Filed under: Leopard
First major reviews of Leopard hit the streets: NYT, WSJ and USAToday
The big three geekmeisters have been released from their embargoes and the first Leopard newspaper reviews are out tonight. Uncle Walt even favored us with a cheery video rundown that appears to have been filmed in his rumpus room. A brief summary:
- David Pogue from the New York Times: "powerful, polished and carefully conceived." The respected Mac writer gives big points to Time Machine and Quick Look, while skeptically eyeing some lesser additions to the list of 300 (Danish
localizationspell checking comes in for Pogueian scorn). - Edward Baig at USAToday: "Apple's operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically... Leopard is one cool cat." Baig gives a pretty comprehensive rundown on new Leopard features and notes some hiccups with Back to my Mac vs. network firewalls.
- Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal and allthingsd.com: "Evolutionary, not revolutionary... I think it's better than Vista." The headline says it all: Faster, Easier than Vista. Walt took the time to go through scores of features and even do some startup timing tests with a Vaio (the Mac came out well ahead). He also noted a couple of neat features, such as Google Talk support in iChat and instant access to shared folders on Windows machines.
[E]very piece of software and hardware I tried on two Leopard-equipped Macs - a loaned laptop from Apple and my own upgraded iMac - worked fine, exhibiting none of the compatibility problems that continue to plague Vista. My old Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer, for which Vista lacks the proper software, worked instantly in Leopard, even over the network. And, unlike with Vista, it was able to print on both sides of the page. I popped my old Verizon cellphone modem card into the test Leopard laptop and it worked, too, with no software installation or tweaking.
Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
[via twitter/Joe Maller]
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Rafe H. said 11:22PM on 10-24-2007
iChat supports Google Talk in Tiger, too. It's just Jabber. Or does Leopard support voice-over-Google Talk?
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Jon H said 11:42PM on 10-24-2007
Mossberg's story suggests that Time Machine will not, in fact, work with volumes mounted via Airport. He says a network-mounted volume has to be hanging off another Mac that is running Leopard.
That sucks.
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Michael Rose said 11:45PM on 10-24-2007
Jon H --
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html
"You can designate just about any HFS+ formatted FireWire or USB drive connected to a Mac as a Time Machine backup drive. Time Machine can also back up to another Mac running Leopard with Personal File Sharing, Leopard Server, or Xsan storage devices."
As consolation, I'll wager that Airport disks get added in later on via an update.
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ianlive said 11:48PM on 10-24-2007
I am so excited! This is better than Christmas. What a time to be a Mac user.
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MaxPayne said 11:56PM on 10-24-2007
What old man Mossberg forgot to mention while talking about BootCamp is that it't the first non beta release of the program. Which, i hope will fix some issues that all previous BootCamps have including the latest 1.4 beta release :)
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Alan Yeung said 11:55PM on 10-24-2007
Time Machine worked on Airport shared disks in the earlier betas. Apparently that feature was removed just for the final version, probably because it had some unresolved bugs. I'm sure one the bugs are resolved we'll see support for Airport shared disks come down the pipe in a Leopard update.
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Quicknik said 12:43AM on 10-25-2007
Okay, is it just me, or does anyone else feel that Mossberg needs to stick to what he does best? Just because he's a writer for a highly respected, high profile periodical, does NOT mean he can suddenly become a broadcast professional. Um, there's a REASON why people who get in front of a camera are paid so highly. He's diluting his professionalism by feeling that he can use technology to expand into the video domain. Eeek… let the Midwestern soccer moms experiment with their iSight cameras, not YOU Walt!
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Anthony said 1:11AM on 10-25-2007
It's Walt Goatburg! Bahahahahah
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Johnny said 2:44AM on 10-25-2007
Okay, if I hadn't seen that WSJ video, I would have agreed with Mossberg's claim that Leopard is not revolutionary, but DAMN! If you think about it, Leopard IS revolutionary. Just look at Time Machine and CoverFlow. That's pretty friggin nuts. So basically, Walt's statements contradict what he shows on the video!
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Thomas said 3:50AM on 10-25-2007
Anyone know if Time Machine will delete stuff that is already on the drive i plan to use for TM ?
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Morten said 3:24AM on 10-25-2007
Being Danish I find spell-checking to be a great addition :-) So much for cocoAspell....
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Alexander said 4:55AM on 10-25-2007
My order of the Family Pack (Dutch Store) just switched to Prepared for Shipment... Just a short time before we can use it.
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アッシュ said 5:24AM on 10-25-2007
Improved language support for anything (Dutch, Braille...) shouldn't be scoffed at in such a way. Even if it doesn't prove useful to every writing type in New York, there's surely cause for celebration for a good number of people somewhere. If we could get some updates on even the input for Japanese that would be a nice nod this direction.
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tuaw said 5:30AM on 10-25-2007
I got an email saying my copy shipped on 25 October!
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Brian said 6:07AM on 10-25-2007
Looking forward to being a geek at the Apple store in Kingston (Surrey not Jamaica unfortunatly) at 6pm
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jackson said 6:36AM on 10-25-2007
Jon H --
Time Machine doesn't backup to networked drives. You're right, this sucks. There are lots of other annoyances in Leopard, too. Finder doesn't play nicely with Spaces, for example. I assume this sort of stuff will be fixed in an update but it raises the question of just what the hell they've been doing all this time.
Thomas --
Time Machine won't delete the stuff you already have on your drive. It creates a folder called Backups.backupdb and sticks everything in there.
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h4xx0r pl4n3t said 6:51AM on 10-25-2007
Got it bitches and its fckn sweet will def b buying it when all the foroarer dies down ( i luvs da intraweb ) just could't help myself when it showed up on certain websites. I'm looking forward to seeing what garbage dump does for apps in lep when devs migrate to obj-c 2.0 and xtools which i think is the biggest leap with this release never mind all the fancy eye candy.
Superfast OS for old hardware please! FTW
h4xx0r
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tuaw said 7:00AM on 10-25-2007
#17: I'm terribly sorry, old chap, I can't understand a word you're saying...
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mentalsticks said 7:41AM on 10-25-2007
The USA Today page makes my Safari crash... which is a good thing in general, I suppose, but I was rather keen on reading this article.
Also, I agree with アッシュ that support for other languages is nothing to scoff at.
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Matthew said 10:07AM on 10-25-2007
Didn't someone warn WM that he would successfully sucked out all of the energy from Leopard with that video review. I'm not excited anymore (but, admittedly, I was only just a little excited to begin with).
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