This week, my work-supplied MacBook Pro is having its logic board and optical drive replaced, so I’m using a 1Ghz Titanium PowerBook (pictured here) as my main machine for a while. I figured hauling my aluminum iMac around would be a bad idea.
With a 1Ghz G4 and 1GB of RAM, this TiBook (the last revision of the series) exceeds the minimum requirements for Leopard. While the 64MB of video RAM is pretty wimpy, it’s enough to get the job done. Regrettably, the TiBook shipped with a 4,200 RPM hard drive - which is miserably slow. To add insult to injury, the drive seems to be on its last legs. With its low-end specs and a slow drive, Leopard didn’t run well on the machine. I may try again once its new 5,400 RPM drive comes in later this week, but for now the TiBook is running 10.4.11.
This fits into my my thought that goes something like this: 10.3 is best for G3s, 10.4 is best for G4-based machines, and go with 10.5 for G5s. There’s some overlap in there, but as a general rule, it works.
Tiger is a much leaner OS than Leopard. It uses less RAM - which leads to less paging out to the hard drive - and doesn’t need as much video RAM, as there isn’t as much eye candy to draw. To put it into perspective, the Tiger installer fit with plenty of room to spare on a DVD, while Leopard fills a dual-layer DVD.
But no one wants to be left behind. Having the “minimum requirements” smoke your machine is always depressing, but running Tiger a year and a half after its successor was released isn’t as troublesome as I thought it would be.
The newest version of iLife requires Leopard. Other apps that use Leopard’s Core Animation - such as the excellent Twitter application Tweetie - don’t run. But Tiger users are far from being left out; Apple’s still pushing out security updates for Tiger, and most of the major applications work with no problem - Office 2008, iWork ’09, Safari 4 Beta, iTunes and more. Even MobileMe syncs with 10.4’s apps with no issues.
That said, I find myself missing a lot of Leopard’s features - primarily Spaces. I love Spaces. Having everything crammed together makes me twitch. I was surprised at how much I missed Spotlight as well. Yes, Spotlight was one of Tiger’s headline-making features, but the program is far better in Leopard - it’s faster, more accurate, and can even do basic math, which I use everyday. And of course apps like Finder, Automator, Mail and iChat are much better in Leopard. The one exception in my mind is iCal. Apart from lacking CalDAV support, Tiger’s version of the app is far better.
With Snow Leopard just around the corner, the future of Tiger is uncertain. On one hand, Apple usually only supports their current OS and one version back - meaning 10.6 could bump 10.4 from its “old faithful” throne. On the other hand, since Snow Leopard isn’t going to run on PPC-based Macs (sorry guys, it’s true), 10.4 will always be the next-to-last OS available for some users. My guess is Apple is going to drop Tiger support like a rock. Which is a shame - it’s a solid OS if your hardware isn’t beefy enough to handle Leopard.