Apple has been telling developers that the new Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger release will be a big boon for developers. They probably say that to developers with every release, but in fact, the handful of whizbang out-of-the-box features most publicly touted for Tiger are in many respects feature platforms for third-party apps.

I'm guessing many Mac users upgrade to every major release out of loyalty, but I was starting to wonder if some folks may stick with 10.3 because the bundled Dashboard widgets aren't worth $150 on their own. Instead, it looks like people are going to need to upgrade to do all the cool stuff the rest of us will be doing with everything.