This feature was so successful that it is widely speculated today that the Aero Search and Start Search features in Windows Vista may have at least been heavily influenced in design and placement by Spotlight. Spotlight was developed much faster than competing desktop environment search engines at the time, and indexed new drives and ran as a system service in the background by default. The Menubar also gained a blue (or graphite, depending on Appearance preferences) circle with the Spotlight search glass inside, which allowed universal searching of the entire system, whether files, folders, e-mails, or any other data specified in Spotlight preferences. Spotlight was prominently featured throughout the entire OS, from the installation welcome window and introduction video, to the highlighting effect used when searching with the new toolbar in System Preferences. One of the first breakthrough features was dubbed 'Spotlight', which improved upon the per-application instant search stack and APIs introduced in 10.3 'Panther' was a new system-wide expansion of this technology that was now available to all applications, including to major OS X applications such as System Preferences and Address Book with full metadata details and 'smart folders', a new saved search feature in the Finder, Mail 2, and iTunes.

Outside of the introduction of Exposé in Panther (the previous release), Tiger added several notable killer features that would become OS X icons throughout the decade, and was notable for being the longest running OS X release in history with 11 minor updates (10.4.11), while all other versions of OS X at most had received 8 or 9 updates in total. On JTiger was announced at the WWDC, and took one of the longest wait times, second to 10.5 'Leopard', to release on April 29, 2005. After several successful desktop releases, and the establishment of Mac OS X as a serious desktop operating system with Jaguar and Panther, Apple pushed forward yet again with the next large update of OS X - 10.4 'Tiger'. Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' is a version of Mac OS X.

Mac os 10.4 11