Is Leopard worth it?

think it is worth it.

As mentioned, Time Machine is a must have.

There were a lot of changes made to the OS, check them out at the Apple site and decide for yourself.

50 people saying "Yes" is not going to help you if you decide you don't like it

P

I agree with pretty much everything you've said here, and it's nice to see a balanced opinion.

Some things that just downright piss me off about Leopard are the memory usage. It's silly. I find my 1GB Mac Mini being dragged down to a grinding, pinwheeling, metal-grating halt, just after running safari, a VM, and a few other apps. Now I see why Apple very niftily upgraded their machines to 2GB default, because they KNOW that 1GB isn't cutting it. I'm gonna double my RAM very soon given how cheap it is.

Some apps on Leopard I *have* to force quit when I want to leave them. 9/10 times I have to force quit Safari or it just will.not.close. Firefox is horrendous on Macs, a big disappointment. Like you said about Coverflow file view: Utter junk. Useless. Way to slow down file browsing and actually take longer to find programs, files, etc.

Stacks is awesome. I have my dock on the right hand side, and so that automatically means stacks are in grid form, rather than 'a stack'. I have my applications folder split into 4 categories, and each app correspondingly organised. I have no apps in the dock, just the finder, my application folders and a few others - and I can find and use things extremely well. It's a good method of dealing with data, I'd say.

Expose is cool, I like it. I use it productively as well.... I don't just use it to impress people! The thing I use mostly though is spaces. I love that feature so much, as well as, like you, using that powertoy for Windows. Because of the effective ness of spaces and expose, I very rarely minimize everything, and this is where Mac OS X shines as a true multitasking OS.

Finally, Time Machine is awesome too. The only thing it doesn't back up on my system is my VMware VM's, but thats probably for the better because they are large and I can just back them up myself.

So in closing, I think the improvements in Leopard are worth it. the only offputting thing is RAM usage, and from experience I will now reccommend anyone wanting to use Leopard to have a bare minimum of 1GB of RAM, highly preferred 2 GB and upwards.

I seem to have come across some wireless issues under Leopard that I didn't have under Tiger.

My CrudBook Pros have always had hopeless wireless, but it was just a case of inadequate range. My CBP's are still on Tiger, but the Pros are on Leopard and so is the Air - and I experience regular dropouts on wireless. With the Pros it's not an issue as they're connected to wired networks normally, but I got them on wireless to see if the behaviour was same as the Air, on which the issue is giving me major issues - and they managed to reproduce the problem. So it seems to be it's more of an OS issue than a hardware problem.

I have an Intel iMac that was shipped with 10.4.11 and a Leopard upgrade disk.

I fired it up and configured everything. I have a wired network but also have an Airport Base Station, one of the 802.11b originals.
The new iMac, on 10.4.11, picked up the base station and indicated 4 solid black bars in the menubar.

A week later, still with 4 solid blacks, I ran the upgrade disk to Leopard.

Now I only have 3 solid black bars on the wireless indicator in the menu bar. At first I thought it was a quirk with my machine, but I have upgraded 3 more machines for other people and exactly the same happened.

Nothing changed in the hardware, but after the upgrade the signal strength was degraded.

Then I wondered if the problem was with the older Airport and the new wireless boards not liking 802.11b. Don't know about that one as I do not have a "G" or "N" station to test it on, yet.

I also wondered if it was a driver issue in Leopard and this one is starting to hold water. My iPhone, from the same place and the same base station, will sometimes get a strong signal but most times it is low.
BTW, the Base station is in the same room, 10ft, from the computers.

P

...I'm not sure whether to lay at Leopard's door, as it doesn't occur with every Leopard machine I have. But the newest 3.2 octocore Pros for example have a fairly regular tendency to hang on reboot, or for apps to stop responding on frequently slept systems. Since the afflicted Pros don't really have a common software fitout apart from Office (which doesn't hang my other systems - well, not at shutdown at least) I can only suspect the OS/drivers/hardware.

Mind you, while we are talking about Tiger vs Leopard, speaking in terms of my other platforms the Macs are generally the least reliable of each class of machine I have and I've never really managed to pin down on many occasions whether a particular peccadillo is a combination of OS, drivers, hardware, etc.

For me I got my Mac at Leopard 10.5.1.

I had quite the annoying set of problems initially! First off I ran the update mgr. Saw a few updates, and one of them was the 10.5.1 update. So I did the update and the machine went to shut down, but the update process would hang. I CMD+Q out of it back the login screen and tried mulitple times - still hanging. Apparently I was not the only one experiencing these troubles. I downloaded the 10.5.1 update manually and applied it, and wa-la, it worked.

After that I tried installing Parallels to run Windows. But ho, that produced a Kernel Panic. My Mac wasn't even a day old and already I'd crashed it. Way to start out! (Later I uninstalled the software and used VMware fusion which was fine).

Although a lot of my problems were sorted, the system was still not very stable for me. I'd have to restart every few days because apps would not launch, or would cause problems. Finally with the 10.5.2 update stability was given to us and so were a lot of features people wanted. For instance I much prefer having my menu bar white, instead of transparent. Before 10.5.2 that was not possible, except for a complicated terminal 'hack'. Also, the time machine icon is now in the menu bar which for me is gold. It animates when time machine is backing up and creates a central place to manage and enter time machine.

Considering how young Leopard is, I think it's already a very good system. it's a hog of memory compared to Tiger, and when I get one too many apps running, the OS sure as hell begins to slow a bit. But overall it's very good, spaces and expose I can't live without. There are plenty of errors in expose and spaces, particularly spaces kindly deciding it will switch away from your task, whenever another application grabs focus. That one royally pisses me off, and when you use VMware fusion's unity mode I've actually had spaces flip back and forth 20+ times before deciding which space it was actually going to settle in. But, like I said, we're only at 10.5.2 and the OS is around 6 months old. They built it on Tiger's amazing Kernel and the core image, core video and all those other core libraries are now complete. Leopard is set to be a brilliant OS and I've got every confidence that as it gets more mature it will just get better and better.

... that Vista didn't get the same reception with a similar number of core OS issues at release, despite being far more of a departure from XP than Tiger is from Leopard.

Perhaps it just goes to show that a pretty face goes a long way with those who don't really know what they're doing, eh?

tho I have no need to either. It is a massive departure from XP and yes you're right, Leopard is much less of a difference from Tiger. If anything Tiger was more of a difference from Panther what with the new Kernel improvements on locking and such.

Beware though; there are many many people on the internet and even on this here forum that will argue till their blue in the face, the same junk Apple themselves cite really: It's more secure, It just works, and for the people of lower intelligence, it's just 'better' than Windows.

Now, I use my Mac and I like using it but I will always admit that for the masses Windows is a better system, and far better on security. The 'it has no viruses' argument doesn't fly for Mac because the market share isn't feasible enough to facilitate hardcore virus writing. A phrase I once heard was something along the lines of 'a clever marketing tactic Apple used to ensure their system would be virtually virus free was to price their systems so high that less than 10% of the world would use it' and boy is that true.

Anyway, I digress.

That sounds ridiculous to me. In the general picture here, Macs are not cheap, but aren't too expensive either. I wouldn't mind paying less for one, but that's not the point. My point is, competing computers customized with similar specifications end up being around the same price range. I saw somewhere that the Dell XPS One was a few hundred dollars more than the 2.4Ghz iMac (20-inch) with lower, base specs. If Macs are so expensive to the point where most people avoid purchasing them, then that doesn't explain why they would go buy the alternatives. Look at Alienware, Dell XPS systems, higher-end HP computers, etc. From my view, there's not much to base this claim on.

Windows probably is more secure, but not by much, considering the fact that Windows still has more access to inner files and the like, while OS X does not. That, and you usually have to install security features and stuff... I think you understand where I'm going with that. Anyway, OS X would be a good target, but we mustn't forget that it has pretty good security too. And, Apple tends to find the exploits themselves and keeps them quiet for the most part, reducing a few risks ever so slightly. "For the masses"... I disagree. It depends on what each person needs, and OS X is much easier to use in my opinion. It's only hard to adjust from Windows once you switch. That said, Windows is far better for gaming because of DirectX, where OS X is lacking. In the future, Apple may decide to improve the system for gaming since they already have graphics in the bag, but who knows.

You could make the argument that Leopard was just a new look for Tiger, but the improvements like Time Machine and all the small things add up. Vista is horrible in comparison when you compare it to XP. Vista has better security, but there's no point to it if you can't use it (I've heard this from friends who are Windows users). Leopard has a few helpful improvements and I really don't see any huge disappointments. I use an Intel Mac, and since Leopard was scripted to run better on the Intel architecture, I end up getting better performance. Though honestly, I can't compare it as well to Vista since I do not use it. Trust me, I'm not one who's citing junk .

-BMF

simply by unhiding them and giving the machine your administrator password when asked, which essentially gives complete root access to that process (it may even give the entire user root access which is a bit of a blunder, but whatever) for the task to be done.

In turn, Windows File Protection will stop important files being deleted on the Windows side...

I too think OS X is easier to use and I've come to prefer the interface over Windows... needless to say I'll always love my Windows XP.

I'm in a rush so I'll reply to your other post here too. The spaces problem doesn't occur whenever VMware is not running, but there are other issues. If I open an application and then 'space out' as I like to call it, and the app takes focus, it can appear on the screen in front of all the spaces until you space in and then out again, it appears correctly.

The simple issue with security is that when it is done through obscurity it can often blow things out of proportion. I don't really know a great deal about the whole situation and no-one really does until you wake up and Apple has the market share of Windows.

Anyway... in rush gotta go.

sorry i didnt respond in a while. I decided i will buy it for my bday in may.

I uploaded it to Youtube for you guys.

Watch how spaces goes crazy over VMware fusion's UNITY mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A782ICytXoE

it happened actually while i was posting the previous response, and I couldn't get it to stop. I actually had to press Escape and F5 (my spaces button) a few times.

Like the comment on the video says, it could be that VMWare and Spaces do not like each other...

Either that, or Leopard + a virtual machine is too much for the Mini. I doubt that, but I'm just saying. That's a lot to be running on it considering it has less power and memory than the rest of the Mac family. But really, that's probably a small part of the problem, if it is one. That is odd, isn't it? Does Disk Utility help any, or report anything out of the ordinary?

-BMF

are fine on the Mini. Hell, my only limit is RAM, and I still do pretty well on the 1GB. When I had 1.25GB of RAM on my laptop, which only had a VIA 1500MHz processor, I could run 2 or 3VMs side by side.

The error I think is just one that spaces and VMware's Unity do not like each other, or that a delay in processing may have caused the glitch. The Mini's are pretty powerful computers though.