Edit 10 May -- I found a solution to the problem discussed below: the extreme slowness of my Mac after upgrading to Tiger. Details are posted further down in the thread.

Original post:
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I really don't know whether my experience applies to anybody else who is thinking of upgrading to Tiger (OSX 10.4). But I find the new operating system to be torturously slow.

The problem (for me, at least) seems to go much deeper than the usual quirks and flakiness that you expect with version x.0 of any complex, newly released piece of software.

I'm running a year-old eMac with 1GB of ram and a 1.25GHz G4 processor. I tend to keep a lot of applications open all the time, and I never restart or log out unless I have to. Most of the time I run iTunes, Firefox, Mail, Address Book, Preview, VoodooPad, and Pages (the word processor module of iWork). With Panther, all this stuff works smoothly and quickly. Nothing ever freezes up. I sometimes experience some minor delay in switching back and forth between apps -- especially when iTunes is involved. Sometimes there is a bit of (very slight) jerkiness in playing back a DVD when a lot of other apps are open.

Tiger, as the old Apple slogan goes, changes everything. While it looks almost exactly like Panther (with a few new bells and whistles), the "feel" of the operating system is like nothing I've experienced from Apple before. You click, and you wait. And you wait. You type a form entry, and you hope it will someday appear in the text field. You give up, you repeat the command, or you try to switch to another task while the system contemplates the first one, but this usually just causes further delays and frustrations. Finally you resign yourself to the fact that the system will probably do what you want ... but ... you ... have ... to ... be ... really ... really ... patient.

Even then, applications sometimes get locked up. And this includes some of the "core" apps like Mail, not just 3rd-party software like Firefox.

I never used the original OSX, 10.1, but this reminds me of stories I heard about that system: that it was powerful but awfully slow, especially if you had any sort of limitations on memory or processor speed. This makes me hopeful that the situation will improve as the new OS gets fine-tuned. Meanwhile, I have gone back to Panther 10.3.9 -- a sleek, magnificently engineered, and thoroughly tested OS that is a genuine pleasure to work with.

Your experience may be quite different. Clearly, a lot of people like Tiger very much. I hope someday I will, too.