This year I spoke at about ten international conferences and a couple of other meetings, starting with MacWorld in San Francisco in January. At each event, I kept noticing more and more developers on Macs. So much so that sometimes a sea of luminescent apples would greet me when I looked into the audience. And I've probably done my little bit to nudge quite a number of people onto Macs. Not because I own any stock in Apple (*doh*) but rather because switching from Windows to OS X (Tiger) made me love playing with computers again after 23 years on PCs.
The Leopard is tarnishing the reputation of OS X article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
My recent upgrade to Leopard, however, has left me with a sour taste in my mouth and I've started questioning whether Apple is truly committed to OS X and the computing business or whether those will take a back seat now to its mobile and devices business.
I've previously blogged about how difficult the upgrade process was for me (the installer refused to recognize that I had a hard disk in my MacBook Pro until I forced it to see it by saving the EULA on it) and how my keyboard randomly freezes (this happened to me about a dozen times yesterday while hacking out the countdown timer for Seb during the conference). But two things happened yesterday during my presentation that left me thinking that the mistakes that Apple is making with Leopard will ultimately hurt the image of OS X quite a bit.
Firstly, I saw Mike Jones apologize to the audience before starting his presentation that he was running Leopard and that he was sorry if it screwed up (he then went on to recount how horrible his upgrade experience was and how he had to reinstall it from scratch). I also found myself giving the same apology before my talk. If there was anyone in the audience considering an upgrade to Leopard (or buying a computer with Leopard on it), you can rest assured that they probably will not (or will think long and hard before they do).
Secondly, Keynote screwed up. Twice during my talk, it jumped to the last slide. This left me in the awkward position of having to rummage through my slides and restart my presentation. Twice! At first I thought that I had done something wrong -- pressed the wrong button or something (user's always initially blame themselves for errors). However, after my talk, someone in the audience Stephen Pollard came up to me and told me how he had just taught a three-day course and had Keynote do the same thing to him several times under Leopard.
I'm now considering whether I should downgrade to Tiger.
At the start of this post, I mentioned how much penetration OS X was getting with speakers and developers (the very people that others turn to for advice on which computer to buy). What is going to happen now that speakers realize that Keynote on Leopard is not reliable and may make them look bad in front of an audience? How many will downgrade to Tiger or begin their talks with a disclaimer about how unreliable Leopard is?
And how many more will have their keyboards freeze in front of a large audience?
How many will be greeted with jeers of "Get Windows!"
The final straw for me with Windows was having to stand in front of an audience in Australia while we all waited for Windows to verify my hard disk after crashing spectacularly in the middle of my talk. My keyboard freezing in the middle of a talk may just have the same effect on me for OS X. The darn thing is, I just can't go back to Windows -- it's a dark place that I want to forget about. So what do I do? Linux? Maybe I'll start flirting with it on an EEE PC but I don't think I could switch to it full time. A trip back to Tiger looks like the only viable alternative.
Please, Apple, fix the installer, those debilitating keyboard freezes, and the Keynote instability. If nothing else, these issues are affecting the very people that influence large numbers of others. OS X's reputation is being tarnished as we speak, and, if left unchecked, will continue to do so.
Why, Apple, did you take a polished, stable operating system (Tiger) and release an upgrade that lacks the key ingredients that made people love it? In case you're wondering what those were, they weren't eye candy and pizazz. They were stability, reliability and an impeccable polish.
I want those things back. You can keep the shiny 3D dock!
The Leopard is tarnishing the reputation of OS X article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Did this happen with the 10.5.1 update as well?
Interesting read Aral, but I can honestly say that I have not encountered any issues. my glossy iMac had an upgrade and my G4 PowerBook had a clean install and I would say both work flawlessly. The only issue I have had was with MAMP and changing the preferences for ‘Start Servers when starting MAMP’ & ‘Stop Servers when quitting MAMP’ to off solved any issues I had as I would always start the server via the dashboard widget anyhow. But a few teething problems with any new product is in a way expected, it is the price of being an early adopter.
Hey Aral,
Me too I was LOVING Tiger. Worked smoothly and never let me down.
However since my upgrade to Leopard, I’ve also been experiencing some hard times:
-firefox not letting me type anymore
-kernel panics while using Snapz Pro & Parallels
-Permissions all screwed up (not to be reset, unless you format your harddrive)
-Memory filling up not to be cleaned out, forcing me to reboot my machine
I’ve been thinking alot about downgrading to Tiger.
I don’t think we would be the first ones to downgrade, Aral.
Wanting to upgrade so soon after the release, and trusting Apple that much might just ‘ve been a mistake.
@ Robert: the 10.5.1 upgrade didn’t fix any of these issues.
No issues here. Runs much faster than Tiger (on a MB Pro 2.16, 15″), Safari is faster, Time Machine Rocks, overall better experience than Tiger, though I would not say it was bad at all. Leopard is just better.
And you think Apple is not committed to OS X??? Because you had a few issues? I don’t buy that. Did you practice a few dry runs with Keynote before you gave your presentation? I’m not making excuses for Apple, but it is a computer that does a lot of things with a lot of different apps. Yes, Keynote is an app that should work for sure, Apple made it. But I think your expectations may be higher than normal.
Anyway, I am a satisfied customer. I am testing now before I roll it out to the other 54 Macs on my LAN. I guess then I will know if Leopard is a great upgrade or not. I do know I will not be performing upgrades. I will install from scratch after backing up. I think that makes more sense to avoid these issues.
Cheers.
“Why, Apple, did you take a polished, stable operating system (Tiger) and release an upgrade that lacks the key ingredients that made people love it?”
Substitute “Panther” for “Tiger” and you’ve got a credible impersonation of many users two and a half years ago. A better question might be,
“Why, Aral, did you take a stable production machine and install a Point Zero OS upgrade on it?” ;)
http://macmagazine.com.br/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/1-turma-jornalismo.jpg
:)
wow. Sorry to hear about the problems with Leopard.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve upgrade 3 machines in my house to Leopard w/o any issues and upgraded two family Macs to Leopard w/o any issues as well. Well — I should say that the only issue was a few pieces of software that weren’t updated to work with Leopard.
Hope things get better for you.
I’ve had no problems whatsoever. Install went well, though it took forever and been running just fine on a Mac Book Pro for the last month, and a Mac Book for the last week. No issues.
The last thing you want to hear is that my 5 installs to date have gone smoothly… it is true. I had an issue with VPN which required a Beta of VPN Tracker. I’ve read that many face problems due to Apple’s default selection of Update vs. my choice Archive and Update.
In all cases I updated all of my third party apps BEFORE ever updating to Leopard. Apparently some of old code can cause problems. Then I ran Disk Utility on every one to clean up any permissions issues. Last, I FULLY BACKED UP every system prior to updating—which I NEVER do! Perhaps this is why things went so well for me? To demonstrate that my fears were for naught? Or did I somehow do something right in the process?
I manage two dozen Macs. Had a desktop a year ago that crashed often and gave me fits. In my experience once this starts I continues. I finally zapped the hard drive and reinstalled the entire system and all apps. From that point forward it ran without issue. Perhaps that is your best next move… sorry if it is, but better that than to apologize to your audience before giving a talk.
Given the millions of Leopard systems sold, some number of these will have issues. Those that don’t seldom post their success stories.
Question, what, specifically, made you upgrade?
I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m not curious …
I’m also one who upgraded on day 1. Now that I think of it, my main reason was thinking, just “cause it’s better” … and I really wanted to get at the new features.
But, when it comes to upgrades, I guess we should be thinking in terms of stability rather than “coolness” factor … aka, as you already alluded to in this post … we should be thinking in business terms, rather than with a “new toy” mindset.
But, it’s so hard to get caught up when we are so passionate about the technology! :)
–
I haven’t experienced the problems you mentioned (yet) …
I suppose it’s just because I’m been working under desktop XP for a lot of projects lately and haven’t been as portable with my MacBook & Leopard.
Zero problems here – and I have been beating on Keynote quite a lot recently with presentations – even using the Apple Remote with it.
Upgrade was a little long as Keith attested to, but I’ve upgraded several boxes on the same network, and I am absolutely in love with Leopard.
Sorry to hear that you had a problem with install and now your Keynote has flaked out on you.
We’ve upgraded four machines to Leopard and three of the upgrades have had complications. Two of them rebooted fine, but soon afterwards, the admin user disappeared. The symptoms were that on the first reboot, the machines automatically logged in to the admin user, but once logged in, the admin user password no longer worked and when we logged out, the admin user was gone.
We had to restart in safe mode and follow the instructions listed in Apple Support document 306840.
The third machine was even more complicated. It took hours to get Leopard installed.
On the first machine (G5 iMac) we did the standard upgrade from 10.4.1 and ran into the admin user disappearing problem. On the subsequent machines we did the archive and install and still ran into that problem on one of the machines (Intel iMac). The only machine that didn’t have any major hiccups during upgrading was an Intel MacBook.
But we did encounter some serious printing problems after upgrading to Leopard, issues which remain unresolved.
All of this has left a sour taste and there are another five Macs we won’t be upgrading to Leopard soon. I’d love to upgrade the PowerBook I use to Leopard because Leopard now has a Japanese dictionary, but we’re not able to print envelopes on our Lexmark networked printer with Leopard. It is so odd. With 10.4.1, the envelopes print fine, but with Leopard 10.5.1, the envelopes always jam inside the printer. That anomaly doesn’t make a lot of sense. Once the printer starts printing the envelope I don’t understand why the operating system on a computer would cause and envelope to jam. But the problem happens 100% of the time that there is something dramatically different between 10.5 and 10.4 printing.
Man, that scares me now.. I have Leopard installer lying on my desk and I don’t have enough courage to upgrade… I don’t want to mess up my existing installation, everything works so well…
Probably, I would wait for some more time, watch what everyone is saying…
Probably a fresh install should do better than just upgrading on existing installation?
BTW! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience.
-abdul
Every single update to OS X in it’s history has been buggy like this until a few updates later. In fact every single update to any piece of software is like this. An update with lots of new features leads to lots of new bugs. A while later after several bug fixes many bugs are fixed and it’s far more stable.
@Robert: Yep, I’m experiencing the all of the above with the 10.5.1 update installed.
@Chuck: As I mentioned, I wasn’t the only person in the room who experienced the same issue with keynote. And, having given about a dozen presentations with Keynote this year alone, I believe I know how to step through slides with it :)
@dk: I wasn’t a Mac user back when Panther was out so I guess you can say I was spoiled. I switched directly to Tiger. And it rocked! I miss the polish.
@John O: Thanks :)
@Keith: Glad to hear it, man! Although didn’t you have issues at your talk at FOTB? Were those not Leopard-related?
@Dave: I think it’s a mixed bag. Like you said, either you experience issues or you don’t. But I expect more from Apple and OS X. I wouldn’t be surprised if these issues happened while running on Windows but it’s unacceptable to me that Leopard, for example, couldn’t see the hard disk in my MacBook Pro when Apple controls the hardware.
@Scott: Quite a few things. The finder improvements, for one thing (the breadcrumb navigation can be a lifesaver). Above all, though, curiosity. Yeah, I know what it did to the cat :)
@Eric: Thanks. I guess I might wipe the machine and reinstall from scratch and see if that solves the issues I’m having.
@Daniel: Sorry to hear about the issues you’re having. Here’s hoping that Apple’s aware of these and that 10.5.2 will bring us closer to the sort of stability and polish we’ve come to expect from OS X with Tiger.
I have to agree with most folks, that Leopard has been a shining improvement in my osx experience. All the new features and bells and whistles have truly enhanced my daily life. Now I have to admit that I do a clean install every time and that I have seen other upgraders have issues. And Leopard has breathed new life into my powerbook g4.
However your keynote problem is not limited to Leopard. I have had several folks complain about this on Tiger. Not sure what that deal is. But in Tigers defense, before my first preso at MAX US this year powerpoint decideded not to open my presentations any more. 2 minutes till the start of my session powerpoint just crashed opening my ppt. Fired up Keynote and had it open my PPT and gave my session without a hick-up.
So I guess with all software, YMMV.
Aral, your posts in particular have stopped me from upgrading. I am still a Tiger.
I have experienced crashes while giving presentations and I am trying to see if there is a pattern here. I had a thought when at the San Jose 360Flex keynote Mark Anders’s powerbook pro froze. As he rebooted he apologized and wondered aloud if there was something buggy about the mac-intel platform. After the keynote I told him I had the same freeze-up during a recent presentation while doing the same thing:
Apple-tabbing between applications.
The difference was that I was using a Powerbook G4. PowerPC. Just last week I was presenting (on my month-old MBP) and it happened again: a complete freeze while apple-tabbing between keynote and Flash. So here is the other commonality:
Connected to a data projector with DVI to VGA adapter.
I had practiced this presentation countless times with zero problems. Everyday this MBP gets connected to a DVI based external monitor with zero problems. The MBP has never crashed on me before. Is there something about connecting to an external projector using the DVI to VGA adapter? Are these circumstances similar to your experiences?
- Randy
thanks for sharing your experience with leopard – interesting points you’ve brought up. Hopefully they’ll have an update for leopard at macworld in Jan.
Blogs that end in “Please Apple, fix…” might make you feel better, but they’re not helpful. You’re not talking to Apple, here. There’s a chances they’ll see it, but there’s a bigger chance they won’t.
If you actually want Apple to fix something then file a bug report with them, at…
https://bugreport.apple.com/
I think it requires an Apple Developer Connection membership (there is a free version). It just takes a moment to register, but if you actually want the bug FIXED, then this is the way to do it. The bug made its way into 10.5.0 because none of the beta-testers encountered it. You might be the first person to contact them about it. By the same token, if you never file a proper bug report, it might not get fixed for a LONG time.
Speaking as someone who uses Keynote, I’d sure appreciate you helping squash this bug so that I don’t have to encounter it.
Regards,
Ron
I’ve upgraded a MBP and a imac without issue so far. Worst i had was mail bombs out occasionally when connecting to my company’s email server. My computers both work better overall and i love the benefits like the search highlight in safari and console. The ties between mail and ical. In the few times mail crashed i always send in the report to apple when the dialog comes up
I’ve installed it from scratch on 3 Macs and they’re all running without any trouble. However, a friend of mine who upgraded had some issues that got fixed after he re-installed.
Well, this is the first time that I’ve regretted an Apple system upgrade, and that’s since System 7.0.1! There are just a lot of quirks, things like cursors moving around by themselves, little graphic glitches, where the image seems to snap or reset into sharpness. I don’t know, I hope this gets straightened out, but I certainly wasn’t impressed by anything that came out of the .01 upgrade. One specific thing that has hurt my productivity is that ColorSync is no longer available in my print dialog box. I relied on a filter in there to lighten images to a chronically dark photo printer. Now that’s gone, and the printer is useless to me. I don’t think that any previous OS X upgrade has had this kind of regression. It’s troubling. I’m considering downgrading back to 10.4x.
Hey Aral,
Sorry to hear your Leopard saga continues, and be sure I never meant to belittle the troubles you’re experiencing .. in front of an audience.
I obviously do not have the same severity of troubles, and my confidence in my Mac system is pretty much the same as with Tiger.
I made a clean install on my MBP, after a long detailed backup process. I re-installed all my apps, using the latest installers available, after validating Leopard compatibility (not everything is available), but the system IS stable, actually I really like it : )
I also have years of Windows in my repertoire (though I also follow Mac OS since version 8.6 ~ 1998), and am sure you too remember installing Windows over and over, again and again.. that dark place you mentioned. It might surprise you, though incomparable, OS X had it share of troubles too, you joined the ride only recently.. Cheetah ,Puma and Jaguar were MUCH buggier than this Leopard release. Applications crashed, the notorious spinning-beach-ball-of-death was haunting me.. I even remember loosing data on a Jaguar-Tiger upgrade that went wrong. C’est la vie..
My advice is not to “revert” to Tiger, backup and re-install Leopard.
I gotta say that the comment about the fear that Leopard is tarnishing the reputation of Mac OS X is right on!
Thankfully, I’ve had pretty good luck with Leopard, and I’ve been a “day one” upgrader since the earliest Mac upgrades. Even back to System 7 and the like. (I worked for Apple, back then!)
I have two machines running Leopard, a dual proc G5 2.5 ghz and a 17 inch 2.16 MBP.
Some hiccups on each, most recently Excel deciding to frequently quit somewhat spontaneously, and without rhyme or reason! Of course, in the midst of working under a deadline! It’s so productive saving after almost every keystroke! And the “Mail sometimes can’t “see” Exchange Servers” problem has reared its head with me. It’s only my work email! The most annoying thing, however, was taking so long to figure out that my USB and Firewire expansion cards in my PCI slots of my G5 tower were not Leopard-compatible. System slowdowns, freezes, applications that wouldn’t launch, etc. Even virgin installs had problems, so I knew it wasn’t any “residue” from doing an upgrade install. Removing them cleared everything up! (Even using a SATA card in the laptop has worked without issue!)
In spite of any of the problems that I’ve had, I still do love using Leopard and would not go back to Tiger. The single biggest improvement, perhaps to the surprise of many, would be the improved Spotlight. The speed is great, and it’s ability to so quickly find what I want is excellent. I had gone to Google Desktop, but Spotlight now puts it to shame.
I wouldn’t think of telling you to simply stick it out – your problems are your problems. However, in spite of my glitches, I’m sticking with it. Good luck to you!
Sorry to hear about your problems, that is unfortunate. I guess I am lucky, both our MacBook and MacBook Pro have been very solid since upgrading to Leopard. In fact, they have been running without a reboot since I installed on October 27 (haven’t upgraded to 10.5.1 yet). I have seen a few problems, but nothing significant.
I upgraded on day 1 as well on my mbp with no issues and I love every second of it.
I did an upgrade and not a new install but before I did I cleared all the caches and reset all the logs and ran all the cron scripts, which should just be good ole common sense since if you have items in the cache and then put a new os on and it tries to run them then there should be issues. Now Apple could avoid that by having the installer do it but it only takes a few minutes on your own to do.
If your keynote is doing that then it sure sounds like a cached copy is corrupt.
Most all issues I have seen on OS X have been in the caches, delete them if you have any issues and it will likely fix the issue.
I don’t think your issue’s and will tarnish Apples rep much, there are some issues and I seem to have noticed most were fixed within 1 month, whereas the Vista users are still waiting for theirs (will be over 1 year).
I know it’s a bit useless to say it now, but it is always a bad idea to jump the gun on a new OS, and it’s usually an even worse idea to jump the gun and then simply upgrade.
A much better way to do things is to wait it out; these Keynote issues may not be at all related to 10.5 but may be more easily triggered in that system. It may not be a Leopard update that fixes them, it may be a Keynote update. And while this is still Apple, you have to remember that it’s a different department in Apple and their update is on their own timeline.
An even better way to go about putting a new upgrade on your system is to Archive and Install; one of the options from the install disk. I work the service desk for an Apple Authorized Service Center and I constantly see people who have trouble with straight Upgrades; problems caused by third party or old software and not at all related to Leopard itself.
Archiving and Reinstalling will put all your data in a “Previous Systems” folder on your hard drive, then erase the OS itself and put a clean copy on the HD. This will keep compatibility issues or corruption issues from arising. Of course, the best way of all is to Erase and Install, which wipes the entire HD and puts a clean copy of the OS on it.
Don’t tell people to not upgrade. Tell people to upgrade with care, because on the whole, the bugs in Leopard are minor and scattered (and the system itself increases productivity, as opposed to most Vista stories I’ve heard) and usually preventable. Don’t say that Leopard is tarnishing OSX, instead remind people that as awesome as new things are, there are always problems. OSX is still very solid on the whole.
You have my condolences. I hope things are straightened out soon.
I’ve upgraded both my Mac Pro and iBook G4 to OS 10.5 with zero problems … and I run a few pro applications such as Final Cut Studio and Adobe CS3. Also, I’ve made and given three Keynote presentations using Leopard. Everything has gone smoothly.
10.4 was not stable for me before 10.4.6 (I use also Mac OS X Server and do not remember if bugs in earlier versions were related to the server).
So I wait at least for 10.5.2 or 10.5.3 before installing it on critical machines.
Any doubt in commitment for Mac OS X by Apple seems to me silly after Apple puts Mac OS X on more and more devices (iPod Touch, iPhone).
I just believe they have done much work (Intel transition, downsizing Mac OS X for small devices) at the same time, maybe too much work.
Another problem (I am a registered developer) is, that the beta phase was way to short to really help finding bugs, the final release has been put into developer hands after the official release.
“…why did you upgrade to point zero release…”, “…always a bad idea to jump the gun on a new OS…”
These guys sure sound like they’re talking about Windows. A bad idea to get the point zero release of a supposedly rock solid OS? That was ALREADY rock solid the major release before it? Okay. Suddenly I stop hearing that voice in my head that keeps chiming “Macs just work”…
Me, I’m still on Panther and have no intention of upgrading. It works for me and I’ll stick with it until Apple comes out with OS 11, or my G4s fail spectacularly.
Dude – one machine for installing new updates and one machine for presentations. Can’t risk new software glitches when you’re facing a crowd. Leopard was a bumpy ride for me, but I kept Tiger on the machines I use in public. Things are smoother now, but it’s been quite a ride.
Move to Ubuntu : )
It might take you sometime to install it, but once it’s done, it doesn’t break up. Also, it runs niiiiiiiiiiiiice on MacBook pros and i can verify it does run like charm in a new shiny 24 inches iMac : D
Apple “just works”… damn marketing departments!
@Ron: Will file the bug and update this thread — thanks for the link.
@Everyone: Thanks for the kind words.
@itdontjustwork?: Well, that’s a big part of it. I know Tiger wasn’t 100% but it sure was close to 99% for me and I could easily forgive the 1%. That’s the problem with meeting such raised expectations.
@djscott: That’s a good system but I just can’t manage two computers. Been on a single laptop for years and love having everything in one place (with backups, of course). But if you can do it, then yeah, your solution is the safest one! :)
Aral, as someone who works in the technology industry you really should know better than to start using a new OS until version .1/service pack 1 comes out!
No matter how dedicated the OS manufacturer and how much testing they do, the first release of any OS is always going to be buggy and, unless you want to be what essentially amounts to being a free tester for Apple/Microsoft, you should wait.
Patience my young padawan! Don’t be so keen to get the new shiny stuff, as hard as it can be to hold off!
Ah you early adopters, sold by the hype ;)
@ Keith – you had probs the projector finding your machine as i remember. wonder if that was anything to do with Leopard?
Preliminary Leopard Review
by Terry Lawrence,
Periwinkle Consulting
periwinkle@shaw.ca
Like any major System update, Leopard has a mix of improvements, new features, glitches, unimprovements, and discontinued features. Here is an early review of some of the losses and gains I have observed from installing and setting up Leopard on about 15 Macs of various vintages from a 7 year old G4 to the latest 24″ Intel iMacs, and how it worked with various peripherals.
Classic Mac OS 9: Discontinued. Leopard has killed OS 9 Classic on computers that otherwise could still run OS 9 applications. All four of mine, for instance. When booted from a drive running Leopard, you cannot use any OS 9 applications. This is not too surprising as Steve Jobs announced the end of support for OS 9 almost 5 years ago, and none of the new Intel based Macs made in the last two years can run classic anyway. However, if your particular business depends on some OS 9 application that has not been ported to OS 10, or you don’t want to front out the money for a new version of that expensive app, DO NOT upgrade to Leopard unless you have multiple hard drives and leave Tiger or earlier running on at least one of them.
Dock: The new “Stacks” format does not support Hierarchical display anymore, so you are stuck with the new Fan or Grid options, which are only one level deep. Since they are at the right end of the Dock, if you have enough icons on the dock to fill it across the screen, they display a very annoying behavior in that the arc of icons in Fan mode can project out of the display at the top, or in Grid mode, the Grid display will flutter back and forth as you move the pointer around in the Dock area.This new “feature” is definitely an unimprovement in my opinion. The problem didn’t show up in the Leopard Keynote Demos because there were only a handful of icons on the dock, so it didn’t extend anywhere near the edge of the display. See screenshot.
Finder: Desktop Icons showing the front page or first clip of documents or movies are nice, but a bit slow to load at startup. Overall appearance is improved with the streaky brushed metal look and the heavy sidebars gone on Finder windows. Coverflow view of the hard drive is useful for scanning a file of photos or movies, but not as helpful when looking at documents or folders. The Spotlight search engine is improved and loads much quicker.
Printing: The Print Setup Utility is gone, leaving less options for selecting printers. You can still create Desktop printers by dragging the printer icon from the Printer Preferences window to the desktop. My 3 printers, a Brother 1270N laser, a Lexmark Z65 networkable inkjet, and an Epson CX5400 AIO, all worked after I reinstalled the drivers. Automatic Discovery still works fine, although I haven’t had occasion to see how Bonjour works with a printer plugged into an Airport base station yet. I would say this one went sideways. There is little if any improvement to printing, but the existing functionality is retained, although you now have to access the options through the Print & Fax System Preference. On the other hand, the layout is perhaps a bit less confusing for new users. All the USB and network printers on all my clients machines have worked OK in Leopard except one old HP that was working through a Parallel Port/USB adapter. Probably the adapter wasn’t supported.
Mail: There is a helpful improvement with a new Mail Activity progress bar at the bottom of the folder list, which shows you what is happening while sending or receiving mail, and a somewhat annoying address selection box on that volunteers to add addresses or dates in email text to Address Book or Calendar, but gets in the way when trying to copy something. Some Stationary is now available, but you can’t use attachments or signatures with it at the moment. Hopefully they will hire a graphic artist from some greeting card company to produce some decent looking stationary and fix the problem with Signatures and Attachments in a future maintenance update. On the other hand, the stationary that has photo placeholders embedded in it works very well with the pop-up selection window that shows all photos in your iPhoto program. You just drag and drop your photos onto the placeholder photos to embed them in the stationary. You can also create Notes in Mail, which show up as emails under the Notes Folder in a new section called Reminders. This is somewhat like MS Entourage.
Address Book: Still doesn’t support Categories, and doesn’t remember any custom list items such as Medical or Transportation. Good search engine, though, but that is not a change. No visible changes that I can see. This is one badly neglected but vital app that needs a serious upgrade.
iCal: Somewhat improved. The interface is a lot cleaner, and the general appearance is much improved. And the Dock icon finally shows the correct date every day instead of just once a year! However, it isn’t smart enough to just show the first two lines of each event like Palm calendar does, leaving room to see several events in the date square for a day, and in fact, if the text of the message is more than a few sentences long, it will project down into and overlap an event on the day below it, overlaying the text of the other date. See screenshot. This one needs fixing. On the other hand, unlike Address Book, it does support color coding categories of sorts, in the form of multiple “Calendars”, and they finally got rid of those stupid “Drawers” that infested everything in Panther and carried over into the Tiger version of Calendar.
Sherlock is gone in Leopard, and the Network Info Manager utility, which enabled you to create a Root account, is also missing. I suspect that Apple gave up on Sherlock because virtually everyone now uses Google instead, and a Google search box is built right into every one of the 15 or so Mac web browsers, except Internet Explorer, to the right of the Address Bar.
Time Machine: I connected a spare Firewire HD and let it do it’s thing overnight. It’s been accumulating data for about 2 weeks now, enough time to try it out. The Finder window works well in Time Machine. I was able to recover test files I had deleted a week or two earlier from the Desktop and Documents folder. This is one are where the Coverflow option works well for previewing documents and photos to find the one you need. Applications were more hit and miss. I created some test contacts in Address Book and could recover them a week after deleting the, but recovering mail didn’t work. With Mail open I opened Time Machine and could see and read the contents of the Inbox and other folder a week or two earlier, but when I clicked Restore, nothing happened on several tests. Time Machine seems to work with Apple apps so you can open the application (say iPhoto) and then hit the Time Machine icon and from within Time Machine, navigate through the folders, playlists, albums, etc., to locate what you need and click on Restore to recover it (maybe). The interface is great, and it works seamlessly when it works, but at the moment, it doesn’t always recover the data, at least in Mail. But, it is only version one.
My Palm Desktop calendar displayed a strange glitch. When you first open a contact or calendar, the date looks OK, but if you use the arrows to move ahead or back a month, or forward or back through the contacts, the dates and other numbers get scrambled. It looks like the new numbers or dates appear, but the old (previous) date/number is still there also. If you go through several contacts, the date and contact number will become a black bar as the different characters fill in the spaces between characters. This turned out to be particular to a specific Theme – Rose Garden – and probably had something to do with the font used for the date. Changing Theme solved this problem. On the other hand, the Missing Sync continued to work seamlessly with my Sony/Palm PDA, so data syncing between the handheld and desktop was not affected by the update to Leopard. Thanks, Markspace.
A few of the interface changes make sense, such as moving the Firewall options to the Security System Preference instead of Sharing, but they removed the ability to enable or block specific ports in the process. The Network System Preference has a much improved interface.
Leopard has crippled my older G4 Tower so two of the 4 hard drives, which are connected to the Logic Board by a Sonnet PCI/IDE controller, are no longer recognized and the 4 port USB 2/PCI card no longer shows anything plugged into it. If I boot from a drive running Tiger, though, they work fine, so there is some change in Leopard that is disabling those PCI cards.
Downloads now go by default into a Downloads folder in your user folder which shows up on the dock as a “Stack”. You can still have Safari download to the desktop if you prefer by selecting the desktop as your preferred download folder in the Safari (or other browser) Prefs if, like me, you find working with the Stacks annoying.
There is a serious issue with Leopard arbitrarily changing the permissions of the Administrator to a Standard user, effectively preventing the user from doing anything requiring a password . There is no easy fix for this since the (now) Standard user does not have permission to change His/Her User back to Administrator status. The work around is to boot from the Leopard installer DVD and under the Utilities Menu, choose Change Password. In the Change Password utility, change the Root User password (even though there is no Root User). Quit the Change Password utility and restart. You will now be presented with a login screen, even if you had Automatic Login set as your preference. Type Root into the User Name field, and your newly set password into the Password field, and log in. Open the System Preferences from the Apple Menu and click on Accounts. Select (highlight) your account and put a check in the Allow user to administer this computer checkbox. Quit System Preferences, log out from the Apple Menu, and log in as your own user. All should now work normally unless, of course, Leopard decides to lock you out again at a later date. In which case, just repeat the procedure. So far, I have seen this happen twice to an individual computer or user, but I have seen the problem 3 times now on different computers.
PDA’s: Blackberry, Sony, and Palm. No problems to report. They all seem to sync OK in Leopard. I did run into an odd little problem on a 24 inch Intel iMac, though, where a Blackberry would appear to sync but didn’t actually transfer the data. I eventually solved it by plugging it into a different USB port. A little USB VooDoo there.
To sum up my experiences to date, it’s a mixed bag as usual with major system updates. I had very similar experiences with Panther and Tiger, both of which had major problems with their first few versions until around the .3 or .4 upgrade & bugfix. I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of problems with various peripherals other than PCI cards in G4 and G5 tower computers. I would say that the average home user, especially if they are mainly using Apple apps or MS Office, probably won’t encounter any serious problems. But I would not be in a hurry to install Leopard (or any major system update like Vista) on a production machine that needs to work the next day. You are much more likely to encounter problems with high-end page layout, video, and graphic programs than with the iApps that came with your Mac. For those professional users, I would give the usual advice: wait until Apple works out the bugs before you upgrade. As the operation manual for my old Seagull outboard motor put it, try out your new motor on a calm, sunny day in a sheltered cove; not in an overloaded dingy catching the last of the tide in half a gale.
Terry
Aral,
I was the chap who came up to you after the Brighton event – I’ve had the same issue with Keynote this morning! I’ve been using Keynote since version 1.0 and the apple remote on my macbook pro for 15 months. At least once per hour Keynote jumps to a ‘random’ slide when i’ve asked it to advance one slide.
Anyway – great to meet you on Saturday – I’ll keep in touch.
Best wishes
Stephen Pollard
@Terry: Wow, that’s got to be the longest comment I’ve read :) Thanks for the informative, in-depth review!
@Stephen: Thanks, man, and apologies for forgetting your name. I’ve updated the post :)
[...] hmm, my quibbles are pretty small compared with this guy’s – who had a dire upgrade and whose Keynote (equivalent to PowerPoint, only nicer) leapt unprompted [...]
[...] and of glitch-ridden applications. In fact, previous public advocates of the Mac have taken to apologising to their audience in advance when doing presentations due to the high risk of a problem occurring during a [...]
Leopard is rock-solid on my Intel iMac. Very pleased with the stability and performance. Spaces rocks!
Absolutely no problems, 4 installs. Intel as well as PPC. But then, I never experience the problems that people seem to have. Same with my iPhone, no problems – no hacks. Sometimes when I read the problems that others have, I almost feel that I am leading a sheltered life, free from all of the hassles that seem to plague others. Yea!
Hi Aral,
Just wondering if you’ve got Application Enhancer installed? I’ve heard that it can cause random problems with Leopard…
I’ve had one helluva rough ride with Leopard, and my internet connection. I use an Airport Express, and between a G5 and MBP have random regular connection drops. The Apple forums revealed I’m not alone it this. The community suggested fixes have helped at times but not for long. Ive considered downgrading to Tiger as well. Other than this there are a few broken Finder actions in Leopard such as renaming files. I put my dock on the left of the screen so dont even enjoy the shiny 3d dock. Oh well, as a programmer I should know not to make the leap so early…
oops I meant Finder actions in Automator.
Yes, I also had those Keynote problems. Today, I even had some crazy thing happening that when I typed something in Coda that it switched Spaces. In combination with the keyboard freezes this is really annoying!!! Leopard is driving me insane.
I like your write up on Leopard and the reader comments. Here is my Leopard story, “Apple’s number one product of all time”. (My opinion only.)
Last night, I finally had enough of dealing with Apple’s Leopard operating system and removed it from the iMac. After nearly a month of finding Apple’s Leopard’s undocumented features and wasting so much time, I pulled the plug on Leopard and de-evolved back to Tiger.
It all started when I decided to create a color profile for my LCD display, printer and scanner. Before starting the color calibration process, I went and down loaded (just hours before) the latest OEM Leopard drivers for both units. Then restarted the iMac just to be sure everything was loaded properly. Being in a rush, I assumed they would work and did not test either device. While running a color calibration/profile program , I discovered that I was unable to get the Canon i9900 printer to create a color test print. Neither was I able to get the Epson 2450 scanner to work.
This latest Leopard screw up was the last straw for me.
I pulled out a copy of Tiger on an external drive with all the applications, and user files, and was able to download off the web the latest disk copy program. I also backed up all the photos and itunes music files on two separate external drives.
Like awakening from a nightmare. The iMac has Tiger installed on it once again and it is working like a charm. In hindsight, I never realized how good Tiger is until I took a wild ride on Leopard.
To date, Apple’s Leopard OSX is the most trouble some operating system to install and it never worked 100% compared to Tiger. I never got it to completely work with any third party hardware. For me, Leopard is so troublesome that it surpassed any of the Windows operating system installations I have done in the past by a long shot, including Vista. Which makes Leopard number one, congraduations Apple!
A group of us at my office early-adopted Leopard, partly because we had faith that it would be stable and partly because we really, really could use the latest Java build.
Oh boy. Tremendous mistake. Not only has it been wildly unstable, but we look like idiots for taking the risk.
The scary thing is that everyone has completely different issues. So different that I honestly wonder if Apple can fix them in any reasonable time-frame. The Flash IDE is essentially broken on my neighbors computer, but fine on mine. Eclipse crashes roughly every 2 hours for me but is stable next door. Web serving is pretty screwed up for just about everyone. Email keeps forgetting my password. Every time I reboot the finder says it’s having trouble shutting down (pure Windows bug there!). Honestly, it’s just a total wreck.
Ready for the punch line? Apple pulled the Java update on the day before launch. So all this and we didn’t even get what we wanted out of Leopard.
For the first time in a long time I find myself eyeing the XP machine that I (still) use serve Java and think… I’ll bet Eclipse runs fine over there.
My Macbook Pro appeared to not detect the hard drive when I performed my install, but when I put my ear close to the machine I could hear the drive being accessed, so I let the machine sit. I walked away and came back 30 – 60 minutes later and there was the drive ready for me to click on. I did not experience this on a mac mini install.
Strange, but after this the install on my laptop went smooth as can be. The mini install was just as smooth too.
Hope this helps someone.
Leopard has been a real headache. Probably some of the developers from Vista were hired by Apple. I’m seriously debating on going back to Tiger. Purchased the machine new, was supposed to come pre-installed with Leopard…but ended up with an install disc. Upgraded. My apps would not work. Glazed the HD – fresh install, fresh install of all aps – 2 days at least.
Permission problems with CS3. Frequent crashes. Loss of keyboard. Very frustrating. APPLE FIX THE PROBLEM – this is not like you at all!
I just upgraded to Leopard from Tiger and instantly i started running into problems. First one being that the keyboard stopped working after my comp went to screen saver and came back. Then my photo booth doesnt work any more and the webcam is inverted on ichat. I called apple, they told me to achieve and reinstall leopard (which i did) and got no improvements. As if yet, i m wondering if I should go back to Tiger (i was a lot happier there). This was my first mac i bought (mac mini) because I was sick and tired of constantly reformatting my pc because of viruses or crashes (running with vista). As for now, I hope apple fixes the keyboard problem because it is getting very annoying to reboot or unplug and replug the keyboard every time I come back from screen saver mode.
As long as I can remember I have been telling people why I work on a Mac. It just works! Apple has defined simplicity and function, so what happened? Are they too busy making the next latest and greatest gadgets and detracting from it’s famous operating system.
I work in Photoshop every day, It is 100% of my business. I am running a Mac Pro tower, 6gb ram, two internal dedicated scratch disks. Before upgrading to leopard my system and Photoshop was smokin fast. After upgrading to Leopard everything came to a grinding halt. First my permissions went off the charts asking me for passwords, seems like every time I open something. It took 2 reinstalls and one erase and install just to log in and get the computer running. It then took 5hrs to reinstall all my software and stuff.
Now! let’s talk about performance. I am now forced to save files in Photoshop CS3 Extend every 5min or so, as it will constantly freeze within 15-20 min. Saving files under 500mb is pretty quick but files over 1.5gb and up is actually slower then it was before I upgraded. For some reason I haven’t figured out, Adobe Acrobat will not run. I have tried every trick I know and every suggestion posted on Adobe forms, including reinstalling CS3 twice. Just to make sure I wasn’t going out of my mind I upgraded my macbook pro to Leopard. Permissions were fine but Photoshop had the same issues, within the first 15 min of working on something, the spinning wheel of death. I have already downgraded that back to tiger.
I have lost 2 full days of billable hours dealing with this so I will be downgrading my tower back to tiger.
best of luck to anyone else sharing in Leopard issues
May everyone involved in Leopard burn in Hell. Worst month of my life, thank God for Tiger. Jesus, even Vista sucks less than this POS
I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve been using OS X since Jaguar…upgraded to Panther with no problems…upgraded to Tiger with no problems…upgraded to Leopard, and it has been a nightmare…
Random freezes
Kernel panics galore
Being spontaneously dumped back to the login screen
Safari crashing if I sneeze too hard
Leopard is without a doubt the biggest, stinkiest turd Apple has ever dumped on the world, and it’s making me rethink my decision to own a Mac. Of course Vista is just as turdy as Leopard is. Maybe I should just run Linux. *sigh*
I’ve also had nothing but problems. I have upgraded 3 macs to Leopard : 2 MacBooks and a G5 iMac. None of them are working well. Applications crash. Lots of little bugs all over. Safari crashes. iPhoto crashes. It is a real bugfest. My theory/fear : success leads to arrogance, arrogance leads to failure. Too many people at Apple are either working on iPhones or spending their stock option gains. They are loosing their edge. With luck they will clean up Leopard — but this is not a mess than one service pack will fix. I would love to downgrade, but don’t know how. If anyone has a link, that would be great. (And don’t you just love those Apple adds about how people are downgrading to XP? C’mon Apple…)
I installed Leopard yesterday in hope of catching whatever new things came out of the Keynote today. Two installs, a lost day, and too many system crashes to count, I’m starting to wonder if that was the right idea.
I can’t do anything with my external hard drives. They go inactive and the entire machine ends up freezing. I have to manually reboot if I want to get anything done, and between waking up and typing this, I may have already done it three times. I’ve lost some files in this, only to recover them and realize that I’m going to have to spend hours renaming them. Keynote is a mess, the whole damn thing keeps freezing up.
I’ve been with you since 7.0, Apple. Never once have I had to downgrade. I may have to do that with Leopard. Make it stable, please.
Let me start off by saying I’m just an average user, not a “power user”.
I sympathize with all of those having troubles.
I “upgraded” to Leopard from Panther on my PPC G4 power book. What can I say? Buyer beware. Due diligence.
Had I taken the time to research a bit, I would have found that easily 1/2 of the application versions that I am running are not supported by this new os.
I reverted back to Panther, backed up to a bootable external drive, and did a clean install of Leopard.
It is running ok. I have to say though the “300″ new features… well, not so much.
Time Machine for instance. I hear people raving about this feature but, as a general user, I only want to back up maybe 10 folders – I gave up going through each folder/subfolder/subfolder choosing which NOT to backup – too much of my time wasted.
Others such as iChat and it’s many background effects and multiple chats are Intel specific. PPC users are told they don’t have enough CPU power, irrelevant even to dual processor users.
Apparently, Apple has decided to kick those of us still running Power PC processors to the curb. Which I suppose is to be expected. Maybe not this quickly, but expected none the less.
Why Leopard cannot be backward compatible with the old OS’ is a mystery to me.
Why are “legacy” systems now obsolete?
This is of course a rhetorical question as it is clearly a “bottom line” issue.. Everyone makes money on the new upgrade – Apple, Lexmark, HP, Digidesign to name a few.
I have to buy a new printer, (driver not supported), I have to buy the upgrades to all of my programs, (current versions are not supported), etc…
No, I’m not complaining. Simply stating the fact.
And sadly it does all come back to Buyer Beware.
I love my Mac and have no intention of leaving but I am telling anyone who is thinking of upgrading to Leopard to do their due diligence. It is a shame to have to boot from an earlier version just to get my work done.
Thanks.
My Configuration: Adobe CS3 on Leopard / G5-1.8mhz Tower,3GB RAM… Machine freezes intermittently, often when I am engaged in a critical project in CS3. I am unable to revert to Tiger, as CS3 will not run work within that environment. The machine never froze in Tiger, and I very seldom ran Disk Utility.
So, it looks like I am going to have to put up with Leopard’s instability until the Apple software team releases a patch. I hope they can figure out a solution soon, as I am getting tired of rebooting. I run disk utility once a week, and that seems to help. But I did it yesterday, and my machine has crashed three times within the last 24 hours. I send the data via the dialog box to Apple when I reboot.
Don’t know about other folk but I have experienced numerous problems with printer sharing over Leopard and it appears there is no fix. Specifically my HP Laserjet 1022 printer attached to my iMac (now running Leopard) “disappears” from printer sharing on the network — now *everytime* I have to print a document from the network computers (e.g. my MacBook) I have to reinstall the printer. This previously worked fine under Tiger. Even worse — a search on Apple website just gives the advice of “reAdd your printer” if it gets lost. Very disappointing — the whole attraction of Macs is that they work seamlessly — Leopard has too many problems on this front in my opinion and Apple is being very closed lipped about them.
Hi all,
I don’t have anything new to add, just more weight to Aral’s original post. Sure, the advice about avoiding .0 release versions is undoubtedly sound, but as several posters have pointed out, Mac releases since the birth of X (and indeed before, although the rules were different) have typically been very solid, and certainly usable with no major trauma, from the .0 release on. This has certainly been my experience. What’s more, my update to Leopard (10.5.0) went fine. I had heard about the APE problem, and did everything necessary to ensure a smooth install. Leopard worked great for me for a couple of months. Then things started to go south… I got the Keynote spontaneous reboot issue, and the jumping to the last slide deal. I thought the latter was just me being clumsy with the remote… maybe not. The reboot thing is infuriating, and having updated to 10.5.2 last night, today Keynote caused a reboot five times on me in the space of as many hours… It seems to be WORSE now after the latest update… Or perhaps it’s just a gneral deterioration, but in any case, 10.5.2 did not resolve the issue.
Sometime after the 10.5.1 update, I suddenly lost my shares from the sidebar, and my ability to connect to my older machines (a G4 tower, also running Leopard, an iBook on Tiger, and a MiniMac also on Tiger) is now really random (sometimes they appear, sometimes they don’t, sometimes I have screen sharing, other times not. Sometimes the available options work, but mostly connection is impossible, and having tried, the share icons vanish again…)
I also have the printing problems that Carl mentioned…
In short, I can’t *trust* my OS, and I find myself wasting more time trying to get things happening than actually being productive. And this has never happened to me before. I have been using Macs for as long as they have been in existence. I have used (and early-adopted) every OS that has been released to the general public. Sure, I’m getting older, maybe a little less patient (?) but the Leopard is taking big bleeding bites out of what was a very healthy relationship between me and my Mac.
I will tolerate these vagaries until 10.5.3, at which point — if nothing improves — I’ll either downgrade to Tiger, or else switch to Linux…
Sad but true.
We had discussions and got information also from Apple already back when they released the “64-bit G5″ Powermac that never was fully supported as 64-bit system. We then started to systematically evaluate price, performance, software stability and availability and slowly move business over to PC. Already in 2002, it seemed quite apparent to us, that the type of supportive technical dedication that we expected was not to be expected from Apple any longer.
However, people with clear dedication still exist :-) So we now run 60% of our stuff on Linux, 30% on Windows Vista, 20% on Windows XP and some 10% on Mac OS X – mainly on old machines that we are not likely to replace, and, mainly for tasks we may as well complete on any other machine.
Just a quick note — I recently downloaded the rather large patch to take Leopard to 10.5.2 This seems to have fixed the printer sharing bug. However ‘Shared Drives’ and drive mapping still has all the issues mentioned above. Highly frustrating particularly in the light of the fact that the *value proposition* of the Mac and this OS is seemlessness and no time spent fixing these kind of technical and frustrating issues.
I’ve got some serious problems on my end. I initially, believed it was Leopard, then I thought it was RAM, now I’m back to the Leopard theory. Running tiger, my 2 gigahertz intel duo was running flawlessly. After upgrading to Leopard, I experienced a lot of freezing, and hard-rebooting. I eventually concluded that the 2nd RAM chip had coincidentally gone bad after upgrading, and perhaps a more resource intensive Leopard just made this obvious. Weeks after pulling that RAM chip out, I’m experiencing freezing again. Ughh.. At this point, I’m ready to pick up a new macbook, though If I restore my system from the Time Machine, and experience the same issue, I’ll probably just throw my macs out the window. Really not sure what to do at this point.. Anyone have an idea what I should do? Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Phil
10.5.2 has absolutely ruined my machine, GarageBand, Logic and ProTools, all not working, I can get ProTools to work, without ReWire and Logic without Core Audio, useful. I had no problems with 10.5 though…
Aral,
I just read your article and really appreciated it. Having work with Windows for over 18 years, beta tested the early Windows NT 3.1…, I switched to Mac OS X 10.2, just for the fun of playing with FreeBSD on a laptop, and loved it. For me working with Windows or Mac is almost the same thing except Mac is, or was, more reliable.
I finally moved to 10.5 because when my Powerbook crashed with a hardware failure I bought a new MacBook Pro with Leopard pre-installed (Apple is definitely familiar with built in obsolescence). Since then I also noticed that I had to reboot my laptop more frequently, Time Machine would be great if it was designed to be a true backup system, with NAS support, scheduler etc… and I am now afraid to print on my printer that is shared by my Windows station as since the last OS X update, it randomly freeze the launching application on my Mac.
It looks to me that Apple is gently reaching the point where they want to release new OS versions more often, get more profit, with lowering their quality control. Are we seeing the beginning of the end of high quality product at Apple? This remind me the 80s when, after a huge success, Apple was almost killed.
Strange, i’ve had Leopard since february and i’ve not had any problems at all o.o
Since Leopard was installed on my Mac OS X, version 10.5.5, I have been unable to us the two programs I’ve been using for 10-12 years at least. One is Adobe Photoshop, and the other is a desktop publishing program I’ve used for many years, and have lots of files I am no longer able to access. A message comes up for both, “the Classic environment is no longer supported.”
I note several others have indicated they wish to downgrade to Tiger (and one other indicated they would but don’t know HOW) – and I too don’t know how to downgrade and get rid of Leopard. I would appreciate help on this, as I am NOT familiar with this type of thing, and have to do something so I can access old files and adjust photos in Photoshop.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Doris
Tiger has so far been the best Operating system I have ever used.
Leopard is disappointment–to put it mildly. It’s now December 2008–and 10.5.5 still has got keyboard freezes all the time! Often I have only one or two programs running and while I try to do some trivial task (say click on a link or a button), everything completely freezes up to minutes.
i’ve had the same set of problems with leopard through about a dozen installs of every kind – upgrade, archive & install, clean install – across two different machines [G4 PPC and MBP inte], installing from two separate leopard DVDs. we’re now up to version 10,5,6 and leopard is still completely and utterly hopeless. i’ll not list all my probsd here – it would take too long! but check out this thread on the appletalker forum:
http://www.appletalker.net/forum/index.php?req=thread&id=1407
Personally, I’ve yet to experience anything in Leopard that I regard as an improvement. Spaces is too clumsy to be useful (seems to me to work much more intuitively in KDE); Screen Sharing only seems to work Leopard-to-Leopard, which is not useful to me, so VNC client is still a must; usability of the Dock was initially degraded by the syle-over-substance faux-3D presentation, though at this stage, a year into the product lifecycle, it’s possible to get a clearer visual presentation out of it. Menubar and menu transparency seems to me to be a very clear usability degradation, but then I’m a heretic on the current vogue for the Fittishization of UI design and don’t believe in the top-of-screen menubar, either.
I’ve decided I like the new network browsing UI a little better, but not so much that it would bother me in the least to not have it. Haven’t yet checked to see if you can now copy and paste from text in Dashboard widgets; if so, it would be an argument for switching back to Apple’s dashboard from Yahoo’s.
If I ever get Time Machine working, that will be an improvement. But only a minor one, as I have similar (albeit not as easy to use for file recovery) capability via Synk Pro.
For me, Leopard has really just been the cause of (conservatively) about 30 hours of lost time and effort, as the migration (from a Tiger Macbook to a different Leopard Macbook, using Migration assistant) was exceedingly painful.
Re. Tiger v. Panther….
I switched PC to Mac at Panther. It crashed like crazy. I was using Win2K at the time, and by that time it was rock-solid: I think I may have had one actual system crash in the two years before switching. Panther crashed on me at least once a week on my Mini.
But it was very hardware-specific: on my Powerbook, it never crashed at all. Go figger. I’ve heard similar things from others: That Panther was very hardware-sensitive.
After Tiger, I did experience a few of what appeared to be software-related system crashed. But until the past year or so, it wasn’t a regular thing. (But that’s another story.)
So from my perspective, Tiger was (initially) a huge stability upgrade.
Later, I had a recurring problem with the system freezing on wake from hibernation. Not sure whether to blame Tiger or the firmware for that, but it never happened on my Mini or my Powerbook, just on my Macbook Pro.
never never never upgrade to a new major version of an Apple operating system until at least a x.3 revision (aka 10.5.3). There isn’t anything special specifically with the revision 3, its just usually several months after launch. My standard is to wait until at least 10.x.5.
You can consider this policy conservative and paranoid, but the opposite is tempestuous and irresponsible. Just pick a revision, and consider that your personal “launch” date. Let your excitement build around that.