Leopard and new Mac apps are bumming me out

Let me preface this post with the fact that I have been a sworn Mac user since 1995. Let me add that a few weeks ago I tried to use Windows just for my trip to Japan, and I bailed out after one painful day. I even had our IT guy kill a perfectly good Thinkpad with Ubuntu I hated Vista so much.

When Leopard came out a few weeks ago (it was a Friday) I went to the Apple store in San Francisco to buy it immediately but got spiked until the 6 p.m. grand reveal. So, the next day I went downtown first thing and picked up both Leopard and the new iLife. Easy enough.

I expected a few bumps in the upgrade of the OS and the applications. Sure enough, that happened but it was nothing major.

It has only been after a few weeks of usage that I find myself experiencing both OS and application crashes reminiscent of the mid-'90s when you had to obsessively save your work since you knew your Mac was going to crash at some point. I was bred into a "save early, save often" Mac culture at my first job in NYC where people would occasionally lose hours worth of work.

That was then, this is now. Or so I thought.

With the arrival of OS X much of this crash-y behavior stopped dead. Not only was the new interface a pleasure to use, but the OS was also rock solid. And the applications themselves seemed to crash far less.

Enter Leopard, and I now have at least one Apple brand application crash every few hours. It seems to be primarily Mail.app and iCal, which offer some must-have features for business users--for example, Todo's and Notes--that can sync across multiple computers, Blackberrys, etc. The applications are great, except when your computer keeps crashing and your calendar gets corrupted. I also find myself restarting multiple times a day when the OS slows to a crawl.

On Sunday, I learned the "calendar cache" lesson wherein my calendar simply wouldn't update even after I blew it away and restored from the backup.

And on Monday, I learned the hard way that Garage Band is highly unstable. After a few hours of just being on GB, it starts to slow down and crashes repeatedly until I reboot. Maybe it's because I loaded the Remix DVD (another $100 out the window), but the application is almost unusable and I lost my musical masterpiece.

All that said, I will still tell everyone in the world that they should use the Mac OS instead of Windows. My Mac issues don't even come to close to the screwiness and nightmare that Windows can be (and usually is).

I just wish that Apple would focus a bit more on computers instead of iPods so that the truly devoted can stay that way.