Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Apple, Leopard
Leopard review rodeo
We've talked so much about Leopard already here at TUAW that I'd find it hard to believe you readers haven't decided yet whether you're ready to pick it up (or not), but just in case, here's a few concise reviews from around the 'net to let you know whether this is something you want or not.- PC Mag gives the OS a whopping 4.5 out of 5: "Leopard performs all such tasks even better than previous versions did-and Leopard is the only OS on the planet that works effortlessly and intuitively in today's world of networked computers and peripherals. Leopard is far from perfect, but it's better than any alternative, and it's getting harder and harder to find good reasons to use anything else."
- Laptop Magazine isn't quite as harsh on the glitches, but also give it 4.5/5: "Part useful, part flash, all beautifully easy: Apple's Mac OS X 10 Leopard bounded into stores Friday, thrilling the Mac faithful with a solid and extremely useful upgrade."
- CNET gives Leopard an 8.0 out of 10, saying that while Leopard is nice, it might not be necessary: "Should you pay for Leopard? If you're happy with the way Tiger works, then maybe not. If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard. And if you're considering the purchase of a new computer, Leopard makes Macs more enticing than Tiger did."
- And Macworld says that while you might not use everything, the stuff you will use is worth it: "Given the impressive value of Time Machine and improvements to existing programs such as iCal, iChat, Mail, and the Finder, most active Mac users will find more than enough reasons to consider that upgrade cost money well spent. Despite a few interface missteps, particularly when it comes the menu bar and the Dock, Leopard is an upgrade that roars."
Thanks to everyone who sent these in!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Moose said 8:33PM on 10-30-2007
Is it actually accurate to say, "If you need Bootcamp, however, then you must have Leopard."? I know they won't support the beta any more, but aside from patches and upgrades, why MUST I have Leopard to use Bootcamp? I've never had a problem with the beta, and I'm only running XP Home virtually. I might have missed something...
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djscott said 8:34PM on 10-30-2007
"...the best days of Leopard are still yet to come."
I'd be happy with 10.5.1...
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Tom said 8:34PM on 10-30-2007
I imagine this is going to be a painfully stupid question, but I've yet to get a straight answer from anyone:
Is it possible to use Mail 3.0 in Tiger?
To be honest I'm fine with Tiger for a while, I'll probably update in a few months but so far all I want is the new Mail. CAN HAS PLZ?
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rena said 8:40PM on 10-30-2007
Leopard,the new Mac OS.I will buy it.I bought iSkysoft DVD to iPod Converter for Mac to hlep me to convert my DVD to my iPod touch.I do not know can it run on the new Mac OS.
http://www.iskysoft.com/dvd-to-ipod-mac.html
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Crash1105 said 8:57PM on 10-30-2007
Get handbrake to rip dvd's its easier and free plus it will use h.264 and is faster and it works with leopard
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jonathan ober said 9:10PM on 10-30-2007
Need the money for the iMac first...but I'll wait til Adobe issues are resolved. I need InDesign and Acrobat to get my work done.
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Drupa said 9:14PM on 10-30-2007
These reviews make me wonder who writes these things and who finances them? I had a failed install on a powerbook which resulted in heavy data loss and an unbootable laptop. My intel Imac went better, but I have now discovered that iChat and iCal didnt update when I did the upgrade. They won't open now. I wish I could say that things are OK with Leopard, but they clearly are not. I haven't tinkered with stuff so much that I would expect a simple upgrade to cause this much chaos. I suppose wipe and install folks are doing better, but I took the 10.0 / 10.1 / 10.2 / 10.3 / 10.4 upgrades and had little trouble (10.0 was a challenge). This one is the hardest to handle. I am very suspicious of all the positive reviews now. How could folks be having such a difficult experience yet the rumor sites hype and praise the OS?
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Jay said 9:44PM on 10-30-2007
I have to second Drupa - where are all these reviews coming from? Out of the 10-15 people I know who upgraded to Leopard over the weekend, at least 8 of them have had serious difficulties, including myself. I personally have gotten the notorious "blue screen" on both my C2B MBP and my PB G4. They took some time to resolve using single user mode. Several applications (about 1/3) of them failed to load, and even Apple's own applications crash after 10 minutes of use. Several libraries were compiled and linked for PPC on my C2D machine, which required a couple hours of fixing.
Also, the majority of advancements in Leopard, are trivial - GUI updates,minor functionality added, etc. I do have to give credit for "Instruments" and the newly added dtrace, which are fantastic. Also XCode is now becoming my favorite IDE. However, the updates to finder and the GUI removed functionality that wasn't as "pretty" in Tiger, but much better (i.e. placing folders in the dock to emulate an applications list; stacks is incapable of doing this, and does not do things like putting most used apps/files/etc first in the "stack"... stacks is almost useless other than for cleaning up your desktop).
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Cransy said 10:02PM on 10-30-2007
Why is there so much complaining in this site. Seriously.
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Ben the Dog said 10:17PM on 10-30-2007
Apart from Time Machine (which refuses to play ball, or plays ball at a snail's pace), Leopard seems really nice so far. Seems to run pretty quickly on my G4 PPC and has some nifty new features. Installation was a breeze and took about 2 hours.
Will be interested to see what comes out with the inevitable first patch.
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Xanthor said 11:29PM on 10-30-2007
Agreed with the above. The complainers here are so funny.
If you expect a 1.0 product to be perfect you are insane. And this isn't a simple app - this is an operating system rewritten from the ground up for two very different architectures.
YES, there will be problems...but if you installed this and never even thought there would be you are crazy as hell.
If you installed this without backing up, why?
That said, I had the blue screen issue and a few random other items but nothing major. It does make me wish Apple had better QA, but to say everything else is horrible, well I see your attention to detail is less then that of a PC user.
Leopard is my favorite Mac upgrade since the big OS X. Bugs and all.
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Quix said 11:43PM on 10-30-2007
Personally, I've found Leopard to be fantastic. Perhaps it's partially due to a clean install, but Safari absolutely BLAZES now. Everything seems zippier, cleaner, slicker, shinier, more enjoyable.
Sure, there are some infuriating quibbles (Apple, is it *really* rocket science to make windows resizable on all sides???), but overall this upgrade was worth every penny and then some.
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Scott ELLIOTT said 12:10AM on 10-31-2007
Don't know if you knew this, just found this out when I was looking for a new Background for Leopard. (I hate the Star Trek default one to bits!)
In the finder, when a file or folder is highlighted you can hit the Space Bar to pop up a Quick View of that file or folder. Hit space bar again to make Quick Look disappear!
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Tom said 12:17AM on 10-31-2007
@7: Heavy data loss, eh? I guess your data wasn't worth a $70 external hard drive, then.
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Dave said 12:20AM on 10-31-2007
No problems with leopard. However I did end up having some issues due to Dot macs sync mantainence. Which trickled down to me having to reset my iPhone. I believe they are updating stuff for leopard. But who knows?
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Mark S said 4:13AM on 10-31-2007
I installed Leopard on my C2D MacBook Pro and iMac G5 and it went without any problems at all (I did a clean install). 10.5 is a really solid OS release. I can't wait to see what the future holds for it. One of my biggest complaints about switching to the Mac from Linux several years ago has been resolved with Spaces. (Oh why Apple did it take you this long!?!)
I do have some minor complaints about the Finder though. I think the omission of the traditional shortcuts to your Music, Movies, and Pictures folders in the sidebar is a huge oversight and a foolish mistake. I'm sure a number of us used those in 10.1-10.4 very frequently. You can choose which folders you want to show up in Leopard's Finder preferences, but sadly those are not options anymore. I had to manually throw them in the sidebar. I really hope Apple changes that in 10.5.1. I also dislike that some folders are disorganized out of the box. You have to choose to organize them by name, kind, etc. I ran into several instances where files were just piled on top of each other when I opened certain folders after making the upgrade. The overall experience has been quite positive for me.
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henrrrik said 5:47AM on 10-31-2007
I think it's great. I did clean installs on both my MacBook and my MacBook Pro and everything has been smooth.
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howardsatinsky said 6:14AM on 10-31-2007
It's true that I haven't seen comments on how much faster this OS is all around than Tiger was. I have been using Macs exclusively since '90. I agree that this is the best upgrade since X.
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Ben said 10:23AM on 10-31-2007
Well, I found funny people who are complaining like hell.
1/ Upgrading an OS on the same machine without a backup : Whaouu, heuuu, let me think about it... No fu**** way !!! All my digital life and work is on my MBP. I can't seriously take that risk. So, I use SuperDuper
2/ Leopard is slow : Sorry but not on my MBP and on my wife's MB. It's a lot more faster, and when I say faster, i say faster. Launching every single app (Apple and not) is faster, Global display is faster. Only CoverFlow in iTunes takes a while to initialize. Mail3 with more than 14000 mails in my mailbox is terribly fast and smooth.
3/ No Improvments, just some GUI touch : I suggest you read this very good (but a little technical) article : http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/1
4/ TimeMachine is ridiculous : Well, I don't know but I can't explain to my wife how to use any other backup software, same thing for my dad. But where TimeMachine is Magic, is that you just have to plug an external hard drive and click ONE button to activate it.
do you read me : JUST ONE BUTTON to activate a full incremental backup system !!
I'm sorry but there's genius in this : simple is beautiful and Apple did a great job on this one.
5/Compatibility with old G4 867Mhz : Do you read this, the most advanced operating system on an old G4 867Mhz and it works... it doesn't rock but it works. (troll and jokes on : Did you try to install Vista on an old Pentium 800Mhz) ... pfff, let's be realistic, computers changes rapidly and we know that. It's hard to tell but I think it's time to go to 64bits architecture folks ;-)
6/ blue screen of death : I made a regular upgrade without any bugs. The only thing I noticed was that my Growl mail notification has been deactivated... but I can live without for the next weeks and Leopard told me during the first launch of Mail3 that it disabled the Growl notification : Thank you and bravo !
So, okay, i've had some bugs (100%cpu with DirectoryService so I had to kill the process, selfclosing Mail (one time)... I don't like Stacks and Webclip doesn't work very well... but on the other hand I've got TimeMachine, Quickview which is fabulous and very usefull and lot lot more improvements
I'm very very happy.
For my part, it's a very good release. If you can wait for the 10.5.1, wait but it's worth the 129€ even with some tiny little bugs ;-)
And as always, make a backup before any upgrade if like me, your life is on your mac.
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Zach Everson said 10:44AM on 10-31-2007
It's ok. The Mail and iCal changes are minor tweaks; I'm not sure if they even enhanced the programs. I like the new look and time machine is fine, although it's not a huge step up over Super Duper. Overall I'd give it a 3 out of 10 for not really being worth the money. There's no "wow" feature like previous had. That being said, there's the potential to make vast improvements with 10.5.x upgrades (like Notes syncing on an iPhone).
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