over into the New Evolution. If you do, there are numerous ways to install including a Mac-to-Mac (Firewire transfer) and other means using the Migration Assistant.
   
2. The Dashboard contains widgets: Are these alone a good reason to upgrade? Didn't you always want to have something called widgets? Anyway, look for a cult following for Dashboard items like the weather, stock quotes, clocks and so on. Apple already has these built-in, but why not get more. The Great Ones of the Planet Macintosh have already suggested this was a throw-back to System 6 and System 7 (excuse me...."Classic Mac OS") and the concept of desk accessories.
3. Safari and RSS feeds: Hmmmm.... NetNewswire Lite rocks, so I agree with dudez that say you do not need a $129.00 browser upgrade if you just want RSS built into your browser. You can always stick with Firefox on Mac OS X. I must admit that Safari renders very fast.
4. Oh, yah, baby! I can really get hooked on Spotlight. There is no hype here: It just works as advertised. If you have a ton of stuff on your box (hey, why don't you have a ton of stuff on your box?), then searching AS YOU TYPE SOMETHING totally rocks ('screaming' intentional).
5. Mail: More sexy looking that it did in Jaquar, it pretty much does similar things but better and faster. I have no need to connect to an Exchange server with 'Mail' but I could if I wished.

Okay, you can go ahead and browser all the new features here. I am a better man for upgrading. My old PowerMac Cube had a hardware upgrade to 1GHz in the past few years, and was stuck behind with a pre-Jaquar OS. I can finally clean out all the legacy rubbish in that computer as well thank to the Family Pack.

P.S. I have no association whatsover with Apple, yet am happy to give them this promotion because it is deserved. I have been using Macs since the 128K and Macintosh II days. My migration path has been:

Desktop Path Macintosh SE/30 -> Overclocking the same ->
Quadra 650 -> PowerPC upgrade
PowerMac G4 Cube -> Upgrade to 1GHz

PowerBook Path
PowerBook Titanium -> iBook G4 1GHz