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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."
All of my Leopard update problems stem from 3rd party hardware.
Highpoint apparently will not be updating their drivers for the PCI-X RAID cards and using the Mac OS 10.4 drivers allows for accessing your drives in some sort of freaky read-only state. This caused a cascade of bizarre problems, culminating in my iTunes database and my iPod being corrupted. I suppose this comes from the actual MP3s residing on a read only partition (which claimed to be read write). So I guess I'll be buying a new RAID card soon and you can bet it won't be a highpoint product.
I've got a few other issues but nothing I can point back to Apple and complain about.
My biggest complaint is that I want to buy a new MacPro and they haven't updated them in quite some time.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I waited over the weekend to upgrade my Macbook Pro (first gen 15") to Leopard. And you know what? I'm happy I did it.
I did the upgrade on Monday night after using Carbon Copy Cloner to take a snapshot of my machine. And yes, to Windows folks that was a bootable image; I could reboot to my external USB drive if I wanted and CCC my machine back again... but I didn't have to.
So how did the upgrade process itself go? I inserted the Leopard DVD, clicked the icon to upgrade, waited for the reboot, clicked once and walked away to watch Mythbusters with my kids. By the time I came back upstairs to my laptop, I had a Leopard logon screen.
So I logged on to "survey the damage". You know what? I was impressed. Here are my first impressions:
1. 3rd Party Applications: The Missing Sync is broken. I knew that and expected that since they are notorious for lacking behind Apple updates. No worries, I don't really NEED it... sure it's nice, but it's not a requirement. Parallels worked, but networking was broken. A quick reinstall fixed that. Yahoo Messenger was busted out of the box, but I had Version 3 Beta 1... upgraded to the latest and voila, we're chatting with friends. My ancient copy of Photoshop 7 gave it up for the team. Even a reinstall wouldn't fix it. No problem, I have Aperture as well and rarely use Photoshop any more. Uninstalled, no worries. So out of all my apps, I had one casualty and a few "non-life threatening injuries". That's much better than my Vista experience.
2. Apple Applications: My first launch of Mail resulted in a "database upgrade" follwed by an immediate failure and Mail disappeared without so much as an error message. I launched it again and it's been fine since. I might delete my account and re-sync it... I love IMAP. Address Book and iCal are both greatly improved (as is Mail) and are actually useful tools now instead of toys. I see huge improvements here. Finder is significantly better, and though I do find the "embossed icons" to be a step backward in readability, the general improvements vastly improve the experience. Besides, I have faith this will be fixed either with a patch or a third-party hack. Everything else I've not really played with much.
3. General Usability: Wow. That's all I can say. The improvements over even the latest Tiger release are impressive. Although synthetic benchmarks show a very slight speed decrease on this platform, the general "feel" of the OS is significantly improved. Application launch times, app switching and generally USING the operating system make it feel like the system's actually been significantly improved. It's noticeable, and I have not really noticed any speed decreases at all apart from still seeming slow when I have my XP VM running in Parallels (rarely). At the end of the day, I get the impression that Leopard is faster, even if that's not backed up by the benchmarks. If the operating itself feels better, who cares what the benchmarks say anyway?
4. Other Notes: Wake from sleep is significantly improved. It used to be that I would open the lid of my laptop and I'd end up waiting for up to 15 seconds for a logon prompt. Now, the prompt is there within moments of me opening the lid. This significantly improves usefulness for me. Also, I thought that the "Coverflow" browsing would be a toy I'd bore of quickly. Quite the opposite... I've found it incredibly useful for going through busy and full folders so I can locate documents incredibly quickly. A+ on that feature!
5. The Bad: So far as I said, the only things I'll take issue with are the icons (embossed instead of clear icons) and a few things that I think need a little more work. The Stacks function... yuck. I don't like Stacks... I thought I would find it useful but it's just ugly. Not impressed, but I removed the default Documents and Application stacks from my dock... I'll use Quicksilver TYVM. Also, I've had one "grey curtains" failure (Mac owners know what I'm talking about) just a day after installation, but nothing since. It could well ha