No one is as anxious as I am to see the new Tiger OS X when it’s released on April 29th, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that you never want to be an early adopter if you have a business critical system. What do I mean? Does anyone remember the first release of OS X? That was a mess. Hopefully since Tiger is not the dramatic update that the initial OS X was it will cause less problems. But can your system afford to have any problems at all?

These are questions you need to ask yourself before you install Tiger on the 29th. What can you expect? Well there are bound to be applications that just do not like Tiger. That’s not Apple’s problem; it counts on the developers to meet the needs of Tiger, not vice-versa. You can be certain that some smaller developers will just not have the time or capabilities to update to Tiger compatible software until weeks, or even months after the release. Then what about the haxies you have installed now? I would think that a few of them might not work or worse yet, might have adverse effects on Tiger.

Then what about Tiger itself? Sure it’s been beta tested for months, but there are no guarantees. All you have to do is look at almost every minor OS X upgrade in the past two years. There have been conflicts with existing hardware, problems with wireless, networking, and the last update 10.3.9 which we just had was found to screw up Java in certain cases. Can you imagine Tiger hitting the wild without at least a few of these glitches?

[Continue reading Why You Should Not Upgrade To Tiger On The 29th.]