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OS X Leopard Ships On October 26th

David in AZ writes "According to the Apple website, Mac OS X Leopard will start shipping on October 26! From their blurb: 'Packed with more than 300 new features, Mac OS X Leopard goes on sale Friday, October 26, at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, Apple announced today. And, beginning today, customers can place pre-orders on Apple's online store. "Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we've ever released," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129.""

18 of 762 comments (clear)

  1. Macbooks by BiggerIsBetter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does this mean that Macs sold after this date come with Leopard pre-installed as well?

    --
    Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
  2. Interesting by Thyamine · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I find it interesting (and funny?) that all these years I've had a PC (built myself, not from Dell or such) and never once purchased a copy of Windows or felt bad about it. Now that I've had a Macbook Pro for 5 months, and have been so happy with it, I'm eagerly awaiting Leopard so that I can actually buy it.

    I'm trying to avoid the whole fanboy thing, but it's hard to not like it. I mean, the pricing of the hardware is certainly high, but once you dive it it's quite nice.

    --
    I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
    1. Re:Interesting by greed · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not sure what those coupons are for; I've never been able to use them to get an upgrade.

      I think they're for if you buy a new Mac and the new OS comes out a week later.

      Heck, remember when System updates were free? Take a stack of floppies to your local Apple store (before the Apple Store, of course), and copy their reference system. No worries about authorization: it could only run on a Mac, and all Macs came with System something....

  3. Damn, "Time Machine" sounds cool... by nweaver · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html

    Automatically hourly incremental backups to an external disk, with everything done readable in the filesystem as simlinks so you can look at arbitrarily hour-snapshots for the past day, day snapshots for the past month, and weekly snapshots thereafter.

    COOL!

    --
    Test your net with Netalyzr
    1. Re:Damn, "Time Machine" sounds cool... by 1110110001 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The big difference is fsevent, which is also used by spotlight. Syncing 100.000 or more files with rsync can take some time, because you always have to traverse the whole tree on source and destination. Time Machine already knows what's changed.

  4. Wikipedia built in... by Vokkyt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the Dictionary Section:

    "Wikipedia in Dictionary

    Harness the power of Wikipedia when you're connected to the Internet -- built right into it's Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results."

    From the Parental Controls:

    "Wikipedia Content Filter

    Limit access to profanity in Wikipedia."

    Huh...interesting.

  5. Re:The Vista bashing is starting to get old.... by stuntpope · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's just competition, doesn't annoy me. Fairly standard practice for a company to say, "unlike the competition, our product does this", especially when you are not the market leader. Market leaders are assumed to be the best, so competitors have to knock them down a notch and challenge the assumptions. Look at Ford's recent ads. Guy pulls up at night next to a competing product, and starts going over all the ways the Ford is better than the other car. Mazda has an ad where a Toyota owner is ridiculed for going the "normal" route of buying a Corolla, instead of the "more feature-full" Mazda. Hey, I managed to get a car analogy in here!

    And "The Steve's" point is spot-on. With Apple, you don't have to decide between levels of product like you do with Windows. Home Basic? Home Premium? Ultimate? Apple is saying they designed an OS with lots of new features, and you get all those features if you buy the product. Simple as that.

  6. New Systems or just OS upgrades? by failedlogic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I follow some of the Apple 'rumor' sites. Curiously there are no known updates on the Mac Pro and the Mac Book Pro seems to be rumored for an upgrade in the Winter. Apple seems to be weaning off the Mac Mini (as I hear the Mini has had poor sales). It seems new hardware will have Leopard included but will not be upgraded.

    Consider most iMac users will *require* an enclosure if they want to use Time Machine as it will only work with an add-on drive and not on the system disk.

    This leaves me to ask, will we see a go-between on the Mac Pro and the iMac? I'd really love to see a lower cost tower than the Mac Pro. Expandable hard drive bays, upgradable video card and an extra DVD drive in the same case would be most welcome. My iMac G5 is in need of replacement and the footprint of the system when I account for the external DVD and dual-HDD enclosure doesn't make it seem as worthwhile for space saving.

  7. First untied x86 version? by bre_dnd · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Something else that is interesting about this is that it will be the first untied x86 version -- you can actually buy a x86 version of MacOS without buying Mac hardware to run it on.

  8. Re:The student edition is now $47 more by Helios1182 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Price discrimination is how the economy works. You try and get as many people as much as possible, then get those that didn't buy it at the original price to buy it for less, so on and so forth. That is why they release a $29 hardcover book, then a $15 paper back, and then a $10 reprint.

  9. Re:language distortion field? by martinX · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I looked (being of a suspicious nature), and you are right. WTF is "Holisticly provide access to ethical communities vis-a-vis client-focused. "

    I suspect someone put in some filler text that someone else forgot to take out...

    Especially since "Holisticly" is the wrong spelling.

    --
    When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
  10. Re:The student edition is now $47 more by Crizp · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'll bite.

    My "shitbox" (new iMac 20") has 4 GB RAM and a Radeon HD2600 Pro. Fine, it's likely underclocked, but I can still run relatively recent games in OK resolutions. It's certainly better than the x1650 I had a few weeks ago.

    I don't care if I can't run Biowhatever, I'm not a GAMER with need for dual 8800's. Most of us are not. As long as IL2 Sturmovik runs alright, I'm happy :)

  11. Re:The student edition is now $47 more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    You can use rsync. I can use rsync. My sister probably can't (and definitely won't) use rsync. She can use Time Machine, though.

    OSX has made *nix operating systems usable by non-computer experts, and that's something that Linux has yet to do (sorry Ubuntu fans).


    The fact of the matter is that there wasn't a fully working incremental backup solution for OS X and HFS+ until Time Machine. That is pretty sad considering how OS X has been missing this considering how long its been out (6 or 7 years). The original AC said this:

    Oh really? Please tell me what feature of Linux comes even close to Time Machine? No rush...I'll wait.

    For all other UNIXes and Linux, incremental backup has been available, but OS X is so pathetically late to the game. If the AC wanted to actually make a point, he should have said "show me in Linux where automated incremental backup is easy for a non-techie to use." There are GUI's to do rsync backups, I haven't personal used any, so I couldn't comment on it.

    Time Machine integration with apps sounds pretty cool.

    In any case, rsync combined with other UNIX/Linux apps/utilities, is quite close to Time Machine and actually is more powerful than Time Machine in many ways (more fine-grained control of the schedule, tunneling over SSH, using a different UNIX OS as your backup server, etc).

    We can talk about how OS X is much more user friendly and is easy for a non-techie to use, but that's accepted as a given and I wouldn't argue that.

  12. Re:The student edition is now $47 more by rattler14 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's a suggestion...

    Find 4 friends, buy a family pack. 4 of my friends at school are doing the same. Thus, $40 apiece.

    yeah yeah yeah.. we're not "family", but we live on the same damn floor, so whatever. My department eventually gets a license and I get it for free 2-3 months later. But I'm happy to pay 40 for it right away.

    --
    my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
  13. ...and they seem to have their own exchange rates by gunne · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Using google currency converter:

    129 USD In SEK:
    129 U.S. dollars = 828.979584 Swedish kronor

    and the list price for apple store sweden:
    1.195,00

    hmm
    1195 SEK in USD:
    1 195 Swedish kronor = 185.957535 U.S. dollars

    So thats a 56$ premium. I don't think so.

    Congrats, apple. You just won a pirated copy of Leopard!

  14. Re:Translucency is so overrated by Bertie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'll tell you a good one. With Beryl, you can set windows to become progressively more transparent the longer you've gone without interacting with them. So the one you're using is solid, the one before is a bit transparent, the one before that is a bit more transparent, and so on. What this means is that as stuff gets less relevant, it literally fades into the background, so that your screen looks less cluttered and it's easier to concentrate on what's important right now.

    Sounds a bit gimmicky, but I think it's really handy.

  15. What happend to the "Step Back" command in Xcode? by neutralstone · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It wasn't advertized for long, but the archive managed to catch one of Apple's first pages about Xcode 3.0, which mentions this nifty feature:

    Step back

    Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Drat! If stepping through code wears you down, you'll love more forgiving debugger in Xcode 3.0. If you step too far, you can rewind to the previous point. That's right, Xcode 3.0 has gone non-linear. Simply click the run button to update your application and start it up. Hover over a variable in your code to see its value in a tooltip. Then just pause when you need to debug. If you go too far, just rewind. No need to start over. No need to set up a debug session. No need to switch focus. Just code, build, run, and debug in Xcode 3.0. What ever happened to it? Hopefully it will be included in some not-too-distant-future version.
  16. How about the Java 6 Version? by puppetluva · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't want the ultimate version, I'd just like the late-2006 JDK 6 version.

    You know, the "I wish I didn't regret buying a mac for Java development version". The one on the shelf next to the "Boy I'm glad I didn't donate my old Linux thinkpad since its all I have for Java 6 development" version.

    My mac is great -- unfortunately I don't get to turn it on much these days.

    Same old story. . .
    1) Apple starts doing great
    2) Profit!!!
    3) Apple gets really egotistical and forgets that other developers exist. (And thinks that archaic languages like Pascal and Objective-C are the only games in town. While coming up with some platforms external developers can't code at _all_ for like the iPhone, early Newton, etc.)
    4) ???
    5) Struggle for a few years and almost die!
    6) Repeat

    I wish they'd "Think Different" this time. Here's what I would suggest.

    1) Support cross-platform development languages so developers could choose their platform (think Java) above others.
    2) Support cross-platform standards for documents like Oasis/open-office formats instead of the egotistical AppleWorks, ClarisWorks, Pages hubris. That way they don't almost die when Microsoft decides not to upgrade Microsoft Office for 8 years or so.
    3) Support developers that develop for their devices instead of handcuffing them with bogus languages on their main platform (languages that no-one knows or cares to know in the general industry) or worse, disable them from writing real apps like on the iPhone.
    4) Make laptops that don't burn the users' genitals.
    5) Be less secretive about things that aren't new features and don't need to be secrets. (Like APIs, and platform development - like JDK development).
    6) Listen to the users even _after_ they get popular. It seems they score huge points with users after creating stuff the users want, then they completely ignore them for years until it is too late.

    I like Apple, I don't care for the Red Sox. I want Apple to stop playing like the Red Sox.