Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Power-PC Edition

     Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger has two different versions, just like Leopard does for two different architectures of processors. Intel and Power-PC. Apple ditched Power-PC in 2005 to go Intel over the next year. Tiger first released with Power-PC, and on the later 10.4.x releases, Intel was added. Power-PC is now no longer used by anyone but IBM for their servers. Apple ditched Power-PC due to Intel having better technology.

     Tiger is a bit of a hog if you try running it on any old G3-based mac with 128MB ram. It doesn't run well on 256MB on these old machines. Tiger could run on any Mac dating back to 1999! I would personally recommend Tiger on a G5 if you can't get Leopard on one. At the time, Tiger had more features than Windows XP did (Vista came out 2 years later). Tiger was supported by Apple until the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion back in 2011. You can still get some new applications to work on Tiger, but support is fading as time moves on. Tiger is now to the point of obsolete. 

Mac OS X Tiger on Power-PC

     I personally love Tiger for its ease of use. It's like having the feeling of knowing that nothing will happen to it and it will keep the Mac stable without problems. On my Power Mac G3, I have encountered some kernel panics. On my iBook G3, Tiger is stable as a rock. Another thing I like about Tiger is the easy functionality to turn it into a server. I used my G3 as a server for a few months until I got my Sony Server that ran Windows Server 2003 R2. For online based content, it handled Facebook fine, just a little slow. It handled YouTube videos in 240p without a problem, and it is a great music server. I have that as my dedicated PC-Radio. It does that really well.

     The bottom line... Tiger is great for a Mac that was made in 2002 to 2006 as it is reliable, can use a few modern apps, can serve as a file server, can be a music player, can still be a backup computer, or just to take a step back in time.Tiger isn't fast compared to the $300 pc down at Walmart, but it can handle E-Mail and Facebooking fine, and a few low-quality YouTube videos.

Review Info:
DyNiForm
12/3/2011 9:52PM PST