Leopard Early Adopters Suffer For The Rest of Us

News.com tallies up the minor annoyances early adopters have experienced dealing with the newest version of OS X. From a change in folder design to install issues, and beyond to lack of support for Java 6, Mac users have had more to grumble about than usual in the last week. Just the same, the article notes, there have been no major problems and (compared to other OS launches) Leopard kicked off fairly well. "Let's give thanks to the early adopters, however masochistic they may be. You can do all the QA in the world before releasing an operating system, and it's not going to compare to what happens when the unwashed masses get their hands on the product. Microsoft's Windows Vista had years of developer releases, and was released to manufacturing several weeks before it went on sale to the general public. Still, compatibility problems cropped up because it's extremely difficult to anticipate what people are running, and in what combination. It's easier for Apple because it tightly controls its hardware and software, and because there are fewer potential combinations in the wild, but it's still a Herculean task."

Comments

Early Adoption

[Gricey]

Isn't this always the case? If you jump in first, yes you get your shiny, and you put an end to the wait, but you're gonna have to live with the niggles.

Same with the iPhone, same with Vista, hell, same with Debian testing.

Longer wait = More Stable
GET IT NOW = Put up with some mild issues

M.

Re:Early Adoption

[elrous0]

Not always true. I just want to say that the DVD player that I bought in 1997 is still running strong. I can't say the same for three of the el-cheapo $100 players I bought later.

Re:Early Adoption

[Khuffie]

The only difference is, because it's Apple, people make excuses and say "oh, it's a new OS, it's natural there are bugs." When it's Microsoft, people's reaction is more akin to "M$ sucks! Windoze sucks! Burn it at the stake!". For the record, I installed Vista when it launched (in fact, I ran the beta exclusively the last few months), and didn't have any major problems aside from an incompatible codec that was fixed before the launch. I'm waiting to get my hands on Leopard to install on my MacBook (which blasphemously is running Vista almost exclusively, I still can't get used to a lack of taskbar) and see how things go.

Re:Early Adoption

[corvair2k1]

Anyone who's used Apple products for any length of time knows that the 1.0 release is going to be quite shaky. Remember 10.4.0? Yeesh. The difference between Apple and Microsoft, I think, is that Apple actually fixes it, and fixes it somewhat quickly.

Re:Early Adoption

[toQDuj]

The difference is that at Microsoft, they had 7 years to fix the bugs. At Apple, they had 2.5 years.

Re:Early Adoption

[somersault]

And just where is Microsoft today that Apple hasn't been first, in real OS terms? Have you ever used an Apple? Did you try an Apple in the late 80s, and then try Windows 3.1 and go.. ewww..? Probably not..

Re:Early Adoption

[Just Some Guy]

What I have a problem with is when it's Microsoft, everyone is up in arms about how M$ sucks, and when it's Apple everyone's like "it's okay. it's a 1.0 release. they'll fix it."

That's because there's a wide historical gap in what kind of bugs are there and how they're fixed. MS has long been criticized for basic design flaws that may or may not be fixed when a service pack rolls out a year or so later. Apple tends to have bugs along the lines of "Mail.app's spam filter gives false negatives in this corner case because we accidentally used an int instead of a float in this function", and most of them are usually fixed when a service pack rolls out a few weeks later.

Re:Early Adoption

[Sparks23]

There's often a lot of unwarranted blind "ZOMG Microsoft is evil!" or blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone, but in this case I think the earlier posters were saying they're less concerned about issues in Leopard because they expect a 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 fairly quickly after release based on user-reported issues, where they have no such assurance of any significant Vista improvements until Vista SP1.

This isn't an 'Apple is better, Microsoft is evil,' I think, more just an observation that Microsoft will roll all their significant (non-security) updates to an operating system into one or two big updates more widely-spaced, while Apple has a history of making a lot of little point-release updates over the course of an operating system's life.

One method isn't necessarily 'better' or 'worse' (Tiger could be a headache-inducing moving target for a programmer at times, with developers surrendering and arbitrarily going 'This will only run on 10.4.3 or higher,' or 'this will only run on 10.4.8 or higher' and so on), but I think the gist of the comment is that early adopting with Apple is slightly less of a risk since there's a higher likelihood of point-releases to address issues quickly after release.

Re:Early Adoption

[Stamen]

Regarding maximize, I think it has a lot to do with your resolution as well. If you have a high resolution monitor, maximizing often produces a little tiny bit of content with 80% whitespace. When I'm using my laptop disconnected from my monitor, I tend to max out my screens as well, but not with my monitor. OS X's zoom feature (green dot) is designed to make the window just big enough to hold all of its contents, but no more.

Maximize works well in Windows, because you have the taskbar, which if you think about it acts as an upside-down set of tabs. So basically you have 1 large screen of tabs that you flip through with the taskbar. Also Windows (at least XP and below) doesn't highlight the foreground window real well, so if you have a bunch of windows opened and showing, it's really hard to tell which one is the front most window.

Since OS X doesn't have the taskbar, it does a good job of highlighing the z-order of the windows, and it has stuff like Expose, having floating windows, rather than maximized windows, works really well. I always use a desktop manager like Spaces or VirtuaDesktops so I layout my windows and switch "spaces", rather than minimizing.

It's just a different way of approaching the problem.

OS X also uses drag and drop a whole lot more than Windows, so that necessitates having windows next to each other rather than on top of each other. Someone in Windows will always go to the right-click first, and old Mac user will try drag and drop first; which also explains why a right-click wasn't very important to Macs for a long time.

It's interesting to look back at Photoshop, which started out exclusively on the Mac. Older versions were very Mac-like, with many small floating windows. But once they came out with a Windows version and that became the dominant OS for their software, they started to make it more Windows like, without the floating windows. This happened to Macromedia's stuff too.

Re:Early Adoption

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be kidding me, comparing a DVD player to an operating system with millions of line of code and thousands of hardware combinations. I mean honestly, how can you sleep at night?

Re:Early Adoption

[aidan folkes]

There's often a lot of unwarranted blind "ZOMG Microsoft is evil!" or blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone, but in this case I think the earlier posters were saying they're less concerned about issues in Leopard because they expect a 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 fairly quickly after release based on user-reported issues, where they have no such assurance of any significant Vista improvements until Vista SP1.

There has actually been a stream of updates for Vista that fix various issues. I know because I have Windows Update set to ask me every time!

Re:Early Adoption

[Bill_the_Engineer]

On over 90% of desktops?

I remember when over 90% of the home/education was an Apple ][ or clone. So yeah, Apple was there too. ;)

Re:Early Adoption

[shmlco]

Uh, huh. I have about twenty windows running in nine Spaces at the moment. On Windows that taskbar would would filled with marvelous and meaningful entries like:

Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc... Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc... Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc... Mou... Mic... Mic... Sla... Exc...

So much for not getting lost. (And yes, I know I could have a two or three line taskbar, How much screen real-estate do you want to waste?)

Re:Early Adoption

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Actually, I was referring to the very early days of Apple II. The Atari 400/800 (former 800 owner here) actually was a response to the success that Apple was having. The Apple II was introduced in 1977, the Atari 800 was introduced early 1979 and commodore vic 20 was introduced in 1980 and the C64 was introduced in 1982.

So, Apple did in fact own the home computer market once. In fact, the Apple II proved that a home computer market existed and paved the way for both the Atari and Commodore machines..

So my memory is just fine.... thanks for asking.

Re:Early Adoption

[Bert64]

That only works on a very small scale, it completely breaks down when you have a lot of windows open.
Apple are catering to different requirements. Windows users will typically run one or two programs, and divert 100% of their screen space to each program as they're using it, and then close it when they're done. Mac (and unix) users will typically run lots of apps, and leave them running in the background unless they're completely finished with them. If the apps are idle, a decent OS should be able to swap them out anyway if it needs the memory. I very much like spaces on leopard, lack of multiple workspaces was my biggest beef with OSX.

Re:I hope this will end to those obnoxious Mac ads

[ByOhTek]

Since when has inaccuracy stopped them from putting something in one of the Apple ads?

For that matter, it's been a long time since inaccuracy has stopped most ideas from becoming advertisements.

Minor annoyances, eh?

[EveryNickIsTaken]

News.com tallies up the minor annoyances early adopters have experienced dealing with the newest version of OS X. Had this been a windows release, I'm fairly certain that these would have been called "major GUI design flaws" and "critical systems bugs/security issues."

Re:Hasn't Been That Bad

[mattgreen]

Why can't people be more moderate? Because people at this site attach exaggerated importance to the choice of one's operating system when it really doesn't matter. Additionally, extremist viewpoints are rewarded with mod points, so there's little point in being moderate, because you won't get attention. Since there are so many voices, recognition becomes a coveted thing.

That said, intelligence and dogmatism (about technology) usually don't run hand-in-hand. Technology is about solving problems, not getting into pissing matches about your preferred technology. Unfortunately, few people seem to be able to see beyond themselves.

Re:About as good as non free can be.

[morgan_greywolf]

Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless. How, exactly, did you say that with a straight face? Sorry, I've done Debian upgrades, and they're not always that smooth ... just because apt-get dist-ugprade works doesn't mean everything works well after that, especially if you have any customizations, or odd bits of hardware or applications.

Filevault problems

[mikael_j]

I installed Leopard this morning, at first everything seemed to work but then I made the mistake of running software update and then rebooting resulting in Leopard complaining about my Filevault partition being corrupted.

After about an hour of screwing around I had managed to get access to my files by making a .sparseimage file out of the Filevault file, deleting my account and then recreating the account and granting it admin rights, all of this through single-user mode with apple's wonky terminal apps, but hey. At least it works now! :)

I found a pretty big thread about this on Apple's support forums so it seems I'm not the only one with this problem.

/Mikael

Installed for 5 days

[fermion]

Computer does not seem slower, but it does not seem faster. No major problems other than a problem at shutdown. Less that a gig or ram, 1 gig processor. Spaces works pretty fast.

The only GUI issue I have is that it is no longer easy to tell if an application is open from the images on the dock. Perhaps switch back to the old look and feel.

As far as developer problems, and resulting application problems, so of this simply stems from the compromise apple has made. Apple has always treated developers like paid professionals and user like, well, paying customers. This may not be right choice, but it gives users a much better overall system. One implication of this is that the Applications are often not ready as soon as the OS is. OTOH, as any sysadmin knows, one does install a brand new OS on production machines. That is why I am phasing in the installation. I can see what works and what does not, and if the OS is ready. I may or may not install the OS on my main machines for several weeks.

Vista Sucks?

[Zebra_X]

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20071030122926454

This list of problems is almost as staggering as Vistas issues. What's most interesting is that a number *Applications* don't work with Leopard.

At least Microsoft values backward compatibilty. Arguably Vista's internals changed significantly more than Leopard yet MS managed to maintain almost complete backward compatibility with old programs.

I mean, Photoshop 7 doesn't work with Leopard!?

Of course, what little hardware Mac has available is also having issues according to that list.

Better hope your hardware partners update their drivers!

Re:Vista Sucks?

[linuxgurugamer]

Backwards compatibility? Vista? Those two don't belong in the same sentence. Almost every publisher had to modify their apps in order to make it work properly with Vista. Hardware manufacturers had to modify their drivers, and now, over a year after the Vista release, there are still enough problems with Vista that many people are still choosing XP instead of Vista.

I run Vista, XP, and now OS X. I'm waiting for my upgrade to arrive, and don't expect too many problems. I only have Vista because some of my customers have it (against my advice), and those customers tend to have more service calls than the others.

Re:Java complainers

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is very important, but it takes development effort to do a good port, and Apple has been very busy lately. Good job, iApologist.

Microsoft screws Java: they're LAZY and EVIL and BOYCOTT BOYCOTT BOYCOTT.
Apple screws Java: they're very busy.

Two very very stable early MacOS releases

[davidwr]

MacOS releases 1.1 in 1984 and 2.0 in 1985 were extremely stable, considering they had no memory management to speak of and only rudimentary multitasking.

Of course, there was a lot less going on in a typical Mac than most machines today.

If you want stable and secure, run a proven-stable-and-secure OS like OpenBSD and run it as an appliance rather than a general-purpose PC. The fewer things you have going on, the less chance two things will interact badly and cause problems. You can achieve similar stability with most OSes if they are not on a network and only run a small, well-tested set of applications.

Re:About as good as non free can be.

[Blakey Rat]

At the same time, Apple is a reminder that non free will software always depend on the free software world and will always have problems.

Non-free-will software? What is that, software you're forced to use while some jack-booted thug holds a gun to your forehead? I don't think we have any non-free-will software in the US.

More seriously, I have no clue what this is supposed to mean. Non-free software will always depend on free software? Explain DOS, Mac OS Classic, OS/2, Netware, etc. (Actually Netware probably does depend on some free software.)

Upgrades of Debian are always smooth and lossless.

With all apologies to Baghdad Bob:

"I can say, and I am responsible for what I am saying, that they have started to commit suicide [at their keyboards]. We will encourage them to commit more suicides quickly."

Third party drivers.

[pavon]

Agreed. Unfortunately if that poor soul installed Logitech drivers, or other third party software they might have APE installed without even knowing it.

Re:where software comes from

[Blakey Rat]

That's a pretty shaky foundation to say that "all OSes depend on..." equates to "all OSes borrow a couple ideas from..."

I really don't care, I just have to call out BS claims when I see them.