Apple’s Leopard: The Reviews Are In

If these are mixed reviews, what would a truly great review look like. I see respected writers and tech followers who are virtually unanimous in saying that Leopard is undeniably better than the guy with 90% market share. Nothing lukewarm about these reviews. Perfection–No..Best of the bunch—Absolutely.

How about an update to this reflecting reviews by people who were not in the pre-release world? It would be good to get a wider cross-section (with appropriate “background checks”, i.e. ‘X reviewed MacOS Leopard, X has previously been known as a Windows specialist.”

dave

“ex ped: Sore? Not at all. I’ve been in business of dealing with Apple on “exclusive” pre-releases and am happy to be out of it. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt”

Jim’s Respose: If you had to do any kind of pre-release testing for anyone, you’d be forced to write your own article of the test results. I don’t think you could do it! You are only good at copying and pasting what everyone else wrote.

“Nodack: As Phil’s editor, I will happily answer the question. No, of course not. No employee of Fortune or of this site is allowed to take payments of any kind along the lines that you suggest.”

I’m not suggesting that Phil is taking under the table payments from some third party outside of Fortune/CNN/Time Warner.

I’m suggesting that Phil’s jobat Fortune/CNN/TimeWarner is to write negative articles about Apple and to pass it on as Apple News.

“ex ped: Sore? Not at all. I’ve been in business of dealing with Apple on “exclusive” pre-releases and am happy to be out of it. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt”

As Philip has hinted at, he used to be one of those guys like the ones that wrote the reviews that had to have a positive spin on what they wrote about, but is “happy to be out of it.”

So what do we have with APPLE 2.0? Mac news from outside the reality distortion field. What does that mean? It suggests to me that Philip believes everybody having anything to do with Mac is in a reality distortion field except “news” Philip writes about?

I won’t hide who I am. I am a Mac fan and shareholder, so I am biased towards Apple. I go to CNN to get my news or at least some of it. I go to the Money section and look up Apple (AAPL) and it lists their ticker and under it it lists all of the News related to Apple. Just about every day there is a story from Apple 2.0 about Apple. The average person would click on that link and expect some sort of unbiased news about Apple good or bad.

After reading every single article from Philip in the last year I have come to the conclusion that Philip really doesn’t like Apple at all and he doesn’t hide that fact very well.

Even this article that seems like it is a positive story about Apple with the glowing reviews, but Philip starts off by basically saying “These guys are all paid to write nice things about Apple therefore their reviews are meaningless, but here they are, but I won’t get into it.”

Jim, as Philip’s editor it is your job to make sure he does his job. Do you mind telling me what his job is? If you respond it will probably be to tell me his job is to write news articles about Apple. In my view, 99.9% of his articles have a negative spin on them, so it would appear from the outside that Philip’s job is to write negative things about Apple.

In my view this site isn’t News. It is an Apple blog from somebody that doesn’t like Apple and paid for by Fortune/CNN/Time Warner.

“One could fault Apple (AAPL) for once again handing out advance copies of its new operating system upgrade only to journalists who depend on good relations with Steve Jobs to supplement their income”

I’ll bet you you are not one.
Sore are we?

ex ped: Sore? Not at all. I’ve been in business of dealing with Apple on “exclusive” pre-releases and am happy to be out of it. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Nodack: As Phil’s editor, I will happily answer the question. No, of course not. No employee of Fortune or of this site is allowed to take payments of any kind along the lines that you suggest.

[i]“One could fault Apple (AAPL) for once again handing out advance copies of its new operating system upgrade only to journalists who depend on good relations with Steve Jobs to supplement their income, but let’s skip all that and go straight to the reviews:”[/i]

The only thing you wrote in this whole article Elmer was the preface telling everybody that all of these nice reviews are by people paid by Apple to write nice things or they won’t get paid by Apple somehow making their reviews null and void.

My question to you Elmer is, are you paid to write negative things about Apple or you don’t get paid?

I’ve already asked this question before, I know, but I don’t ever seem to get an answer from you or my post is deleted. A simple yes or know would suffice.

“No, it wouldn’t. Starting with the fact that they don’t have BIOS in firmware, they use EFI”

While that is technicality true. Considering the fact that mac hardware can run windows natively and “PC” hardware can run Mac OS natively it makes them the same in my book. Yes I know you have to tweak Mac OS because you have to get around Apple’s protection that Steve puts in to prevent you from installing Mac OS on non-Mac hardware. That and drivers are the only things that stops you from running Mac OS on a “PC”.

“But Leopard is also more than just an operating system: it comes with a whole bunch of end-user features and applications which you typically don’t have in your typical Windows package.”

That’s because If M$ adds them it’s considered anti-completive.

B) It would be 100% IBM compatible if it still was used today.

No, it wouldn’t. Starting with the fact that they don’t have BIOS in firmware, they use EFI.

Love to upgrade but will it break my ability to use Quicken? Intuit isn’t talking.

PED–regarding the Family Pack of licenses. It exists to offer a discount to honest customers. If it’s wrong to pirate copyrighted music and movies, it’s also wrong to pirate copyrighted software. Unlike Microsoft and music/movie cartels Apple doesn’t use draconian protection measures. Instead, they trust us to pay up. They might lose money on the deal, but on the whole I like this arrangement better.

Leopard is much more than a “system service pack”. The breadth of developer tools and new technologies is really impressive and does qualify as a major system update: 64bits, Objc-2.0, Core Animation, resolution independence, code-signing, Xcode 3.0 with Dtrace and Xray, etc…

But Leopard is also more than just an operating system: it comes with a whole bunch of end-user features and applications which you typically don’t have in your typical Windows package.

One thing I like about all the OS upgrades is that while the media focuses on the big-news features (e.g. Time Machine), every OS upgrade has these little features and conveniences that are so well thought-out.

Apple doesn’t highlight those too much because they come with small learning curves. As I’ve seen with Panther, Tiger, and I expect I will with Leopard, there are the little features that will appear in OS X Hints and other happy articles, that will make my life so much easier.

@ P E-D:

As am in the Entertainment Industry, I can enlighten youas to what “mixed” reviews generally means in film, TV in theater reviews: “mixed reviews” means that reviewers are falling on both sides of the break-even point — some rate the film as more positive than negative, but some rate it as more negative than positive. Mixed. The sample of reviews you give above vary in their enthusiasm, but I think its fair to say that they are all more positive than negative. So as group, they’re probably best described with a term like “generally positive” or even just out-right “positive”. “Rave” is generally reserved for when all reviews are positive, and many reviewers are citing almost no flaws at all.

@ Michigan James:

Don’t be fooled by the fact that Leopard is ostensibly still an “upgrade” from Mac OS 10.4 to 10.5; it contains at least as many new features and improvments as the major Windows upgrades have. Do a side-by-side comparision with the improvements from Win XP - Vista, and Mac OS Tiger - Leopard, and you’ll see what I mean. This is especially true of you compare Vista Home Basic to Leopard. Of course, the higher Versions of Vista have more features, and come closer to the functionality of Mac OS X, but you’ll also pay even more, around $250, for Vista Ultimate. In short, Leopard is not a Microsoft-type “Service Pack” (which are usually more about fixing bugs and plugging security holes.

With half a dozen Macs, what to you do?
6 Single user licenses, or
1 Family license + 1 single user, or
2 Family licenses, or
some other scheme?

ex ped: Good question. I understand Leopard isn’t copy protected, which makes me wonder why anyone would need a family pack? –Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Let’s be clear. I like the Mac, but by definition a Mac is A PC.

A) It’s a personal computer.

B) It would be 100% IBM compatible if it still was used today.

C) Every part is identical to what you can and would buy for a PC.

The only thing that makes it different about what mac fokes call a PC is the OS.

So what is a Mac? A PC with Mac OS.

Thanks for reading, bye.

Read between the lines. These reviews are by Steve’s Jobs personal MacPets. They clearly had some issues that they glossed over. I like Apple, they’ve made me alot of money, but they are not the “Perfect system” that Macer’s claim them to be.

If Microsoft had received this kind of “mixed” reviews when Vista, and its 6 versions, came out, they would have been ecstatic.

um how are these results mixed? It sounds like someone is a jealous pc user. Get over yourself and get a mac already…

ex ped: Not my headline. I thought the reviews were what the film critics call mixed/pos. I’ve already got half a dozen Macs, but can always use another… –Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The first guys is obviously a Mac head. The rest of the reviews seem to be unbiased. I personally have nothing against Mac OS or Vista, however could you imagine the complaining if M$ charged $120 for what essentially is a service pack of features?

Wall Street Journal review, which by no means is biased in favor of Apple, states that Leopard beats Vista. And Leopard is priced at 129$, which is just slightly more than 99$ MS wants for an upgrade to basic Vista.

Being PC user I’m struck by fact that company that has no more than 5-6% of the market can make product cheaper and better than company that has 90%+ market share and seemingly inexhaustible cash supply. If that doesn’t mean abuse of dominant market share then I don’t know what does.

Mr. Jobs, if you ever decide to release Leopard for PC then I’ll buy it.

Umm… Hate to ask a dumb question, but I read most of those reviews. How are they “mixed”? All of them are positive.

I understand you are trying to be “against the grain” or whatever silly spin this blog is supposed to have, but a title like that is just ridiculous.

You made me click though, so I guess you win. What a rip-off…

So why the “(Mixed)” [reviews] qualifier in the links to this article? And attempt to incite controversy in bring in more website hits, perhaps? It seems to me that all the reviews you post range from “good, but not perfect” to “rave”. I certainly wouldn’t call any of the review you cite negative, on the whole.

This is just a no-big-deal release that Apple pushes out every year. It will be a nice to have if you want certain new functions (e.g. time machine), or the new interface will improve your productivity. Go to a Apple Store to try it out first if you can. Some reviewers compared Leopard to Vista. Vista is more like OSX 10.0, when users had to go through the necessary migration pain. OSX interface and ease of use have long left Windows in the dust long long time ago.

Why does the front page of CNNfn say “The (Mixed) Reviews Are In”? The drawbacks cited by the reviewers here are fair, but very minor relative to the advantages. For example, Mossberg’s complaint about the translucent menu bar is a cosmetic issue, almost trivial compared to profound new functionality like Time Machine. This article’s fair, but the the headline doesn’t really reflect the largely positive reviews.