Mac OS X Tiger

Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the fifth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and serveroperating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005, for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Included features were a fast searching system called Spotlight, a new version of the Safari web browser, Dashboard, a new 'Unified' theme, and improved support for 64-bit addressing on Power Mac G5s. Tiger also had a number of additional features that Microsoft had spent several years struggling to add to Windows with acceptable performance, such as fast file search and improved graphics processing.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was included with all new Macs, and was also available as an upgrade for existing Mac OS X users, or users of supported pre-Mac OS X systems. The server edition, Mac OS X Server 10.4, was also available for some Macintosh product lines. Six weeks after the official release, Apple had delivered 2 million copies of Tiger, representing 16% of all Mac OS X users. Apple claimed that Tiger was the most successful Apple operating system release in the company's history. On June 11, 2007, at WWDC 2007, Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, announced that more than 67% of the 22 million Mac OS X users were using Tiger.

Apple announced a transition to Intel x86 processors during Tiger's lifetime, making it the first Apple operating system to work on Apple–Intel architecture machines. The original Apple TV, released in March 2007, shipped with a customized version of Tiger branded "Apple TV OS" that replaced the usual GUI with an updated version of Front Row.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was succeeded by Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on October 26, 2007, after 30 months, making Tiger the longest-running version of Mac OS X. The last security update released for Tiger users was the 2009-005 update. The latest supported version of QuickTime is 7.6.4. The latest version of iTunes that can run on Tiger is 9.2.1. Safari 4.1.3 is the final version for Tiger.

Despite not having received security updates since 2009, Tiger remains popular with Power Mac users and retrocomputing enthusiasts due to its wide software and hardware compatibility, as it is the last Mac OS X version to support the Classic Environment – a Mac OS 9 compatibility layer – and PowerPC G3 processors.