Mac Forum / General / General / May 2008

I'm also at 10.4.11 and I will upgrade to Leopard eventually the main
reason would be I'm already seeing upgrades to some of my applications
needing a minimum of 10.5, when this group gets large enough I'll
upgrade.

What kind of kernel changes would actually make a difference?  It's a
different kernel version, sure, but would you actually notice?

As far as I'm concerned, Time Machine is worth the price of Leopard on
its own.  If you see things like Quick Look as "fluff", then you clearly
haven't had the opportunity of using them.  QL is fantastic.

As there have been with every release of and update to Mac OS for nearly
a quarter century. Most people never have a problem, but I've never seen
a release pass with absolutely no-one reporting local problems.

Depends. As I noted above, most people never had a problem. It's not
completely bug free, but then neither is 10.4.11. Most of the worst UI
changes that had a lot of people complaining have been addressed.

Still at 10.5.2. There are rumblings that 10.5.3 is near, but as usual
there's no official announcement.

"Compelling" is a very subjective word. Do you use Spotlight? If you
don't, do you not use it because it's often slow for the searches you
do? Spotlight got a tremendous performance boost in 10.5.

QuickLook is also pretty cool - an extensible mechanism to peek at the
contents of a file without ever leaving Finder.

Some people find Spaces quite useful. I don't, but my wife considers it
indispensable for work.

The e-mail app got some nice new features related to task management.

Parental controls are much better if they apply to you.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/>

There are issues with 10.4 as well - you've just learned to live with or
work around them.  No software is 100% bug-free.

The point is, there are *always* issues with any release. Many, many
people (including myself and just about every Mac user I know at work
and at home) are using Leopard every day. Unless you can think of a
specific thing that doesn;t work that would dramatically affect you,
there's no reason you can't use it as well.

Yes, Leopard is *significantly* different under the hood. It's certainly
not all fluff. Fluff, by the way, is what you get from Apple's marketing
team, because that's what most non-technical Mac users understand most
easily. If you want a more in-depth review of what makes Leopard
different, try reading an article from a more technical source, such as
Ars Technica:

<http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars>

I'm won't dare bother to try listing all of the ways Leopard is better
than Mac OS X 10.4 and previous releases in terms of performance,
robustness, stability, and so on. Suffice it to say, the list would be
very long - Leopard is a big improvement in many ways, across the board.

In my personal experience Leopard 10.5.2 is vastly more stable and
reliable than Tiger 10.4.11. Not that I had any major issues with Tiger
but I did have occasional crashes (Safari, Mail, etc.) that have simply
not reoccurred in Leopard. There seem to be two parallel universes when
it comes to OS X and/or Windows, Linux and the like. In one of the
universes everything just works. This universe is populated by the vast
majority of users. In the other universe nothing works. This universe is
populated by the same people who can't get a toaster to work, the people
who are on their sixth TiVo because the others have all crapped out on
them, the people whose cars are always in the shop, and the people whose
DVD players all skip and jerk when playing a movie. Oh, and their cell
phones always drop calls too.

If you live in my universe, the first one where most people live, then
you'll be fine with Leopard.

If you live in the other universe however...

I'm pretty new to Leopard, never used the earlier OSXs, but I am very
impressed with Leopard. Seems fast and very stable. I accidentally gave it
a stability test a few nights ago. I selected a number (at least 50)  of
executable files I had brought over from my PC, and, instead of deleting
them, I accidentally double-clicked and opened them. When you open a
Windoze exe file on a Mac, you get a little window with some sort of code.
I got a bunch of them! Cascading down my screen, then starting again over
to the right, then again and again. I was waiting for the system to lock,
wouldn't have been surprised or dissappointed if it had. But nothing
happened. I had to close a lot of windows, but nothing happened. With only
1 Gb of memory. I was impressed.
And as for TM, I can honestly say that I've never before, in over 40 years
of working with computers, eagerly awaited the first time I accidentally
lose or delete a file. I am now! :)

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10.5.3 as of a couple of days ago.

earle
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