If you can believe it, Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” is over 12 years old as of this writing. It was first released in April of 2005. It was also the version that Apple first used on its Intel Macs in 2006. Because the Intel version came out in 2006 after the PowerPC version had already been in stores, it’s kind of a weird release. There wasn’t a retail copy of the Intel version of Tiger. It was only bundled with the first Intel Macs before 10.5 “Leopard” came out in 2007.
Because of the way it was weirdly released, it’s not super common to virtualize OS X 10.4 for Intel. Nobody’s really using it anymore because it’s so old. It’s probably full of security holes. And technically, it’s against OS X’s license agreement to virtualize it (same with the non-server versions of 10.5 and 10.6). With that said, I really doubt Apple cares about such an old version of OS X these days, and I think creating a VM of it is a really cool thing to do for educational purposes. Who knows — maybe it’s still useful for certain developers who still need to test how things work on 10.4 without keeping an old power-hungry machine around that is capable of running it.
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