Leopard: Hype?

Terry Zorich · #1 10-29-2007, 02:09 AM

On Saturday I picked up a Leopard family pack, as I have two Macs. I installed on my recently-purchased 20" iMac, and so far I'm...underwhelmed. It's barely obvious that anything has changed.

I suppose BootCamp will be neat, but I already have a perfectly good PC and worry about adding complexity to a currently stable Mac. I suppose TimeMachine will be useful (if I'm so boneheaded as to accidentally delete files or something), but until I buy a drive that I can dedicate strictly to doing backup duty, I won't even launch it. Cover Flow slows me down and is bloat, in my opinion. Other 'improvements' to Finder? ...yawn! Changes to Mail? Cute, but nearly worthless to me. Same goes for Spaces and Stacks.

In my opinion, Apple loses a bunch of points for this one. NOT for coming up with improvements to what is admittedly a good OS - rather, for calling Leopard a major revision and having Steve Jobs blabber on endlessly about how groundbreaking it is. Two words: PUH-LEEZE! (It is neither major nor groundbreaking.)

I'm kinda regretting spending that $200. It certainly would have been better spent on a softbox or put towards the 100mm macro I've been thinking about getting.

In fairness, I'm sure I'll come to appreciate the extra little niceties Apple has come up with here. But so far, I'm disappointed. Shame on me for foolishly/blindly assuming it would be as great as the rest of the Apple products I've bought in the recent past.

MikeA · #2 10-29-2007, 04:38 AM

You could probably say the same about every new release of OSX since the public beta.

The thing is, do you want big changes, like the XP -> Vista scenario, where they seem to have run madly about changing things for the sake of it, or would you like things to steadily improve with every release, as they have since OSX Public Beta?

I kinda like the Apple approach. I especially like being able to buy enough licenses for the whole family without shelling out for 5x the single license fee.

Mike.

David Hughes · #3 10-29-2007, 11:18 AM

I like some of the Leopard features but having installed it, it is mainly for interest value. I have maintained Tiger on a separate bootable drive as Leopard doesn't work correctly with Lightroom or Epson printers so will be staying with Tiger for real stuff until Adobe etc catch up.

Dave

Jerry Skrocki · #4 10-29-2007, 03:52 PM

Leopard is a welcomed upgrade for those that have 64 bit capable hardware. Finally the operating system has caught up with the hardware. Those with intel based Mac Pros with Xeon processors will find a great performance increase. Leopard brings the ability to efficiently manage multi-core processors in a true 64 bit operating system. 16 bit printing is another benefit (drivers pending). Managing system fonts on the fly is another capability beneficial to graphic designers like myself.

Terry Zorich · #5 10-29-2007, 04:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jerry Skrocki

Leopard is a welcomed upgrade for those that have 64 bit capable hardware. Finally the operating system has caught up with the hardware. Those with intel based Mac Pros with Xeon processors will find a great performance increase. Leopard brings the ability to efficiently manage multi-core processors in a true 64 bit operating system. 16 bit printing is another benefit (drivers pending). Managing system fonts on the fly is another capability beneficial to graphic designers like myself.

Interesting that you say this. I just read a review where they posted some performance numbers (Tiger vs. Leopard), using a Mac Pro as the reference machine. And while Leopard did outperform Tiger in every category, that performance difference was small, not dramatic as you suggest it might be.

I have a Mac Pro as well, but that's the machine on which I have Lightroom loaded, so upgrading that machine to Leopard is on hold.

Terry Zorich · #6 10-29-2007, 04:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MikeA

The thing is, do you want big changes, like the XP -> Vista scenario, where they seem to have run madly about changing things for the sake of it, or would you like things to steadily improve with every release, as they have since OSX Public Beta?

Leopard certainly seems to have its share of changing things just for the sake of it, rather than because Apple had something useful to add. Stacks and Spaces and Cover Flow, for example.

I also like the 5-user license. Very friendly to those of us with more than one Mac.

MikeA · #7 10-29-2007, 06:06 PM

Interesting the Lightroom comments. I'm not seeing any issues at all, what is supposed to be broken? I'm on a Mac Pro. Definitely _feels_ faster, but I have not done any empirical testing.

Terry, we could get into semantics, and Apple is certainly capable of getting things wrong. What I meant is that the OS remains familiar to use, even though much of it is completely revised. Stuff like stacks are add-on features, not changes to existing tools. Unlike the major revisions in Windows, it's unlikely that any users will require retraining just to find their stuff...

Mike.

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