Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle

"I never got around to doing the upgrade from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to Leopard. Now I have an iPhone 4 and it tells me it won't work with my Mac. How do I upgrade from Mac OS X 10.4 to Snow Leopard?"

Apple forces you to upgrade Mac OS X if you want to sync your iPhone 4 with it. This doesn't really make sense because you can upgrade iTunes without upgrading to Snow Leopard, but in this case Apple makes the rules. To upgrade from OS X 10.4 to 10.6 Snow Leopard Apple wants you to buy the Mac Box Set.

This isn't all bad, because the Mac Box Set includes iWork 09 and iLife 09, so you get upgrades to all of Apple's popular consumer apps too. The price to upgrade to Snow Leopard is a little steep at $169 direct from Apple. Luckily you can buy Mac Box Set from Amazon for around $100.

There is another way to upgrade Mac OS X Tiger to Snow Leopard, but I don't recommend it. For $29, you can buy the Snow Leopard upgrade for going from OS X 10.5 to 10.6. This same upgrade will also work with OS X 10.4. The problem with this option is it violates the Apple end user license agreement. It will get you the upgrade you want, but you won't be playing by the rules. The other thing to know about this option is that it requires you to reinstall all your software, so it's not a true upgrade, but if you are willing to take the risk in pursuing this option it will work on your Intel Mac hardware.