Downgrade to Tiger??

The MacBook Air was produced after Mac OS X 10.5 was released; therefore, there is no Mac OS X 10.4 system which is capable of booting it.

(29434)

That doesn't matter.

It does. Each Mac OS X version contains drivers for specific Mac models, and requires a driver for the model of Mac it's currently on. If the driver is not present or corrupted, a kernel panic will occur almost immediately, or the system may not be recognized as bootable at all. The specific driver needed for the MacBook Air is only present in Mac OS X 10.5.

(29445)

I'd probably take that bet, since the Air was developed after Leopard was available I doubt any work was done with Tiger.

I also doubt that the MBA would run any faster on Tiger.

Apple have a support Article on this very issue:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25497

Don't install older versions of Mac OS than what comes with your computer


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I could imagine it being especially 'odd' with the MBA as no retail version of Tiger (for intel machines) has shipped, so you'd have to use a grey disc which is already considered hot water for most situations.

Kerry Bailey wrote:
Leopard IMO is a bit of a pain & a resource hog, especially on slower machines. I bet Tiger would run circles around Leopard on the Air & make it much more snappy & usable. Anyone know for sure? Thanks.

Actually, I've noticed on Intel machines that Leopard seemed a bit more peppy than Tiger. The result of optimization of the OS for Intel machines. As we get further away from the PPC transition I would expect each subsequent OS update to less and less optimized for PPCs.

To answer your original question it would be very difficult to get Tiger to work on the MBA. You could probably hack something together, but how much time and effort would you have to make in order to achieve something that most people would agree would be a downgrade in performance?

Well after you put Tiger on your MBA let us all know how it works and whether it is faster.

We'll be looking forward to hearing your results.

I'm thinking maybe (just maybe) you could use the grey discs that came with the Core2Duo MacBooks on the Air & install Tiger that way. Arent they generally the same hardware, except smaller?

No; the Core 2 Duo disks will only work on that specific Mac model.

I'd be curious to see how it performs on the Air.

The only thing you will get if you try is a kernel panic.

(29447)

But a faster kernel panic than if he was running Leopard 😉

I am sure that we would all love to see your response written from and posted from the MBA on which you install tiger as the boot system.

I just believe apple when they state that no apple portable works on any system that was created prior to the creation of the type of machine.

so try it and let us know the result

Message was edited by: Rhyd

I doubt your sarcasm will make people here more likely to tell you what you want to hear.

You asked the question, and folks have answered it. Not our problem if you didn't like the answer. You're of course, free to go do whatever you d#%^ well please; it's your computer.

Go get a set of Macbook install discs and see how far you get. My guess is that you won't even get past the setup screen.

There are three main issues to what you're proposing. All retail versions of Tiger are PPC only. The only Intel Tiger versions that are practically available to you are the machine specific install discs that come with a new system. The problem here is that those discs are not full retail versions -- they don't come with all the necessary drivers and system software so that they can be compatible with all Mac computers; just the software specific for a given machine. Lastly, if there are any Macbook Air specific drivers and software required (very likely; as an example, the new touchpad probably uses different drivers than the older ones), they likely won't be included in any consumer version of Tiger, since the MBA was released months after the sale of Tiger was discontinued.

If this is so important to you then I suggest you do some of your own research and try to find this stuff out for yourself (it's called Google). That being said, if you even do get Tiger running, don't come back complaining about system instability because you're running what is essentially an unsupported OS on the Macbook Air.

Message was edited by: Shaggywerewolf