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Leopard as the New Vista?
ninja_assault_kitten writes "There's an interesting rant from Oliver Rist up on the PC Magazine site. He compares the catastrophe that is Vista to the recently released OS X Leopard. While clearly one is a lion and the other a cub, there do appear to be some frustrating similarities. From the article: 'A month of using Leopard with the same software I had under Tiger and the OS has dumped six times. That's six cold reboots for Oliver. Apple isn't even honest enough to admit that Leopard is crashing: The OS just grays out my desktop and pops up a dialog box telling me I've got to reboot. Like the whole thing is my fault. I even snapped a picture of it. After all, I HAD PLENTY OF CHANCES!'"
Apple and Microsoft display the same pattern - their products resembles beta for the first few months, and only become mature after a few years. Happened with the iPod, and all successful versions of Windows.
I never upgrade until the widespread opinion is the product is mature...
Upgraded from Tiger - in place upgrade.
Not a single crash.
Upgraded to 10.5.1 - still all good.
But I'm just one guy - and come to think of it - so is this guy.
While yeah, there are a ton of Apple fans out there that can take a bit too much pride in their machines, the fact is that this is somewhat unusual.
I've seen tons of mac laptops with cosmetic damage, but it's pretty rare that the operating system on a new mac is unreliable.
If this report represents a widespread issue, that's significant. And partly because macs are supposed to work without any problems. And frankly, there's no excuse for them not to. It's like that Halo 3 and the XBOX 360 lawsuit... it's all Microsoft, so there's no excuse for failure.
With my thinkpad, there are parts from several vendors interoperating and dealing with windows and ubuntu and even my playstation when I stream movies on TVersity.
With a mac, it's all Apple, all the time, so the operating system programmer has far less work to do... at least in my mind. Apple has a very interesting business model that ought to be reliable and usually is, so I think this incident somewhat shows why apple fans are so cocky (I'll stick with my thinkpad).
I see. Because you had a computer running the very same operating system that this guy was running, and your computer didn't crash, then you know that there's something wrong with him personally, or he's lying, if he said his computer did crash.
When I upgrade to Leopard, if it doesn't crash, then I'll know this guy is a loser, because us 1337 Slashdot users know that there couldn't be any differences in the hardware or software or use that could cause one computer to crash and another to be stable when they're both running the same operating system.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
In my experience nearly everybody who complains about Leopard being unstable is running some sort of unsanity app (or the logitech drivers). Nobody else really has a problem.
As for the rest of his article, it seems pretty bullshit to me.
Vista Similarity #1: He claims that it's unstable. Most people disagree, a small but extremely vocal group agrees.
Vista Similarity #2: He whines about graphics overload, but then references things that work on even ancient low-end Macs with shitty graphic cards, and claims that everybody is showing them off. I don't think they are.
Vista Similarity #3: He tries to draw equivalence between putting basic network settings three menus deep and Apple deciding that if the dock is on the bottom, that it should have a subtle reflection. Then he complains Apple's new "Cover Flow" is good enough for him, and thus Quick Look was unnecessary. Perhaps he could try not using it, then. To each their own, y'know.
Vista Similarity #4: He claims that Leopard drops packets and loses connections. I have a bunch of Leopard machines on both wired and wireless networks and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true. He also claims that SMB shares come and go. Again, I'm on networks with SMB shares and have seen absolutely no evidence that this is true.
Vista Similarity #5: He tries to claim that time machine is awful, because it does file-level, not block-level incrementals, it doesn't work on network shares by default, and it defaults to backing up the whole system. Time Machine could use improvement, but it's useful and it will get a *lot* of people backing up their machines for the first time in forever.
Honestly, #5 is the only complaint that has any air of authenticity to me (I've had similar complaints), but it's not like it's a horrific detriment.
There are two options here:
Option 1) This is Ziff-Davis MSFT flamebait.
Option 2) The author of the piece is an idiotic fuck who screwed up his install.
My money is on Both.
Okay, so to address your points in order:
* Yes, Leopard *is* more than a point upgrade. It's a major upgrade. Don't get caught up on the numbering... there are BIG changes under the hood between 10.4 and 10.5. As there were between 10.4 and 10.3. A "point" upgrade is 10.4.3 to 10.4.4. I don't have any crashes with Spotlight but I haven't installed FC Studio 6 yet. Even if I did, I couldn't give it a fair shake as I'm not a video editor.
* The GUI for the Firewall is totally different than it was in Tiger. And it's really confusing. What's goofy is the Firewall GUI in Leopard is for the *application* firewall, which is completely new, and which does some stuff based on application signatures. It has no control whatsoever on the ports-based firewall, IPFW. IPFW still actually exists and be configured using ipfw rules if you're so inclined (it's straightforward, but non-trivial for those who aren't command-line fans and who don't want to learn about ports, port state, in/out, and UDP versus TCP). This change is very poorly documented. IMO you should leave the firewall GUI off for now.
* Disk Utilitiy can and does repair permissions. There are a couple applications and things it's not fixing right now, but this is a very small percentage (probably 0.5%) of things. And it's really not much to worry about. The silly thing is that Mac users have come to see "Repair Permissions" as a magic bullet and it's really not. It doesn't fix all that many things, but this is a case of religion (or voodoo).
* Java isn't screwed, but true you're limited to Java 5 (er, 1.5) for now. How many things do you do which are actually Java 6 only commands? Most apps I use still use 1.3 and *maybe* 1.4.
Sure, there are bugs. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's 10.5.1. These things take some time, as the betas are tested by tens of thousands, and the GMs are used by millions (soon enough, tens of millions). They'll get fixed, but if you aren't prepared for a couple inconveniences it's ill advised to upgrade to an OS in the first few days or even weeks of its release. It's called "the bleeding edge" for a reason.
Also perhaps you didn't install 10.4.0. It had similar issues.
I don't know about Tiger (haven't upgraded yet) but the recent Quicktime 7.3 update is a pile of crap.
I'm not a power user, and I really just use Quicktime for porn, but it definitely took a major step backwards in this release: the select/copy/paste functionality has been removed from most movie types. Also the A/V controls (brightness, contrast) no longer work on many formats. These were things that _worked_ in 7.2 and have been _disabled_ in 7.3. I don't know what they're trying to do, but it seems like they're trying to make Quicktime completely useless. Those little features were the only reason I used Quicktime at all (instead of VLC, for example).
Poking around online to try and find a downgrade path, I found that a lot of Final Cut users were totally screwed by this update as well. And the downgrade path is to reinstall the OS from scratch and selectively update around Quicktime 7.3.
Meh... Apple is doing a lot of things right. And they're doing a lot of things wrong. I'd like to see them understand which is which, and hold on to the right things and work on improving the wrong things. Is that really too much to ask?
Bugs and such I understand, but who the hell thinks it's a good idea to disable existing functionality?
Cheers.
This guy needs to post his kernel panic log. I'm curious to see what's causing so many panic events.
All operating systems crash.
Let me repeat: ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS CRASH
It all depends on what you're doing.
Got a fresh install of Windows ME that you only use to play spider solitaire, and that isn't connected to the internet?
Crash free.
Got a not so fresh install of Linux / BSD / Solaris where root has done something really stupid?
Crash prone (and possibly unrecoverable if it's REALLY stupid).
Anything in between is going to be based on what you're doing.
Install the wrong drivers / kernel modules / other software that accesses hardware and you'll make any operating system crash prone.
And since you have many Linux boxen and an crash-free windows box, it's safe to assume you're a power user.
So, you don't count!
You probably know what you're doing, and don't do anything stupid.
The real test is how often does an inexperienced user's computer crash? And, if we gave the author of this article a PC with Windows on it, would it eventually crash more or less? And, since other people don't seem to have this problem, what is causing the crashes (he might be blaming Apple for the work of a bad board for example).
One thing I'll say for Windows users - if you say you have a problem, someone will always pop up and say "Yeah, me too, and this is how to fix it."
Linux geeks still tend too much to attack the newcomer, or shout "Read the friggin' man pages!" Still as a community they are maturing and learning to help people rather than flame them.
Make a complaint about an Apple product though and you run headlong into a wall of denial a mile high, with everyone either claiming that your problem does not exist, that you're an idiot when you point out some of the more bizarre UI choices Apple makes, or most frighteningly, arguing that any deficiency, no matter how severe, is somehow actually a wonderful feature.
I think that Apple users are doing themselves a disservice by not holding Apple to a higher standard. By pretending that hardware or software issues don't exist, and by attempting to shut down those who raise legitimate complaints, they allow Apple far too much latitude to do the same.
This will of course be modded as troll or flamebait by the first fanboy who reads it.
Three Squirrels
"Many of the author's points dont make any sense in comparison to MS and Vista. SP1 isn't due out (as of now) till Q1 2008... OSX's update is already out... don't see the similarity. "
.0.1 updates.
Um, you do realize that Microsoft has been releasing Vista fixes for months now via Windows Update, right? Fixes don't have to come as SPs or
But you're right, I don't see the similarity either. Vista has to work probably 3 orders of magnitude more configurations than OSX does, yet Leopard is still very buggy, even with 10.5.1, BTW.
And make no mistake: The author's complaints are not an isolated case.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/update-leopard-problems-apple,review-1028.html
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/11/14/ive-been-attacked-by-a-leopard/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/caught-in-apple-restart-hell/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/17/the-brand-promise-of-apple/
http://www.digg.com/apple/MacBook_MacBook_Pro_owners_suffer_keyboard_freezing_with_Leopard
And check out the Apple discussion forums (though Apple has seen fit to lock many of the threads that complain about Leopard's problems, so check out MacinTouch and AppleInsider.com forums too).
Apple's "Vista is crap" ad campaign and using BSOD icons for Windows network shares in Leopard makes this all the more embarrassing for Apple. And comedian Baratunde Thurston has publicly called out Apple on its unjustified smugness (even before Leopard was released).
Baratunde Thurston: I Hate the Smugness of Apple
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Privacy - people scream at the idea of google reading their mail just to give them ads. What happens when they're storing all of their documents, photos, music, videos on someone else's server? I wouldn't be willing to do it. Nothing would convince me that employees of the company housing my data wouldn't be able to just go in there and check it out whenever they pleased. I believe Facebook is a classic example of this. Private profiles aren't private if you're an employee.
Power - I recently spoiled myself with a OC'd 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, two 150GB Raptors in RAID 0, two 640MB 8800GTSs and a 64 bit OS to make sure I'm taking advantage of my RAM. Games look beautiful on this beast. You'd have to have a heckuva server and a ridiculous internet connection to provide both me and other people (I say other people, because if I'm the only one using it, why is there a server / thin client set-up?) the same gaming experience I can get from my machine on my own. Not every piece of software will happily work using the thin client model. There are other examples, but games are the first thing that came to mind.
Security - This is the trust issue all over again. The "paris hilton cell phone" hack comes to mind. Her phone wasn't hacked, the server that housed some of the data that she stored on her phone was hacked. Aaaand naked pictures of her ended up everywhere and every poor sucker that knew her got called until they switched numbers. That was just crap from a phone - not the entire contents of someones computer. Everyone thinks it's funny when it happens to a celebrity but how would it be if your intimate videos ended up on the net for co-workers to watch? Personal letters? Photos? Angry rants about your current boss? The list goes on... The fact is I don't think any system will ever by "hack proof" but my little box under my desk is a much smaller target than say a server housing thousands or even millions of other people's data.
I'm not trying to crap on your parade, it just seems like ever since the .com boom people have been saying it more and more and I just don't see it as being a good idea.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
As it is now I jumped the gun on ordering and I upgraded a bunch of clients to 10.5
Remind me to never come to you for any sort of consulting. This is just plain negligent.
This guy's the limit!
My personal preference, and it is a strong one, is that I will not touch console games... when I have used them, I have found the controller to be difficult to understand, slow to respond, lacking in fine-control, and in all other ways lacking. In addition, I get dramatically better resolution on my monitor than on my TV, and I happen to enjoy it more.
In other words... not every person thinks that an xbox or PS3 is a viable solution.
Woah... trusting web app employees is VERY different than trusting desktop app employees. There's a huge difference between trusting someone not to look at MY data housed on THEIR servers than there is to trust that someone didn't write some kind of back door code that allows them to see the contents of my hard drive. Firewall, virus protection, and various other monitoring tools all give me the ability to know exactly what's happening on my computer. I don't have that on their servers. I can't see if someone is trying to look at my files on their machines.
Additionally, any desktop company releasing a piece of software like that (Sony rootkit anyone!?) would immediately get slammed by the public. The evidence would be right in the code - you can't hide from that. That's much different than an employee at some data center casually browsing through everyone's files. Good luck proving they did it and good luck getting the company to admit it even if they know that they did it.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
I have three machines running Leopard and I haven't experienced any panics. Chances are good that one of the following is true:
In either case, if the article's author wants to get the panics fixed, the best thing he/she can do is to post the panic logs so that people can scrutinize it and tell him/her what is wrong. Instead, he posted a rant, which tells me he is more interested in making Apple look bad than in fixing his issues. *sigh*
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