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Apple Archive

Which Older Macs Are Good Candidates for Tiger?

A 'Best of Apple Archive' Article

, 2005.05.13

All the talk is about Tiger's new features (which we all know by now - Dashboard and Spotlight) and the havoc that Dashboard is causing, given that it can run potentially malicious widgets downloaded in the background from websites accessed by Safari 2.0. (If you turn off the "open safe files" option in Safari's preferences, this issue is nonexistent.)

These seem to be the hot topics, which brings me to what people have not been talking about much - the computers that Tiger will run on, and whether it's a good idea to try to get a little more life out of your older machine by using a tool like XPostFacto to install 10.4.

The machines that are officially supported in Tiger have already been established by Apple, and they include any Mac with built-in FireWire. This cuts out all the beige G3s (previously cut out by Panther), as well as some of the early iMacs. While most people won't want to run Tiger on a 233/266 MHz G3, there were slot-loading 350 MHz G3 iMacs (blueberry and indigo) that did not ship with FireWire ports, and these are not officially supported. This also cuts out the early 300 MHz clamshell iBooks.

Apple obviously does this for a reason. Imagine the number of phone calls they'd be getting: "I just installed Tiger on my 233 MHz iMac, and it's soooo slow. Why can't you make your software work better?"

This would also be a marketing disaster - people complaining about the lack of speed of OS X might cause others to think twice about buying a new Mac, even if those complaining were running seven-year-old machines.

While I wouldn't want to be running any version of OS X on a 233 MHz G3 processor, there are some that want to give it a try just to see how well they can make it work. That's why we have XPostFacto.

Also, if you happen to have a processor upgrade in your older Power Mac or iMac, it may be worth installing Tiger, and XPostFacto will certainly prove useful for that.

What about realistic requirements?

I don't have Tiger yet (I am waiting for some of the bugs to get knocked out of it first), but a 350 MHz G3 feels a bit slow occasionally running Panther (10.3). I'd suggest a 450 MHz G3 or a 400 MHz G4 would really be needed in order for the system to still feel responsive - and that's a minimum.

That's for Panther - what about Tiger? With the additional features, it's bound to use more system resources. In fact, the official RAM requirement has (finally) gone up to 256 MB from the 128 MB required by 10.0 through 10.3.

What type of Mac would you want to run Tiger on? I'd guess that Apple's pretty much right in cutting off Macs at the FireWire/no FireWire point. While Tiger will probably function fairly well on some of the non-FireWire PowerBooks (a 400 MHz Lombard should run it decently), the slower iMacs would probably choke on Dashboard, and the 300 MHz iBooks with their slow video chips and low screen resolution would make the Tiger experience rather disheartening.

I mentioned last week that I'm not planning to install Tiger on my 350 MHz blue G3, primarily for the reason that this machine tends to be fussy with OS X - and now that I finally have Panther (v. 10.3.8) running without problems, I don't want to change it.

The other reason has to do with the system's specifications. A 350 MHz G3 is just adequate for 10.3, and it does lag sometimes. The other problem is that there's just not enough RAM - I have 384 MB installed - to run anything more than what's already on there. If the minimum requirements of Tiger are 256 MB, we all know that means that 512 MB are required in order for performance to be decent, and buying PC100 RAM for a 6-year-old computer is a little bit pointless, since it won't be useful in a newer system when I decide to upgrade.

I do plan on installing Tiger on my 12" PowerBook G4, however. While I have not used that machine for over a week, I know that an 867 MHz G4 should be more than capable of running Tiger, and with a RAM upgrade (it's got the stock 256 MB right now) there should be no problems whatsoever.

Then again, you never know. LEM

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