The Day of the Leopard

I pre-ordered Leopard and did an archival install. It took 1 hour 18 min and went PERFECT. MacBook Pro 17 inch laptop seems to love it.

Yes, I stood in line at Lenox Mall, #148 at 5:30 and I did receive my shirt.

I have a ProCare session this coming week and will learn a lot about Leopard; although I have read the book that came with the software.

Apple’s leopard has dissapointed hundrends, if not thousands of its customers in the very first few hours of its release! Nearly every installation of the new operating system (including my own) results in a “blue screen” that cannot be fixed. Apple support provide no help and do not know how to handle this. This is something expected of windows OS, but not Apple!

ex ped: “Nearly every” is almost certainly an exaggeration and can’t confirm the “hundreds, if not thousands” reported above, but The Register reports similar problems here. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt

I think Philip E-D defended his ‘unlike Vista’ comment pretty authoritatively. For what it’s worth, the only compelling technical reason I’ve heard people cite for moving to Vista is improved security; Vista does provide additional security features (and I’m not counting that annoying pop-up as one of the -useful- security features added to Vista.)

Both Vista and MacOS X.5 up the ante for computer hardware. It would be interesting to look at the relative product cycles; what era machines are now obsolete by the introduction of Vista and MacOS X.5? (I think ability to run on old hardware is a clear win for Linux!)

“The authorized reviews are in and they are broadly positive. Boxes containing OS X 1.5 Leopard”

OS X 1.5???

And all this time I thought it was OS X 10.5.

ex ped: Fixed. Thanks as always for the catch. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Wow, what an unabashed bashing of Microsoft in that line “Unlike Microsoft’s (MSFT) Vista — which was six years in the making — Leopard is expected to be a huge success.” What data backs up such a biased assertion? And I own stock in Apple and like Apple, but that clearly was a non-useful sentence.

ex ped: It’s a matter of public record that Microsoft started work on Vista (originally codenamed “Longhorn”) in 2001, that the five years between Windows XP and the release of Vista represent the longest span between two Windows releases in the history of the operating system, and that it was greeted neither with runaway sales nor rave reviews. This from Wikipedia:

“Windows Vista is the target of a number of negative assessments by various groups. Criticisms of Windows Vista include protracted development time, more restrictive licensing terms, the inclusion of a number of new Digital Rights Management technologies aimed at restricting the copying of protected digital media, lack of device drivers for some hardware, and the usability of other new features such as User Account Control.” (link)

The success of Leopard is by no means assured, of course, but the tenor of the reviews is markedly different from those for Vista and I’ve seen the upgrade described more than once in Apple blogs as a “nobrainer.”

Your mileage, of course, may differ. –Philip Elmer-DeWitt