Want to know how most of us will be using computers in a few years? Hunt down the nearest store demonstrating Apple’s new operating system, Tiger, look at the top right of the screen and try typing a word into the search icon you’ll find there.

What happens next is something we will take for granted in the future. The computer finds what we want — but not by folder or name. Tiger knows pretty much what we’re looking for before we ask the question, because it has already indexed everything it can find on the computer in advance. Type in a word and it will tell you any documents that contain it, and rank them in what seems to be an order of importance (very well, too).

Hammer in a date and it will show you every piece of e-mail you dealt with, every appointment and every document you handled that day.

Tiger, like everything to do with Apple, is wallowing in hype. The ads will tell you there are more than 200 new features inside this £89 upgrade to the Mac OS X operating system. Most are so small that you scarcely notice them. But Spotlight, the technology behind this universal search function, is something special. So special that Microsoft is committed to building something similar — and, it claims, better — into the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, which is due out next year.

It has a fight on its hands. I did my best to break Spotlight, and failed miserably. I took out an account with an excellent new mail-hosting service called Alien Camel (www.aliencamel.com), copied a few thousand e-mail messages over to its servers and told Tiger to treat this as my main address when searching.

Programs such as Google Desktop will index your computer too. But Spotlight is built directly into the Mac, and pops up its head easily and quickly everywhere. So, in Mail, you have a little search box in the application itself. After the software spent 30 minutes indexing those messages on Alien Camel on my Mac, it found the mails I wanted — instantly, before I’d even finished typing.

Next to Spotlight, the rest of Tiger looks, to be honest, a little like window-dressing. Apple is immensely proud of Dashboard, a set of mini programs, from flight trackers to dictionaries, that can be pulled up simply by hitting the F12 button. They’re fine, but you can get much the same thing — on Windows, too — from Konfabulator (www.konfabulator.com). Much better are the improved mail application, a superior Safari browser, with the power to handle RSS feeds, and less visible but equally welcome improvements such as superb synchronisation of address books and calendars among multiple computers, an area where Microsoft is currently clueless.

The Mac is on a modest roll, and for good reasons. It has none of Windows’s virus and security problems (though they may come one day) and the success of the iPod has persuaded a new generation to look at Apple.

Because the web is so pervasive, Mac is not such an outside bet. I used to regard it as a poor family computer because there was no Mac version of Encarta, the ubiquitous homework encyclopedia. But now you can subscribe to Encarta online, and very good it is too, with the Mac just as it is with Windows. Only the lack of games software really lets the Mac down as a general consumer machine these days.

If you own a recent Mac and it’s compatible — check the Apple website first — Tiger is a natural upgrade. If you’re interested in a different way of computing, it’s an intriguing product and a pleasure to use.

What holds Apple back is the cost of its hardware, which is up to 30% more expensive than the Windows equivalent. Features such as Spotlight apart, the Mac is, ultimately, a fashion choice, and with a Tiger in the tank, a rather dashing one, too.
david.hewson@sunday-times.co.uk

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