Apple’s Leopard Mauls Early Adopters
15. Nov, 2007 
3 Comments
I purchased OS X Leopard on Friday, October 26, thirty minutes after it was officially released, 3,653 kilometers from home.
In my eagerness to be one of the first to move to Apple’s latest and much hyped OS, I located a Best Buy store across from Red Rock Resort and Casino where I was staying during my recent trip to Las Vegas.
Heather, my significant other stared at me in what can only be described as an “oh my god, you are such a geek that you couldn’t wait until we got back to Toronto to do this??” look. For the record, I did try my best to be a good partner by showering her with affection in between dialog box confirmations throughout the entire install.
I’ll confide with you that my premeditation of this nerd-fest event runs even deeper: Prior to Heather arrived on Tuesday evening (I was there since Sunday for business), I had already visited Fry’s Electronics and purchased a 500GB USB/Firewire hard drive so I could backup my MacBook prior to Friday’s upgrade.
Although my upgrade was surprisingly smooth, after reading Rob Hyndman’s latest entry about his Leopard attack, I am thankful I went through the trouble of archiving my entire hard drive prior to my own upgrade. Rob’s account of his experience was a nightmare I regularly experience as a PC owner, but had believed I was a thing of the past now that I’m a Mac owner.
Leopard did not come without some “issues” however. Now, a few weeks later, I have noticed some oddities that, unlike Rob, I’m not willing to invest the time to fix: I can no longer print within Vista running in Parallels, Firefox has been unstable at times, iCal occasionally declines to display any appointment data and my XTEN softphone client required an upgrade. There were numerous other oddities that leaves me with a gut feeling that whispers “Leopard’s got bugs.”
So the question I can now answer is: “For $129, was Leopard worth the upgrade?”
Well, I really like the idea of Time Machine and the new version of PhotoBooth with it’s cool greenscreening video capability (check out my recent YouTube video for a short example), and the new dock. But unlike the hype that lived up to the product in the case of the iPod Touch and the iPhone, Leopard seems content to live up to it’s software version number namesake: 10.5 – a point one dot release over Tiger 10.4.
I call disingenuous headline :-)
love,
Nathan
I am entertained by the fact that I can now tell when there’s a new blog post when there’s a new flickr photo.
Places and boot camp are better, too, and I find the UI to be _much_ peppier than before.
Lots of little things, but yeah, nothing that really wows.
Nate: Ha! Have you made the move to Leopard yet?
Kev: That is kinda funny, although not surprising, since that flickr account is specifically for my blog posts. If you want better picture selection, see my paid flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/blucier . :)
I can’t comment on whether Boot Camp is better, although I did notice that dual screen with Coherence is nicer.