iLife

You can do two things to upgrade your existing Mac mini: 1) Purchase a retail copy of 10.5 Leopard and install it. 2) Purchase a retail copy of 10.6 Snow Leopard and install it. You must pay for any "major point" upgrade. Any time the number immediately following the "10." changes (as in 10.4 to 10.5), you must purchase the upgrade. Any "minor point" upgrades (the...

Your 10.4.11 is the OS X version known as Tiger... To upgrade, you need to purchase an OS X 10.5 or higher. You can also purchase a Snow Leopard Box Set, which includes both iLife, and iWork in addition to Snow Leopard. You also end up with a bonus of more free space on your hard drive. Mine got over 10GB of space back after the upgrade to 10.6

Snow Leopard does not require any previous operating system to be installed. The standard upgrade version $29US or $35Can will happily install on any properly newly formatted drive on an INTEL mac. It appears that Apple changed the rules sometime just before releasing SL, so now the only reason to buy the retail boxed set is if you need ilife, iwork, etc.

chine on, put the disc in immediately and press the "c" key so it starts from that disc. Upgrading will preserve iLife. If you clean install, you have to install iLife afterwards from the original installation discs. ...

Upgrading to Apple's Snow Leopard OS: What you need to know With a spiffy new installer, the Mac OS X upgrade process is quicker and easier than ever Ryan Faas August 26, 2009 (Computerworld) In building Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X (version 10.6), Apple focused more on under-the-hood improvements to boost speed and stability than on adding new...

My memory isn't what it was. I forgot that life came with a new Mac. Ho hum.

Or would you be telling people to get iLife? --J.D.

you mean "as expected". ;) Do I really have to add "No, Snow Leopard Retail (Upgrade from Leopard) does not contain iWork or iLife..." to the FAQ?

rsion of Snow Leopard and it works perfectly without leopard. I just reformatted right before and everything went fine. It takes up 5 GB and there is no iWork or iLife like anybody thought. ...

That's what I thought... iLife, in various versions, was included with new Mac purchases (which also include Mac OS X install/restore CDs/DVDs), but never with a retail version of OS X, though.