Included features were a fast searching system called Spotlight, a new version of the Safari web browser, Dashboard, a new 'Unified' theme, and improved support for 64-bit addressing on Power Mac G5s.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger also had a number of additional features that Microsoft had spent several years struggling to add to Windows with acceptable performance, such as fast file search and improved graphics processing.

[15] Apple mentioned Mac OS X Tiger by name in a press release published on May 4, 2004, for its upcoming WWDC 2004 event.

In October and December 2004, several non-commercial developers' releases of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger leaked onto the internet via BitTorrent file sharers.

Jobs then disclosed that Mac OS X had been engineered from its inception to work with Intel's x86 line of processors in addition to the PowerPC, the CPU for which the operating system had always been publicly marketed.

Apple then released the Mac Pro and announced the new Xserve on August 8, completing the Intel transition in 210 days, roughly ten months ahead of the original schedule.

John Siracusa, writing for Ars Technica, wrote that some features in Tiger were half-baked, such as filesystem metadata, Spotlight, and Dashboard.

Tiger is also the first version of Mac OS X released in April 29, 2005:[23] to include the "Zoom" screen magnifier functionality.

One of Mac OS X Tiger’s key features was Spotlight, a fast, flexible search tool for finding files, emails, and documents.

Also, mac OS Tiger introduced Dashboard widgets for things like weather and calculators so you can access them quickly.

[24] The following is a quotation from TigerDirect.com's court memorandum: In 2005 TigerDirect was denied a preliminary injunction that would have prevented Apple from using the mark while the case was decided.

[27] At Apple's 2005 Worldwide Developers Conference, CEO Steve Jobs announced that the company would begin selling Mac computers with Intel x86 processors in 2006.

This build included Apple's Rosetta compatibility layer — a translation process that allows x86-based Macs to run software built only for PowerPC, with a moderate performance penalty.