Hacker News Reader

Comment by selestify | Hacker News Reader

What was so revolutionary about 10.4?

Every release had a ~2 factor in performance improvements between the public beta and Tiger (10.4). Performances degraded a bit with Leopard (but improved again with Snow Leopard). That’s why Tiger is a bit of a high water mark for PPC machines. It was very useable on a G3 from 1999, albeit with a more recent graphics card for Quartz Extreme and quite a bit of additional RAM over its initial specs.

10.4 brought Spotlight 10.5 introduced Time Machine 10.6 cleaned everything up and added some stuff like Exchange Support. IMO the peak of Mac OS X. From then on, Focus was put on Social Media integration and data collecting services. Seems I‘m getting old an nostalgic.

10.4 was the first time I felt like my NeXTStation was slower than my eMac.

https://mat.tl/img/emacnext.jpg

It's all subjective, but I'm not sure why they drew the line in the sand at 10.4. 10.2 was the first release that had hardware accelerated 2D graphics, which dramatically improved the UI responsiveness of Aqua. By 10.2's release Apple had also discontinued the development of Mac OS 9.

The OS X Finder was unusable until 10.3, and ISTR there were still other missing things from OS 9 that 10.4 finally rectified, but I don’t recall what exactly. I do recall recommending against relatives and friends installing OS X until 10.4 finally filled in the gaps.

edit: you can argue with “unusable,” but I never saw anyone use the NeXT Workspace or the OS X Finder pre-10.3. Everyone on those systems used the command line to get around.

I think you’re exaggerating. I was a student at a time, started with Mac OS 10.0 on a beige G3. It was slow but it worked. I browsed the web, did my homework, chatted with friends and used Classic for apps that we’re not converted to Carbon yet. It used the terminal because I was amazed I could do so much (like run my own web server), but it wasn’t a replacement to the Finder.

It’s worth noting that for political reasons, that I won’t go into, Finder was written with PowerPlant rather than AppKit.

They even gave it some of the features of Workspace too.

10.4 was also the first release for Intel Macs and therefore was the first version for the majority of modern day MacOS users.

Didn't 10.4 run only on some special developer Apple x86 board? I know it was then successfully appropriated by the hackintosh community, but I don't remember an x86 Mac being released with Tiger

The dev machine was a reference Intel box. I had one at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com