7 ms·

Tiger remains to this day my favourite look for macOS. It's not that I don't like the modern look, but there's something incredibly friendly and inviting about

Tiger remains to this day my favourite look for macOS. It's not that I don't like the modern look, but there's something incredibly friendly and inviting about the 10.4 era Aqua interface. I wish you could still skin macOS because I'd totally run a Tiger desktop on modern macOS if I could. Best I can get is a brushed metal theme for Firefox to mimic old-school Safari!

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Tiger looks over a Snow Leopard core. What more could anyone possibly want?
hyperbovine 5y ago
Do not fear--it's only a matter of time before the "design conscious" crowd, which includes a large contingent of Apple employees, alights on the year 2005 as the pinnacle of "retro" and starts creating throwback versions of everything. By my estimation we're at about 1994 right now so ...
- csdvrx 5y ago
  ... in 10 years, as the cycle of nostalgia takes about 30 years.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I literally have a playlist called 'modern 80s' which is 2020s music releases that kind of sound like they're from the '80s. I definitely subscribe to the 30 year nostalgia theory!
    - Uehreka 5y ago
      There were a lot of bands harkening back to an 80’s sound in the 2000’s, and people were saying that the “retro cycle” was therefore 20 years (if it was recurring in the 2020’s that’d be 40 years). But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”.
      - contidrift 5y ago
        >But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”. As if we lived in the Matrix.
      - Brian_K_White 5y ago
        I think the internet and free universal frictionless undifferentiated unbiased access to recordings has made all sounds equally available at all times, starting somewhere in the 90's, and that has made anyone who was born after that point perceive them a bit differently than before. I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy Kline with essentially equal interest. That's when I got this idea. She was born entirely after not only the existense of recordings that go back at least a few generations, not only after the existense of the internet, but after the mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of recordings, and countless distribution means, both centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was not that different from today, the day she was born, let alone 10 years later. For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to Green Day. For my neice they are both just content.
        Shared404 5y ago
        Born in 2001 here, and can confirm. I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on. They're all just there, there's good stuff from every time period - why would you limit yourself?
        majormajor 5y ago
        I think there's a technological aspect too where after 2000 or so, nobody has really figured out as many new novel sounds to make with synthesizers or turntables or instruments or whatever. The technology of music instrument/tool development plateaued, so the novelty started to as well.
    - adfm 5y ago
      It used to be 20. 70s—>50s (American Graffiti, Grease, Happy Days), 80s—>60s (Summer of Love, Touch of Gray, Love Shack), 90s—>70s (Tarantino, lowrise bell bottoms), 00–>80s… When you’re 18-25, your model is the previous generation. Around 30, the pattern resolves and your grandparents somehow become sophisticated in hindsight.
angio 5y ago
My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its life cycle it was incredibly stable.
- lostgame 5y ago
  Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and Intel! Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well.
    - lostgame 5y ago
      I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM, and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9. 64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time. It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal. I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        The 8 DIMM slots don’t fit in a laptop anyway ;) Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR. But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.
varunprasad 5y ago
The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing. Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.
- wyclif 5y ago
  Snow Leopard was also probably the most stable Mac OS X ever. I had it for years and I don't ever remember it crashing under duress.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Early versions of Snow Leopard did have a bug that could delete all the data on your hard drive. :) 10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta. Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*
- diskzero 5y ago
  Snow Leopard was great to work on. When we were told the next release of OSX would focus on stability and performance, morale went way up. Having a massive backlog of bugs felt like an unseen energy vampire, sucking away the will to live. You just knew some user out there is hating life because you don't have time to address their issue. The Radar issue count for Finder was in the tens of thousands alone and it could be argued each bug was worthy of being fixed.
SllX 5y ago
I miss a lot of things about the 10.4-10.6 era. Brushed metal Safari is not one of those things. As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed metal was that it was for apps that interacted with physical hardware in some direct way: portable music players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something. Now if you think that’s vague, you’re not wrong; most apps could at least print something, and it wasn’t applied consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras, SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I know I'm in a minority with brushed metal but I really liked it, yes its official usage guide was vague and it probably was abused a bit but from a purely aesthetic point of view I liked it, like a lot of things in Aqua of that era it made things feel very tangible. I'm one of the apparently few people on HN who actually liked the touch bar (but not the lack of a physical escape key) on the MacBook Pro as well so take my opinion with a pinch of salt!
  - xattt 5y ago
    Brushed metal worked because you were already touching a surface that was a similar texture as the UI.
    - SllX 5y ago
      Only on a MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Not accounting for 3rd party accessories: iBooks, MacBooks, Apple’s Mice & Pro Mice, Mighty Mice, Apple’s Pro Keyboards, Apple Keyboards and Apple Remotes were all plastic at the time, and mostly white or translucent plastic with a couple of exceptions. The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior to (about one or two month’s prior) or after Leopard’s release, but Tiger’s era (and Brushed Metal didn’t start on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

Tiger looks over a Snow Leopard core. What more could anyone possibly want?

hyperbovine 5y ago

Do not fear--it's only a matter of time before the "design conscious" crowd, which includes a large contingent of Apple employees, alights on the year 2005 as the pinnacle of "retro" and starts creating throwback versions of everything. By my estimation we're at about 1994 right now so ...

csdvrx 5y ago
... in 10 years, as the cycle of nostalgia takes about 30 years.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  I literally have a playlist called 'modern 80s' which is 2020s music releases that kind of sound like they're from the '80s. I definitely subscribe to the 30 year nostalgia theory!
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    There were a lot of bands harkening back to an 80’s sound in the 2000’s, and people were saying that the “retro cycle” was therefore 20 years (if it was recurring in the 2020’s that’d be 40 years). But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”.
    - contidrift 5y ago
      >But I think someone could make the case that the 80’s have just become the permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of “infinite present”. As if we lived in the Matrix.
    - Brian_K_White 5y ago
      I think the internet and free universal frictionless undifferentiated unbiased access to recordings has made all sounds equally available at all times, starting somewhere in the 90's, and that has made anyone who was born after that point perceive them a bit differently than before. I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy Kline with essentially equal interest. That's when I got this idea. She was born entirely after not only the existense of recordings that go back at least a few generations, not only after the existense of the internet, but after the mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of recordings, and countless distribution means, both centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was not that different from today, the day she was born, let alone 10 years later. For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't be caught dead listening to Green Day. For my neice they are both just content.
      - Shared404 5y ago
        Born in 2001 here, and can confirm. I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on. They're all just there, there's good stuff from every time period - why would you limit yourself?
      - majormajor 5y ago
        I think there's a technological aspect too where after 2000 or so, nobody has really figured out as many new novel sounds to make with synthesizers or turntables or instruments or whatever. The technology of music instrument/tool development plateaued, so the novelty started to as well.
  - adfm 5y ago
    It used to be 20. 70s—>50s (American Graffiti, Grease, Happy Days), 80s—>60s (Summer of Love, Touch of Gray, Love Shack), 90s—>70s (Tarantino, lowrise bell bottoms), 00–>80s… When you’re 18-25, your model is the previous generation. Around 30, the pattern resolves and your grandparents somehow become sophisticated in hindsight.

angio 5y ago

My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its life cycle it was incredibly stable.

lostgame 5y ago
Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and Intel! Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can’t run it on any of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore.
- kergonath 5y ago
  It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well.
  - lostgame 5y ago
    I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM, and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9. 64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and today that G5 screams, easily feeling as responsive as my girlfriend’s M1 MacBook Air most of the time. It’s almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it’s got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel machines. It’s surreal. I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn’t get even 32GB RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn’t be upgraded. Shameful.
    - kergonath 5y ago
      The 8 DIMM slots don’t fit in a laptop anyway ;) Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR. But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I finally got one for €100 2 years ago, now it sits next to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of engineering.

varunprasad 5y ago

The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing. Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.

wyclif 5y ago
Snow Leopard was also probably the most stable Mac OS X ever. I had it for years and I don't ever remember it crashing under duress.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Early versions of Snow Leopard did have a bug that could delete all the data on your hard drive. :) 10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta. Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*
diskzero 5y ago
Snow Leopard was great to work on. When we were told the next release of OSX would focus on stability and performance, morale went way up. Having a massive backlog of bugs felt like an unseen energy vampire, sucking away the will to live. You just knew some user out there is hating life because you don't have time to address their issue. The Radar issue count for Finder was in the tens of thousands alone and it could be argued each bug was worthy of being fixed.

SllX 5y ago

I miss a lot of things about the 10.4-10.6 era. Brushed metal Safari is not one of those things. As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed metal was that it was for apps that interacted with physical hardware in some direct way: portable music players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something. Now if you think that’s vague, you’re not wrong; most apps could at least print something, and it wasn’t applied consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras, SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
I know I'm in a minority with brushed metal but I really liked it, yes its official usage guide was vague and it probably was abused a bit but from a purely aesthetic point of view I liked it, like a lot of things in Aqua of that era it made things feel very tangible. I'm one of the apparently few people on HN who actually liked the touch bar (but not the lack of a physical escape key) on the MacBook Pro as well so take my opinion with a pinch of salt!
- xattt 5y ago
  Brushed metal worked because you were already touching a surface that was a similar texture as the UI.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Only on a MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Not accounting for 3rd party accessories: iBooks, MacBooks, Apple’s Mice & Pro Mice, Mighty Mice, Apple’s Pro Keyboards, Apple Keyboards and Apple Remotes were all plastic at the time, and mostly white or translucent plastic with a couple of exceptions. The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior to (about one or two month’s prior) or after Leopard’s release, but Tiger’s era (and Brushed Metal didn’t start on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices.