The mother of all Leopard reviews
by Volker Weber
After reading John Siracusa's review, I don't see any reason to write another one:
I started this review talking about expectations. 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.
So far I have only used the new O/S for a day or so. There have been zero difficulties so far, and I have yet to try any of the new features like Time Machine.
Comments
The missing link ;-)
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars
Uhm, whenever I want to switch to page 7 of that review firefox 2.0.0.8 crashes ;)
very nice review, does it end? i am on page 12...
@Sascha: not here - but i'm using Win32 ;)
turned out that ABP (adblock plus) causes my crash.. strange.
have ABP here too... maybe not the same list? (using "Cedric's" i guess)
It looks like John is sharing some of my doubts about the new interface such as Icons, dock and so on.
The general feeling I get is that the best part of Leopard is still to come in the form of new apps (and probably a new FileSystem).
All in all together, a very impressive review. Thanks for posting the link.
I got Leopard on Saturday and installed it right away. I had no issues with the (clean, i.e. no upgrade) installation and all my applications worked fine (this is an improvement over when I installed Vista on my gaming machine). However, I have one big issue: Sometimes after coming out of safe sleep my keyboard stops working after about 1-2 minutes. I have yet to figure out what exactly causes it... Could someone with a Santa-Rosa-MBP try this? Go to safe sleep (i.e. close the lid, wait for the LED to start flashing, then remove the power plug and the battery), wake up, log in and wait.
Everything seems to work fine, the mouse works, I can do whatever I want to do, but my keyboard is dead, only a reboot fixes it.
Other than that I like Leopard a lot. Everything looks smoother and Spaces is just great. I have yet to try Time Machine, I will do that this afternoon.
I'm not a Mac user but I have been reading the Leopard coverage with interest. This Ars Technica review is by far the most comprehensive I've come across. I especially like that Apple finally adopted some of the BeOS innovations. I still have BeOS 5.0 at home and fire it up occasionally. It was so innovative 10+ years ago. Mainstream OS's are only now catching up, and it was nice to see the nod to that from Apple.
ComputerWorld also has a write up on what's new in Leopard Server. I'm amazed they're offering so much out of the box.
After much a-do I were finally well after the purchase of an additional HD. Nevertheless, Mail.app goes up in flames everytime I seriously use it. As I am ill with an infection, while trying to get this thing up and runing, maybe I´m not up to speed. Anyway, in between CCCing and migrating accounts, installing OSes and deleting stuff, moving Gigs from one disk to another until everything is spread between multiple volumes, to have the necessary room on the target, I am coughing and cursing at the same time, as I never had all of these problems with Apple.
10.5 gives me a royal PITA. It reminds me of old times with beige HW. Guuurrggh!
I took a risk and updated my Macbook this week (it’s now my production machine ;o) ). Overall I’m very happy. Everything is snappier, and I like the incremental improvements. I’m using Spaces quite a lot, The VMware Fusion release candidate works well, and there’s a work-around for getting Skype to function (it doesn’t like the new firewall arrangements in Leopard).
FWIW, I always do archive & install when I upgrade my OS (after backing up my data of course!)—I find that this approach works well.
