“As I’ve learned more about Leopard, it’s become increasingly clear where, exactly, those two-and-a-half years of development time went. Leopard is absolutely packed with improvements. It seems that not a corner of the OS has gone untouched,” John Siracusa reports in his comprehensive review for Ars Technica.
“Perhaps that’s not as clear to the casual user who just sees the surface changes and the major new features in Leopard. But even in that case, there’s more than enough to recommend it. if you’re wondering whether you should upgrade to Leopard, the answer, as it’s been for every major revision of Mac OS X, is yes,” Siracusa reports.
“I’m most excited about Leopard’s internals. They’re the star of this release, even if they don’t get top billing. There’s a good reason we’ve already seen so many prominent Leopard-only software announcements. This is where developers want to be,” Siracusa reports.
“Leopard’s pull on developers will translate into better applications for users… eventually. In the meantime, I’m hard pressed to think of a single Mac user I know who wouldn’t benefit from Time Machine’s hassle-free backup magic. If you’re looking for one reason to upgrade, this is it. Yeah, backups are boring, which is why you’re probably not doing them regularly right now. No more excuses,” Siracusa reports.
“The stage is set for Mac OS X 10.6 to triumph beyond the bounds of its ancestors. In the meantime, it’s the Mac development community’s opportunity to shine. Whether it reigns for two and a half years, like Tiger, or even longer, I’m looking forward to my time aboard starship Leopard,” Siracusa reports.
Full comprehensive review – highly recommended – here.
Ars, it be a right good’un. Ahrrs matey. Get that parrot off my shoulder.
A friend of mine’s comments when seeing the curious arc of the stacks folders unfurled on Leopard desktop…”Looks like the curve of an erect genital member of the human male”….
Is there some subtle meaning to that curve or what?
B Johnson
Are you related to A Dick?
(Andy, that is)
@B. Johnson
The well-Stack’ed and spaced icons are ready and waiting to be touched – via the soon-to-be-announced touch-screen Macs. Then, Cover Flow will also come in to it’s own.
Have any of you been to the Leopard fixit forums? Lots of problems. About 1/3 of people get it to install on the first try. Lots of crashes and broken this and that. I wonder how all these reviewers are getting it to work.
What is the obsession with ‘touch screen’ laptops? I for one don’t have any trouble using a trackpad or mouse. I most certainly don’t want my screen covered with fingerprints.
Another awesome review by John Siracusa. I definitely agree with him on the look of Leopard. Tiger is much more pleasant to look at. The folders look like something from my Linux desktop back in 1998.
Anon
The way you describe it makes me feel that it will come in handy….
Doesn’t the author mean 10.5 instead of 10.6? I don’t think Leopard is that much of a leap.
MW: pressure-as in too much pressure to get the article published.
Umm… Generally, users are posting in a tech forum (such as Apple’s “Leopard fixit forums”) specifically WHEN they’re having problems. They need help, and they’re hoping somebody hanging around in the forum can provide it. Therefore it follows that a high percentage (e.g., 1/3 etc.) of posters will be having some sort of issue. Does this make sense to you?
Two successful installations here. One on a two year old Mac Mini the other on a three year old PB G4. Not sure what could be causing the problems. I simply followed the directions and came back in an hour or so and everything was done.
MW: turned. Apple has turned a corner and left everyone else in the dust.
How come iTunes scroll bars are different from rest of the Leopard scroll bars??
Installation one on a G4 dual 1Ghz, first try resulted in the BSD (stuck on ‘blue screen of death’) also, inadvertently had external disc on during install. This could have created problems. Second try worked just fine installing on a second partition of G4 internal disc. Now I need to ‘ungunk’ the first partition. (Meh…)
Install two on a MacBook 2 Ghz, first try worked, but had to re-enter some passwords for Airport Extreme (802.11n).
Since that time, all is well. both machines ‘see’ each other over WiFi very well.
Also, I asked Apple Store person what license I should have as a single user with two macs. He says “Family Pack” because of multiple Macs. I say “sounds like Family Pack is for family of Macs, not family of Man”. He says that “technically, the ‘single user’ license would work but would violate software agreement”. We both agreed that in this era of WiFi, and the computers being ‘aware’ of each other, changes the whole game now.
Since I am an independent video producer and my home studio lives or dies on reliable working machines, I opted for ‘Family Pack’ to keep things from getting sketchy in the background, lest I encounter some inexplicable problem created by conflicting OS licenses on the WiFi network.
In the end, I’m happy with the results and Apple has certainly earned their stripes, er’ spots, on this one.
Getting a family pack is less expensive than getting multiple single user packs and a way to keep legal if an auditor comes sniffing at your door. Back to topic – Was a bit tricky on my powerbook but got it to work and had just about everything backed up. New iMac worked perfectly and have a clone of previous setup. Anyone who works or has worked in support departments knows that x.0 installs can sometimes be tricky but that is the cost of being on the cutting edge. So far, so awsome.
“About 1/3 of people get it to install on the first try.”
Where are you getting that statistic… looking at the help forums?
The people who are having trouble are mostly morons who install 3rd party mods and then try to do an upgrade instead of an archive & install.
I’m sure 99% of them could have been prevented with a few simple precautions and preparations as detailed in the Macfixit guide here:
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071023091749337
Personally, all three Leopard installations in my household went almost flawlessly, all were archive & installs.
But seriously, I wouldn’t even attempt a plain upgrade on a brand new release of an OS update. That’s just asking for trouble. Especially if you have any OS mods or app plugins you haven’t disabled. Archive & Install is the way to go. That alone probably prevents like 95% of the problems. Just because it’s a Mac doesn’t mean it won’t have bugs and you shouldn’t take basic steps to ensure a smooth upgrade.
Word on MacFixIt is that a “straight install” could lead to problems and that leaving an external device plugged in or Haxies installed WILL lead to problems.
Dave
Installed my family pack on my 2 intel iMacs and Macbook. Just put in the disk and installed. All went smoothly and took less than an hour each. Others in my MUG reported no problems with install either. Glad I did not know of problems, I probably would have gone to a lot of trouble that would have been a wate of time.
So far have installed Leopard on two machines, one on a PB 15″ G5, one on a new Imac. Only issue was migrating from an older Imac to the new Imac. The old Imac had a new keyboard and didn’t like booting into Target mode. So found an old keyboard and everything proceeded spit-spot. After migration, proceeded to update the new Imac before installing Leopard. All worked well.
This is the wife’s mac: she loves the email templates!
I Hope Apple follows some of John Syracusa’s advice, especially with concern to the dock, folders, and bland icons. Some of the things he has brought to light have convinced me to hold off installing Leopard to see if Apple will address them in their first update.
George:
Don’t call me a moron – asshøle.
My install [done by the book: backed up; disconnected peripherals, etc], went well until I opened Aperture [v1.5.6] and discovered that all the menus across the top of the screen had disappeared. And so far haven’t returned despite numerous reboots and preference dumps.
Aperture – a critical app for me – is currently dead on my machine as a result.
Don’t spout off idiotic comments and show your ignorance before engaging your brain next time.
Installed Leopard on my father in law’s mac mini. No probs at all, and he loves it.
Put it on my Macbook, Powerbook and iBook–again no probs at all.
Plugged the iBook into the windows office network and went to browse the network and everything was just THERE. All the machines on the network–no icons shifting around as the network was read, no machines failing to appear, no inexplicable failure to browse the network. Accessing a share just required clicking on the machine and clicking on the share–no dodgy samba authentication problems. Printer access is clearly laid out, and again network printers detected and accessed. With Tiger network browsing was also flakey–sometimes it browsed, sometimes not, and usually I had to keep the IP numbers of different machines memorized.
Time machine is cool, but I think the best “new” feature of Leopard is the vastly improved Finder–particularly over networks.
Oh, and how could I forget–under Tiger losing a network share absolutely freaked Finder and any program using an open file over network was grounds for a permanent spinning beach ball, and froze Word every time. No more–the finder reacts gracefully, and Word instead of freezing up just lets me save the file locally. Fantastic.
I’m so please with Leopard I may end up having to buy it!
By the way, just to try out different ways of installing I’ve done archive and install on the father in law’s machine, archive and install on an iMac 24, an upgrade installed on the iBook (not enough hard drive space to do an archive and install), an archive and install on a PowerBook, an upgrade install on my own Mac mini, and for the Macbook I used this as an opportunity to the replace the OEM hard drive with a 160 GB drive and installed Leopard as a fresh install, and used the migration assistant to transfer my account from the old hard drive stuck in a USB enclosure. Very, very pleased–account and applications transferred without a hitch.
So far the only problem I have had is that a sound program, XLD, that I use for flac to apple lossless conversion is broken, so I have to use xAct to convert to AIFF, and then iTunes to apple lossless.
Given the installations I’ve done I find it hard to believe that any stats would be near only 1/3 for sucessful installs. Although I’ve been installing on relatively recent machines I’ve certainly done a significant number of installs the past couple of days, on a variety of machines, and a variety of installation methods.
@HueyLong
I was talking to the people who got BSOD’d or had problems with the actual OS in and of itself.
Application incompatibilities is a whole other ball of wax, and has nothing to do with problems installing the OS.
Yesterday, Leopard arrived by means of the UPS guy.
I only have a humble titanium powerbook G4 1 GHZ, luckily with 1 GB RAM.
Installing Leopard on top op Tiger was painless: 1 hour 45 minutes later the beast was up and running (including a 20 minutes DVD disc check).
My first impressions:
– total startup time of my humble minimum-specs tibook until login screen is approx 15 seconds longer, and logging in takes approx 10 seconds more than before. However, within 1 minute 20 seconds I am fully operational.
– starting apps sometimes seem to take slightly more than before, but the Leopard extras make it all worth (I have become a fan of cover flow already).
– DVD player works still very well indeed
– to my surprise, Filemaker 8.5 advanced seems to function (though Filemaker announced that Filemaker Pro 9 is incompatible with Leopard). I’ll find out more in the coming days.
“Why on earth would anyone want to keep on using an old minimum-specs (Leopard wise) powerbook G4?”, I hear you asking…
The answer is that my tibook remains cool to the touch, even after playing a DVD for an hour (only the bottom gets warm after extended use, but never anywhere close to the danger zone).
To me, a cool powerbook beats a hot macbook any day.
Oh, by the way: I did a simple upgrade. Worked flawless for me.
correction:
Filemaker Advanced 8.5 doesn’t work after all.
It starts, but refuses to load any database, so is completely useless.
Damn!