Tiger vs. Leopard: Which Is Best for You?
Simon Royal — 2008.09.22
We have had time to get used to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. How does it compare to the legendary Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger?
Progress
It took a long time for Apple to get OS X right.
Version 10.0 was a stab in the dark, and 10.1 made things a bit better. OS X 10.2 Jaguar was the first proper edition, but it still had a long way to go. Mac OS X 10.3 Panther was not the best edition, but it was definitely better than the previous ones.
When Apple brought out 10.4 Tiger, it was amazing. Tiger became the longest running version of OS X, and I was wondering how Apple was going to top it. Then 10.5 Leopard came out with its fancy new features and power hungry visuals – but under the hood, in an everyday situation, how does it compare?
I have run both Tiger and Leopard. I even ran both on the same machine to give it a fair comparison: an Intel iMac Core Duo 1.83 GHz with 2 GB of RAM.
As you might expect, Tiger (version 10.4.11) flew along. Universal Binary apps screamed along, with the smaller ones opening in one or two bounces of the Dock icon. PowerPC apps took a little longer to open, but we are comparing operating systems here, and not system architecture.
Moving to Leopard
After wearing in the shoes of Tiger for a few months, I wiped the hard drive and did a fresh install of Leopard. Things were not as rosy. The whole machine felt slower – boot time was slower, and loading time was a little slower. My iMac may not be top of the range (getting on three years old), but it is way above the minimum specifications for Leopard (which are an 867 MHz G4 with 512 MB of RAM), so I was a little disappointed.
With any new operating system, you expect some bugs. That’s one reason for system updates. As I write this, we’re already on the fifth major update for Leopard, but at the time I was testing Leopard, Apple had just released 10.5.3. The first few updates made a huge difference to stability, speed, and system performance.
We have to bear in mind that we had a grand total of eleven updates for Tiger, and some these made massive differences, especially the earlier ones.
Comparing the two operating systems at launch, I would have to say that Tiger was more bug-ridden than Leopard and broke more apps than Leopard did. I only had one application, the hard drive cloning tool SuperDuper, that expressly said Not for Leopard. Tiger, on the other hand, broke most of my apps on its launch.
Mac OS X Tiger was released as a PowerPC operating system, and the first Intel version was 10.4.4; Leopard was a Universal Binary from day one, streamlined and getting ready for Apple’s impending decision to leave the PowerPC platform altogether.
Visually, Leopard introduced some new handy features in the Finder. Cover Flow is an obvious hit, as well as Stacks. While using my other machine, which has Tiger on it, I miss these features.
For me, Tiger is still the best. While Leopard has a lot of handy features, if your machine isn’t way above minimum specs, you will notice a drop in performance.
Maybe this will be addressed in future system updates. Performance and speed have already been improved with the first five updates. Tiger still runs very well on an old G3. I am writing this on a Pismo PowerBook G3 (400 MHz G3, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB hard drive) – and it smokes.
If you have the machine to run Leopard well, I would suggest it – after cramming in as much as RAM as possible. However, if you’re running anything lower than a 1 GHz G4, stick with Tiger.
Both operating systems are fabulous. There isn’t much difference for the average user between the two except some fancy effects and a simpler way of connecting to other machines on your network.
I run both and love both of them. Being a lover of older Macs (G3s especially), Leopard is sometimes not an option, so Tiger has a special place in my heart. But for any machine capable of running it well, I’d install Leopard.
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keywords: #tiger #leopard #techspectrum #simonroyal
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Question: Q: Which Better? Leopard or Tiger
Posted on Feb 21, 2008 7:39 PM
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Leopard has alot of new features that Tiger doesn’t have. If you would like your Mac to have those additional features then i would recommend updating your Mac. If you don’t need the additional features Leopard has then stick with Tiger.
Feb 21, 2008 7:43 PM
Feb 21, 2008 7:54 PM
You also need to know that Tiger is no longer under active development and applications that are «leopard-only» are starting to appear.
I know people still running Panther — but I’d recommend a careful upgrade to Leopard assuming your applications are all Leopard-compatible at this point.
In fact only 3 of my 4 Macs are running Leopard but that has to do with my «old» Macbook having a small hard drive and a lot of applications and the fact I haven’t got around to swapping in a new drive.
Just keep a bootable copy of Tiger handy — so if you feel like it you can rollback to it at any time.
Feb 21, 2008 7:59 PM
Feb 22, 2008 1:17 PM
That’s like trying to ask which is better, the Apple or the Orange? Seriously, test it yourself. Find out which one meets your needs the most. Ignore the rants here. But do follow these upgrade tips when you are ready*:
— * Links to my pages may give me compensation.
Feb 22, 2008 1:29 PM
Leopard can be quite annoying due to a bug with the folder hierarchal back button, and especially the use of Automator 2. So be forewarned.
However, Quicklook is awesome. Starts up quickly and gives you a preview of almost every popular file type. Spaces has a few issues, especially with FinalCut Pro. Although I find it more help than hindrance.
On the most part, Leopard is snappier than Tiger, but Tiger has had more time to fix bugs and issues. Even the original Automator had its problems. So just pick your kitty.
Feb 22, 2008 1:44 PM
Depends on what you do, I suppose. From what I’ve seen Leopard is alpha quality at best. I’m half tempted to go buy a 12″ PowerBook to run Tiger on. So far the most infuriating bug I’ve run into is with font cache corruption. Since I am a heavy user of LaTeX, Preview has been rendered 100% useless for me. TeXniscope too, unfortunately.
While Leopard is versioned 10.5, 11.0 is probably more appropriate. In the long run there are lots of under the hood changes that will likely benefit users, but for the time being it seems like I spend a whole lot of time fighting bugs or half implemented features. I certainly wouldn’t pay for Leopard until a few more service packs have been released.
Feb 22, 2008 1:52 PM
I started using Leopard a couple weeks ago on a new Mac Pro. After using it a bit and getting familiar with new interface and features I prefer it over Tiger. by a lot.
However, many people do seem to have issues with it. Especially in the areas of wireless connectivity and using Time Machine, neither of which I am using with my new Mac Pro.
Research carefully and make sure the new features of Leopard are ones that you will actually be using. Also, some may call this paranoid, but I would NOT use migration assistant for anything. I would recommend backing up your data to an external source and then manually move your files over after a clean install (format then install) of Leopard. That is what I did with my Mac Pro and so far everything has worked great.
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Question: Q: Leopard vs Tiger? Is 10.5.1 more stable than 10.4.11
Is leopard more stable than tiger? I’m using tiger 10.4.11 and I’ve had a few freezing problems just using a few apps (such as safari, word, etc.) and had to restart the computer. It seems like I’ve had to restart the computer more often than I did with panther (10.3.9). I know the new imacs have had freezing problems because of the video card firmware, but my freezing problems happened even without watching any video- only when safari was open—and I still got the freezing problem even after I updated the software to include the recent firmware release.
have leopard users had a better experience so far?
imac mid 2007, Mac OS X (10.4.11)
Posted on Nov 19, 2007 8:43 AM
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I think it is still a bit early to answer that question but I would not say that 10.5. is more stable the 10.4.10. I would say they appear about equal because I have had no problems with either of them. It is bit difficult to get better then no problems don’t you think.
Nov 19, 2007 8:50 AM
I haven’t had ( knock on wood ) any issues with either Tiger or Leopard.
I do like Leopard and see it as a very good upgrade, but the «wow» wasn’t all that.
Nov 19, 2007 8:50 AM
Nov 19, 2007 8:54 AM
In my experience to date, 10.5 and the recently released 10.5.1 are far more buggy than Tiger ever was. I still use it from time to time (mostly for testing purposes) but 10.4.x will remain as my main, production OS until Apple resolves the numerous issues that remain (particularly Finder related bugs, mouse cursor hesitation/freezes etc. ).
Don’t get me wrong, Leopard has great potential but it requires a great deal of bug fixes before that potential can be fully realised.
Nov 19, 2007 9:44 AM
Hi Patrick Ellis1;
Are you trying to do anything about your problems with Leopard?
I have Leopard on both of my Macs and I have not seen anything like what you are describing with Leopard.
Nov 19, 2007 9:50 AM
I have not seen a freezing problem with either TIger or Leopard — have you run disk utility and verified your hard drive — a disk problem could explain your freezes
I find both Tiger and Leopard very stable — under leopard I have had a couple of unexplained program aborts (Apple mail and MS entourage occasionally just die for no known reason) but that is a very minor inconvenience
I am still exploring Leopard but like it and it seems more responsive on my G5 iMac
Bottom line I personally have found Leopard as reliable as Tiger — But I’m thinking that it is unlikely that Leopard will solve your freezing problem — I suspect it will follow you since it sound like either a hardware or corrupted software issue to me
Message was edited by: LarryHN
Nov 19, 2007 10:03 AM
what can be done besides filing numerous bug reports?
My Leopard install was fresh on a newly formatted drive with no legacy apps, preferences etc. I have tried everything that I know of from using Mac OS X since the initial public beta.
The mouse cursor hesitation on the MacBook occurs fairly regularly following the simplest of functions (quitting an app, saving a file. ) but does not occur under Tiger. This seems to be a widely reported problem.
Secure Empty Trash still doesn’t calculate the number of items properly and, more often than not, leaves a Finder progress window despite apparently finishing, requiring a force quit of the Finder.
Disk Images will no longer eject/unmount within the Finder without using Disk Utility (but did, ironically, for me with 10.5)
These are just some examples that are reproducible on multiple machines while other bugs, such as the Preview app crash that occurs while saving (after having made a colour change) occurs on a MacBook but not an iMac CD — even if using the same boot drive.
As a Mac user since 1987 and technician since 1991, I can troubleshoot until the cows come home but many of my friends and family can’t or won’t. which use to be a selling point of the Mac. Until a vast majority of the bugs are eliminated, I won’t be recommending the upgrade just yet.
Nov 19, 2007 10:11 AM
I can of course only answer for myself, so you may take my response with as many grains of salt as you like 🙂
My personal experience is that Leopard have far more problems/bugs/issues than I have ever experienced when using OS X 10.3 and 10.4 (longest experience with 10.4 — Tiger).
However, after upgrading one of my computers which still run 10.4 to 10.4.11, I suddenly could not access my bank to pay bills. This has to do with Safari 3, which is included in 10.4.11. I also experienced, for the first time, that Safari froze and also a far slower Safari (meaning that on my computers Safari 2 was faster than Safari 3).
I have installed Leopard on both G4, G5 and Intel computers and have experienced several problems:
— Safari has froze several times
— Safari is slow
— Sluggish dock (can be fixed by turning off the cool mirror effect, but still. )
— Sleep problems — my computers rarely go to sleep now, regardless of what I have set the System Preferences to
— When turning off my iMac G5, it only puts one of the two external drives to sleep, while if I force it to sleep, it puts both external drives to sleep
— Importing mail backed up through Backup 3.1.2 did not work (all the folders were restored but not their contents) — I had to import via Mail, which luckily worked fine
— When trying to turn off Bluetooth in the menu bar, my iMac G5 froze and I had to force a restart
— Secure empty trash does not work properly — it shows the wrong number of files being trashed and hangs — this was a problem on both the G4 and the G5, but after Leopard update 10.5.1 it is only a problem on the G5.
— Network preferences in System Preferences does not show the correct encryption level of my Airport network
— .mac does not synchronize properly after Leopard
— Access issues with my bank (has to do with Safari 3)
— Uses far more memory than Tiger (not necessarily a bug, but annoying sometimes all the same)
I can mention several other issues, but think this is enough. And just to make it clear — my computer is not full of tweak/fiddle/diddledoo programs. I have a very puristic approach to my computer and do not use programs that «mess» with my system and when I installed Leopard, I erased and installed. The programs I use and reinstalled, are quite «normal» programs, like iWork 08, iLife 08, Office for Mac, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Aperture, Stuffit and a couple of others. Have never wanted to fill my computers with programs I do not use.
Still, even with a careful and puristic approach I have experienced issues I never experienced before with OS X, and which was something I thought I had left behind when switching from Windows and pc´s a few years back.
Personally I think this has to do with Apple changing from Power PC to Intel processors — after Intel, my impression is that people started experiencing bugs in a way they were not used to on a Mac.
But of course — this is only my impression 🙂
Having said all this, I want to stress that I do like Leopard and instead of planning any reinstallation of Tiger (at least not yet), I instead put my faith in Apple and hope that they fix all the issues/bugs/challenges. It is a nice improvement over Tiger, especially some of the features like templates in Mail, the new Finder, «cover-flow» in Finder and so on. The much hyped Time Machine is not what appealed most to me — I have never used my computer for storage anyway (Documents, Pictures, Music and so on are all on external drives).
I find Leopard to be cool and I sincerely hope it will be as fast and stable as TIger was. But I admit I am disappointed, as I have had more issues with Leopard in a month than I had with Tiger for years.
But do not let me discourage you — Apple can of course not live with customers having problems with their operating system and will surely do all they can to fix any issues and will release updates accordingly. I just wanted to share my thoughts and experiences since you wondered 🙂
Nov 19, 2007 10:33 AM
I’m a techie — I generally check everything twice before I proceed.
The MacBook hardware is fine. It’s been run through every possible diagnostic. The same hardware runs Tiger without issue.
I’m not stating that Leopard is unstable only that I’m finding more bugs in it that Tiger, some of which other users may or may not experience depending on what they do (i.e. Secure Empty Trash). The Preview crash that occurs on MacBooks, Minis and some older PPC Macs but not, for example, an iMac CD is annoying. Disk images that would unmount with 10.5 but no longer do under 10.5.1? It’s bizarre. I’ll be looking at solutions to fix this but I would have hoped that it would not be necessary.
The ‘freeze’ that I mentioned is a very slight one, more of a hesitation and I’m not the only use to experience this (count yourself lucky). This happens irregularly with the MacBook’s trackpad under Leopard but not under Tiger. I’ve also seen this behaviour on another MacBook and a friend’s new MacBook Pro. I’ll be trying this later with an external mouse and then on a desktop unit such as the iMac CD.
The Software update patch worked although Permissions repair constantly yielded SUID errors whereas running the large, full update didn’t. It may be insignificant to a techie who knows what this means (and knows that it can be safely ignored) but try explaining it to an average user.
Fortunately, unlike some, my sidebar shares have always worked as has Airport and I do thoroughly enjoy (and make use of) Quick Look. Great potential but not there just yet IMHO.
Nov 19, 2007 10:39 AM
I can of course only answer for myself, so you may take my response with as many grains of salt as you like 🙂
My personal experience is that Leopard have far more problems/bugs/issues than I have ever experienced when using OS X 10.3 and 10.4 (longest experience with 10.4 — Tiger).
However, after upgrading one of my computers which still run 10.4 to 10.4.11, I suddenly could not access my bank to pay bills. This has to do with Safari 3, which is included in 10.4.11. I also experienced, for the first time, that Safari froze and also a far slower Safari (meaning that on my computers Safari 2 was faster than Safari 3).
Interesting. I must admit that I haven’t experienced that issue with my bank whether running the beta or final release of Safari 3.
I have installed Leopard on both G4, G5 and Intel computers and have experienced several problems:
— Safari has froze several times
— Safari is slow
I have experienced delays, at times, that don’t appear in FireFox. Looking at the Activity window, it seemed to be hung with some websites Javascript. If I recall correctly, this also occurred with other browsers that use WebKit unlike FF.
— Sluggish dock (can be fixed by turning off the cool mirror effect, but still. )
More noticeable to me on a MacBook C2D with Stacks (arghh!) containing a large number of items but not annoyingly so. I’m assuming that this is likely related to the graphics card more than anything. Admittedly, the glass shelf has sort of grown on me although the white dots are still not as visible as I would like.
— Sleep problems — my computers rarely go to sleep now, regardless of what I have set the System Preferences to
No issues on my end yet although I no longer have PPC, only Intel Macs.
— Secure empty trash does not work properly — it shows the wrong number of files being trashed and hangs — this was a problem on both the G4 and the G5, but after Leopard update 10.5.1 it is only a problem on the G5.
still happens, more often than not, on the MacBook. I will be testing the iMac CD as well. I was hoping this would have been resolved with 10.5.1. I guess I will have to wait.
— Network preferences in System Preferences does not show the correct encryption level of my Airport network
Same here. I’m not sure why but.
— Uses far more memory than Tiger (not necessarily a bug, but annoying sometimes all the same)
my memory increase has been negligible — somewhere in the 75-100MB range. Spaces uses up a bit of that.
Personally I think this has to do with Apple changing from Power PC to Intel processors — after Intel, my impression is that people started experiencing bugs in a way they were not used to on a Mac.
But of course — this is only my impression 🙂
Well, OS X was apparently being developed and run on Intel simultaneously with PPC since it was first released so I’m not sure how much the switch played a part. The OS is growing/evolving/becoming more complex so bugs are inevitable but I wasn’t prepared for this many. Still, great potential.
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