The Last Roar of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

Yesterday, Apple released an update to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. If you are not yet running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, you should consider installing Mac OS X 10.4.11.The Mac OS X 10.4.11 software also upgrades your Safari browser to the new Safari 3. If youre not ready to deploy Safari 3, then you shouldnt install the 10.4.11 upgrade.

Beyond Safari 3, there are a number of other enhancements in 10.4.11. Many of them are minor, but the fix does address issues with external USB hard drives. There are many security upgrades in 10.4.11 as well. Therefore, unless youre holding off because you dont want Safari 3, or because youre about to upgrade to Leopard, this is a worthy upgrade.

A big question is: Will this be the last upgrade to Tiger, beyond security patches? Thats entirely possible. Many of us, of course, will be sticking with Tiger for the foreseeable future on some or all of our Macs.

At my company, we have several trusty Macs which dont meet the hardware requirements for Leopard. In fact, one of the Macs that I tote around is a 12 900MHz G3 iBook, which wont even come close to running Leopard, but which is great at connecting to wireless networks, browsing the Web, and taking notes in meetings. It does just great with Tiger.

Those older computers, many of which are perfectly serviceable and reliable, have now gone as far as Apples going to take them. But that doesnt mean you should replace them. For business, theyre perfectly fine, and will be for some time to come.