Later this afternoon, I’m planning on upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4. That isn’t a typo, I am still running 10.3 here. I can never remember which cat any release is and I don’t really care. I can tell without thinking about it that 10.4 is newer than 10.2 but it takes a lot of work to remember if Tiger is newer than Bobcat.
When 10.4 first came out, this iBook was what I was using all day every day for my full-time contracting gig. I didn’t have an external drive to back up to and I thought that even if there was a 1% chance of some problem occurring, it wasn’t worth the risk to disrupt my livelihood. That went on for a while until it got to the point where it seemed silly to buy 10.4 when 10.5 was close to coming out. However, now that 10.5 is on the streets it seems like people have a higher level of dissatisfaction than is typical for an OS X release.
However, what the release of 10.5 did do was drop to nearly zero the value of 10.4 install disks. I asked on Twitter if people had a copy they would sell me cheap and several people replied that they had copies they would just give me. That’s an interesting point where it actually has value to me but not to anyone that has already upgraded. For my part, I’m just getting tired of finding apps that I want to run but can’t because they required 10.4 at a minimum. I’m typing this in Ecto, but I can’t upgrade to the newest version. I can’t run the Levelator or Rogue Amoeba’s Fission. The list goes on. I don’t care about having the latest and greatest, just enough to do what I want to get done. If I lag far enough behind to get that for free, I’m cool with that.
10.4. The Tiger. Best of the Apple “cat family”. The Leopard still leaves me asking why, oh, why? Not enough value for the bucks, and I had to upgrade bunches of software. Not to mention the trip to the huge galleria of a shopping mall, where the Apple Store is.
Our iMac still proudly runs the Tiger.
-k-
You probably don’t want to run 10.5 on an iBook that old anyway. I just installed it on an iBook G4 1.2ghz with 512mb ram, and beyond basic email / web / rss tasks 10.5 chokes mostly due to the lack of ram. Luckily, it’s a second hand laptop and basic stuff is all I plan on using it for 😉
My best recollection is that Tiger was at 10.4.4 when it started to be better than using Panther. This is easy to forget because it was quite a while ago. On my PPC tower I have several drives and one has 10.5.1 on it. There are a few applications I need that still do not work well in 10.5 so I still do half my computing with Tiger. I am guessing that 10.5 will be fine by 10.5.4.
It does seem that the high graphics requirements with 10.5 makes it prudent to turn off a lot of the eye candy on older Macs.
After you get it going try Desktop Manager (http://desktopmanager.berlios.de/) gives you multiple desktops on 10.4. I used it and it’s almost better than Spaces in 10.5. Also it’s FREE.
–jim