Spotlight
Live, indexed, system-wide search of content and metadata, with Smart Folders that kept a query permanently on tap. The command-space habit starts here.
At launch
- Announced
- June 2004
- Released
- April 29, 2005
- Follows
- Panther (10.3)
- Followed by
- Leopard (10.5)
- Architecture
- PowerPC, then Intel
Overview
The release that made the whole disk searchable.
Spotlight indexed everything — filenames, contents, metadata, mail, contacts — and returned results as you typed. Finding a file stopped being a matter of remembering where you had put it.
Tiger also brought Dashboard's widget layer and Automator's drag-together workflows, and it did something quieter and far more consequential: on 10 January 2006 it became the first version of Mac OS X to ship on an Intel processor, with Rosetta translating PowerPC software underneath.
Spotlight
Results before you have finished typing the word.
A live index of the whole volume, updated as files changed, queried from a field in the top-right corner of every screen. Smart Folders saved a search as if it were a place.
Spotlight, resolving as you type
Features
What shipped.
Two hundred features, one architecture change, and the longest run any Mac OS X release ever had.
Dashboard
A layer of widgets that flew in over the desktop — clock, calculator, weather, unit converter — and flew back out. An idea with two decades of afterlife.
At launch
Automator
Drag actions into a sequence and save it as a workflow, with a friendly robot on the icon. It is still there underneath Shortcuts today.
At launch
Intel and Rosetta
Tiger shipped on Intel Macs in January 2006 with Rosetta translating PowerPC binaries on the fly — the first of Apple's three architecture transitions to be run this way.
Added in 10.4.4
Core Image and Core Video
GPU-accelerated image and video pipelines, which is why effects that once needed a render suddenly happened as you dragged a slider.
At launch
VoiceOver
A full screen reader built into the operating system at no extra cost, when comparable software elsewhere cost more than the computer.
At launch
Safari RSS
Feed reading folded into the browser, with a live count of unread items on bookmarked feeds. Peak-era RSS, shipped by default.
At launch
QuickTime 7
H.264 support, which set the codec the next fifteen years of video would be delivered in.
At launch
Mail 2
Smart Mailboxes built on the Spotlight index, plus a redesigned toolbar that people complained about at some length.
At launch
The Intel switch
Two processors, one operating system, one binary.
Apple announced the move from PowerPC to Intel at WWDC in June 2005 and revealed that every release of Mac OS X had been quietly compiled for both architectures for five years. The first Intel Macs arrived seven months later.
Universal binaries carried code for both chips in one file, and Rosetta translated the rest. The whole transition took under a year — a playbook Apple ran again, almost move for move, when it left Intel for its own silicon in 2020.
Desktop
The last of the blue.
Tiger's default closed out the Aqua era's run of blue abstracts. Leopard would take the desktop into deep space.
Aqua BlueCrossing ribbonsThere was only ever one. A system-wide Dark Mode did not arrive until Mojave in 2018, so this page's light and dark appearances are ours, not Apple's — the switch in the corner still works, but the desktop of the day looked like this and only this.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple named ten releases after big cats before moving to California in 2013.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
Tiger ran for two and a half years, longer than any other Mac OS X release, and spanned both processor architectures in the process.
- Processor
- PowerPC G3, G4, G5 — or Intel
- Memory
- 256 MB
- Disk space
- 3 GB
- Requires
- Built-in FireWire
- DVD drive
- For installation