Leopard's roar turns to whimper
- 17 Mar 08, 11:38 GMT
I鈥檝e been using , for the last five months now and was interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences of it, as well as sharing mine.
My overwhelming feeling about the release is one of disappointment, especially compared with the benefits and features that Tiger, the previous iteration, introduced.
So what are the causes of my disgruntlement?
The first is the failure of Leopard to match expectations. I can鈥檛 blame Apple entirely for this, as expectations were my own.
But there鈥檚 no doubting the fact that - and why not, they are a company selling a product after all.
My first expectation was that Leopard would at least match Tiger in terms of ease of use, responsiveness and stability.
But on every machine that I have installed Leopard, the computer is less stable, more prone to crashes, and "hangs", while start-up times are longer, applications feel more sluggish.
The spinning beach ball, representing an application "hanging", is now a close friend, rather than a casual acquaintance.
This is despite bumping up the RAM on each of my machines to 3GB. And it鈥檚 not as if my Macs are old. My iMac is the first of the Intel-powered machines, while my Macbook is just over 12 months old.
To be clear: I鈥檓 not saying my Macs are now crash-prone, glitch boxes. But there is a definite, measurable decline in performance since I installed Leopard.
And I鈥檓 not alone - these problems have been documented on many forums.
However, the latest issue of Macworld magazine reports that 81% of new Mac owners are very satisfied with Leopard.
Some of the key features of Leopard have proved less than useful - Stacks is a gimmick and quickly becomes impractical once a folder has more than a dozen files in it, while improvements to the Finder are still a work in progress.
In some cases Leopard seems to have taken a step backwards.
The new Front Row system has been crippled so that music can no longer be streamed from your Mac to an Airport Express plugged in to a hi-fi.
Why would they do this, unless they wanted to force consumers into buying an Apple TV?
There are also well-documented issues with Leopard and wi-fi networks - from periodic dropouts to problems getting connected at all.
It鈥檚 not all bad however; Quick Look has become adopted into my workflow as a simple way to check files, from video to photos.
And it鈥檚 now simpler and quicker to network your Macs thanks to the visibility of machines in Finder.
Spotlight, the tool to search your indexed hard drives, is more responsive while Time Machine has removed my worry about back-ups.
So am I alone here? Has Leopard been a disappointment?
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Comments
Darren is partly right when saying Leopard is less stable than Tiger. At least my experience confirms it. I bought a Macbook back in Dec 2006 with Tiger installed and used it till January 2008. Never experienced a crash and never had to reinstall the OS. Then I decided to gift the macbook to my brother and buy a new Macbook with Leopard installed. Just two days ago, I had to reinstall the machine as Safari kept on crashing, Skype's chat window was corrupted and reboot and log-in took a long time. And during the installation I discovered that reformatting the hard dish and reinstalling the OS takes a long time, at least 3 hours in my case. But all in all, its 100 times better than Vista installed on my office pc. I wish if I could use a mac in my office too. I agree that 81% people are satisfied with Leopard and I'm part of them.
Completeley agree with your analysis - 10.4.10 was very stable, started up very quickly (and smoothly) and in my view Leopard is slightly less stable and doesn't start up/shut down so well (but still miles better than my XP machine)
Time Machine, however is brilliant.
My first thought on installing Leopard was 'Ohh, shiny' and it is very pretty. There are also some genuine improvements, Terminal is so much better now it finally allows tabs, and Safari is improving all the time (although I use Flock as my main browser, since FireFox was inexplicably rendered unusably slow by the 'upgrade'). Spaces genuinely improves my productivity most of the time (but has some annoying quirks).
However, sluggish does not even begin to cover how unresponsive my machine has become under Leopard. My laptop (admittedly a slightly aging PowerBook, though the last, and best, of that range) now regularly crawls along at a pace even slower than my Vista box, and that's saying something! I have moved my mail and calendars into my Google cloud because the Apple apps (Mail and iCal) seem pale imitations of their former selves.
I feel that 2 years had gone by and Apple still weren't anywhere close to having a production ready OS, but rushed it out the door in the hopes the 'Ohh shiny' response would be the overwhelming one. It is not. And no legions of screaming Apple fanbois should convince you otherwise. At least Apple are in the habit of releasing regular updates to their OS, and I expect things to get better quickly (unlike the unholy abomination that is MS Vista... )
Your comment that
"The spinning beach ball, representing an application "hanging", is now a close friend, rather than a casual acquaintance".
is not entirely accurate, the true function of the spinning beach ball is to indicate to the user that the tasking of the Operating System (OSX), is fully committed to the maximum throughput of the CPU, and there may be a delay in completing the existing CPU cycles, whilst the current tasking saturation, may delay further tasks being pipelined through the CPU.
However my experience with OSX 10.3 (Panther) has been sublime. I've not experienced a single Operating System Crash or "Hang" in Five years of operating two G4 PowerPC eMacs. Which was the main reason to moving to Macs after several difficult years trying to support thousands of readers of a top PC magazine, with the quality-challenged Windows environment.
I have regularly carried out "house-keeping" tasks in OSX, with such utilities as MacJanitor and Drive 10, something you not have chosen to do, and which may explain your less satisfying experience with Leopard.
I have one of the first intel imacs the same machine used by Darren
I joined the digital world last year. The machine was to be a digital hub. I also adopted broadband.
I had previously used a windows 98 PC on which anything is an improvement.
I was recommended the mac os X by a software engineer who simply told me it was better than windows. I took the advice.
I am very happy with Tiger and have used it with my new digital camera and camcorder.
I have so far held off upgrading to Leopard and will do so until the bugs are ironed out. Tiger isn't broken so doesn't need fixing.
I will only upgrade when confident that the problems have cleared up.
You expect issues with a windows upgrade but not from a mac. I am disappointed that Apple seem to have released Leopard too soon.
The support for the list view as found in Tiger was updated about a month ago in 10.5.2.
Please reference. What were the other 19%? "Ecstatic"? "Satisfied"? "Unhappy"?
Yep, similar feeling. My Tiger Macmini coreduo1 with 1GB feels faster than Leopard Macbookpro 2.2GHz 2GB. Somehow keyboard fix that loses first character won't install to my macbookpro and I am still losing characters...
Azareus could be the reason but over couple of days of use memory seems to be full and reboot is needed to get back some responsiveness in system. Closing and reopening apps don't help. Macmini can run weeks without having to reboot to free memory.
One advice to you, though, if you install 3GB to macbook you force system to operate with 64bit memory bus instead of 128bit if you would install similar mem stics (not supported for more than 2GB mem then for macbook) Mem bus will slow some apps down quite a bit.
My experience is that on my macs Leopard has been more stable than Tiger and both are much more stable than my old XP machines.
My biggest disappointment was that leopard offered so little that was novel and useful. I'm not sure it was worth the cost of the upgrade.
Every OS is going to have problems, even the all mighty Apple isnt perfect, did you really think Apple is infallible?
I think the problem with people's perception of whether Leopard is a disappointment or not is that, in truth, there wasn't a lot broken with Tiger. So what was there left to fix?
Finder has always been pretty weak (so much so I've purchased Path Finder as a replacement). Improvements there are welcome.
Time Machine is a fantastic feature and possibly worth the upgrade alone. With the advent of cheap external hard drives there is now no excuse not to back up.
But why does it take so much longer to boot? Good question!
I purchased the refreshed MacBook Pro with Leopard 10.5.2 pre-installed and I could not be happier. Everything works beautifully.
I have dumped Windows for good.
I upgraded my install to Leopard from Tiger and saw (iBook G4) and saw a drop in Xbench readings from around 27 to around 20 and the machine did feel a little unresponsive. I did a full back up and then a clean install of Leopard and the Xbench figures are actually slightly higher than Tiger now at around 30. Generally I am very pleased with the OS with a lot of irritants from Tiger being dealt with. It's sad that Time Machine doesn't officially back up wireless to the a USB drive connected to the Airport - although I can force mine to do it. I have had a couple of hangs but it seems to have settled down now and everything seems to be running smoothly and overall I think the new features are worth the upgrade - even on a lowly G4 iBook !
I had a lot of problems to start with which were entirely my fault. I had copied ALL my Tiger programs to Leopard, without knowing that some would not work without an update, while others were actually harmful.
After several clean installs, and after downloading only programs that said they were ready for Leopard, all is well once more.
A fast, stable operating system that has not failed in any way once I had the proper software.
By the way, this afternoon I installed a version of Fruit Menu that works fine.
I recently purchased an Apple Macbook with Leopard and have been very pleased so far.
Whilst some programs do have a tendancy to crash very occasionally, it is NO WHERE NEAR as bad as the almost constant crashes that happen on Vista (and it was a machine designed for vista!).
I question the new features though, as most seem like a gimmick. I used to have a minimac with Tiger and it was very impressive compared to windows XP. However I feel the only useful new features were time machine, cover flow and boot camp (although I believe it is possible to download this for Tiger seperately).
On the whole I would highly recommend anyone to get an Apple Mac, as they are far superior to windows and the addition of bootcamp takes away any excuse not to upgrade.
However, I think those with Tiger, who are looking to upgrade should evaluate the new features and ask themselves if they really need them. In my experience it is as good as Tiger, but not everyone will require the new features.
Upgraded from Tiger to Leopard a month ago for both my iMac and Macbook and have not been disappointed.
From the cosmetic improvements such as the dock icons, to the functional improvements such as quick look and improved networking (which was appalling under Tiger) I have found Leopard a joy.
Add a time capsule and all my digital worries have gone.
We still have a windows laptop around the house.... somewhere.
Just got my 2.8 iMac with Leopard, replacing my old 2.1 G5 iMac with Tiger. Of course I was expecting a massive leap forward in speed, especially after all the hype surrounding the Intel chips.
Well it's slower, clunkier and the spinning pizza of death seems to be on the screen a lot more frequently...
Not the usual improvement I've come to expect from Apple over the past 15 years.
Could try harder!
Never had a single crash on Leopard yet. My 2007 white iMac that shiped with Tiger boots in under 20 seconds with Leopard.
I run Logic Studio, Final Cut totally maxxed out - no crashes, no glitches - EVER!
I know a ton of people with Mac's and I've yet to hear any bad news ( in fact they are all switchers and are simply blown away by their experiences)
I really don't know what you folks are running that has de-stabilised your computers to the point where allegedly a sand-boxed Unix system has become 'unstable' - i'd be interested to hear what apps are flaking...
I have heard first hand reports that first release of Microsoft 2008 crashes but that's about it - I use iWork 08 - again, never had a single crash or hang up yet.
Oh so the Apples do hang, eh?
And to those who have cheerily adopted the easiest way to be 'hip' - namely MS-bashing, chew on this : I've owned an XP system for more than a year and not only has it never crashed, its performance has been swift and satisfying.
Also, please stop whining about the Windows interface. Don't like it? Change it. Get RocketDock. Get StyleXP or WindowsBlinds. It doesn't pay to sit around and complain when you can get working and customise.
I wonder if the same people using a Windows machine would have such patience? For the record I use Windows Vista, and have never experienced any of the problems that have been discussed on this board.
I wonder if the same people using a Windows machine would have such patience? For the record I use Windows Vista, and have never experienced any of the problems that have been discussed on this board.
I guess it depends where you start from. I entered the PC world twenty years ago and in january took the Apple plunge with a new iMac and OSX.
So i compare it to Windows XP ( and all the previous miserable versions of Windows I've had) and there is no comparison - OSX is like emerging from a dangerous peril-filled jungle into a land of Eden where computing makes sense.
I guess I'm lucky I've never experienced Tiger. But you won't hear a harsh word about Leopard from me.
Mark
Yeah, I never really saw the argument for Macs. Good for you if you bought one to shake the fist at the Wintel monopoly. But one megacorp is just as bad as another at the end of the day, especially one with a monopoly, and many Mac users have been (fashion) victims of a massive media hypefest since they got rich. Get yourself a PC with Linux, learn how to code (it will do you good) and help save us all.
I have to say I think you are spot on your observations. Good things about Leopard: Time Machine, Spaces and Boot Camp (invaluable to me as I have clients with whom I need to use windows, so I now only need to maintain one laptop instead of two)
Bad things: Poorer overall performance, slower boot up times, less stable, compatability issues with older software. All the rest of the new 'features' are either just fiddling or of little practical impact.
Having said that, I can still boot my Macbook pro with Leopard, start VMware Fusion and launch my Windows XP bootcamp partition before my Vista desktop gets to the login screen... :)
As an aside to Mr. Witherden, while I am glad his experience has been better than mine or Darrens, I think the point was to compare the 'Out-of-the-box' experience between versions of OS X, and while third party tools may assist, the fact is I have felt little need to use such tools with earlier versions of OS X.
My experience with Leopard is certainly a mixed one, but I'd have to agree with you saying it's a disappointment. Having used OS X since 10.1, I've seen it go from looking taking nearly 9 minutes to reboot at one stage, to Tiger taking about 30 seconds (on a 12" PowerBook).
On one hand, the Terminal has tabs. On the other, Safari constantly crashes. Since 10.5.2, it's a lot more stable, but just 5 minutes ago my Internet went down, and Safari couldn't finish loading the page and crashed. Initially, plugging my phone (a Microsoft Mobile 6.0) into my laptop to charge it would give it a kernel error and crash the system, but that seems to be fixed. Rebooting takes a lot longer and I can't see any real speed improvement.
But, even that won't send me towards a PC. Written on my Macbook Air.
I too, am somewhat less than impressed with Leopard.
Firstly, it killed the battery on my iBook G4. Overnight, my battery time dropped from 90 mins to 5 mins. Shutdown was abrupt and total, forcing me to reset time and calendar on restarting. Suddenly I had a low-profile desktop.
No software fixes were effective, a thread on the Apple forums showed I was far from being the only one to have this problem. Apple eventually replaced the battery, despite my machine being well out of warranty.
The crippling of FrontRow has been mentioned above; other crippling includes the removal of the bluetooth sms facilities from Address Book. It's dishonest marketing to call something an upgrade when it includes a number of downgrades.
Many icons are less distinctive than they were previously. One gets the feeling that many of the GUI changes were driven by marketing and not design imperatives.
The only new feature I find myself enjoying is the improved Spotlight. I'm sure TimeMachine is useful as well 鈥撀燽ut is it OS or an application?
If I could do so without the considerable hassle it involves, I'd probably go back to Tiger. I have often thought, since 'upgrading' that Leopard will in future be considered to be the beginnings of the 'Microsoftification' of Apple.
Strangely enough the Mac of my three (Intel iMac, MacBook and Powermac) which works best on Leopard, is the oldest - the PowerPC based dual 2.3 PowerMac. I agree that the two intel based Macs have become less stable and there are definite wireless problems, with hangs, loading errors and instability. For example, Skype is now unusable on my Macbook on a wireless network, with drop outs and distortion. Where has interference stability gone?
I like quick view and the improved networking but the rest of the Leopard "improvements" leave me cold. Timemachine is a waste of space (terabytes of hard disc space that is). The hard disc makers must be rubbing their hands with glee. It also slows machines down horribly. Spaces - I still have not worked out a sensible use for this. Stacks is a silly gimmick. I don't like the feature that you have to disable the firewall to get networking to work well.
Wilson
Hi, my first Mac was the MacBook Pro. It came with Tiger on it... very pleased with the 0S. Before the Mac I have dabbled with Windoze when necessary. My main experience has been with working on UNIX and Linux (since the early 90's.) I purchased Leopard expecting it (given the hype) to be much better/improved on Tiger, but it is not. There are some nice additions, but by enlarge it was not worth the cost of the upgrade. I am a little disappointed I must say. I suppose Microsoft is not the only one given to hype. I do like the backup utility, the new 'spotlight' and it was nice that OSX finely caught up with the rest of the UNIX world and added 'virtual desktops' or if you prefer 'spaces' to the windows manager. I am going to stay with Mac's as they are A LOT better the any of the Microsoft OS's. However, I will not jump at the next OS that Mac put out on the market.
I have to say I disagree with most of the comments - having said that, my first Leopard experience is straight with 10.5.2.
I have it installed on an iMacIntel 2.4 and on an iMac G5 1.8.
It runs like a dream on both machines, despite the fact that I haven't upgraded the memory yet. The Intel machines only has 1GB and the G5 ONLY has 768MB. Nevertheless, I can't imagine how much better the experience will be with 4GB and 2GB respectively (more news on that soon...). The new features are all useful, QuickLook is even life-changing. Despite the obvious shortage of memory, it's stable (not had a crash yet) and fast.
Am I lucky or what?
I really don't agree with this "review" at all. I have upgraded through Panther to Tiger and now Leopard without any problems at all. Certainly I don't use many of the features such as Spaces or Stacks extensively but I do use Time Machine which is an excellent simple backup mechanism for the masses.
I have had no application or device problems at all (except that my new Nikon camera doesn't have a Leopard software install, only Tiger, but Leopard supports the camera out of the box anyway).
This article seems to apply more to a pre 10.5.2 update version of Leopard. Stacks are really useful in list form.
My four Macs (from emac to Mac Pro) are all running sweetly..........touch wood. I can't believe I once used Windows.
I wonder if there is much of a difference between machines that were upgraded from Tiger to Leopard (like my Macbook Pro, before it got stolen that is) and new machines that have Leopard pre-installed?
Or whether a clean install/archive and install is better than an upgrade?
At first I was disappointed with Leopard too, particularly with the speed and performance on my old 12" G4 PowerBook, but that has improved over time.
I now have a brand new MacBook Pro and it absolutely screams with Leopard. I now much prefer the look and, although it has its gimmicks and it's far from perfect, going back to Tiger now looks like a massive step backwards in both aesthetics and ease of use.
But let's face it: both Tiger and Leopard knock spots off Windows, Vista included.
As someone who upgraded from a 15inch Panther to a 24inch Leopard I can say I am completely satisfied with my lot!
I missed all the hype of Tiger and so am discovering Leopard afresh. I think its an awesome system and have yet to experience any problems with crashing, hanging, dropping wifi or anything like that.
My biggest issue to date has been that one piece of software I ported from my old computer doesn't work on this one. 10 minutes of downloading later and the problem was fixed.
Upgrading to Leopard has been one of the best decision I've made in the past few years.
My experience with Leopard, as with the majority, has been flawless. 10.5.2 is rock solid, fast and I've had no slowdowns or crashes on my 1st generation Intel iMac. The new features are great; Stacks are most useful when set to display a menu which can be scrolled.
As with any OS, a new version is reliant on the stability of the previous installation, so users with problems should consider reinstalling from scratch rather than an upgrade. Also bear in mind that people who don't have problems are always going to be a silent majority when it comes to software.
I had some concerns and experienced some glitches on my MBP when I bought it (with Leopard) back in November. But since 10.5.2 I've had no issues at all.
I like Tiger (I still use it on another machine) but I certainly don't feel that Leopard is somehow inferior.
Quickview really helps and stacks, in grid view, still proves useful.
I haven't yet experienced a crash.
I'm not particularly disappointed - I still favour Leopard over any Windows operating system, but I will say there has been a definite decline in shared network drives.
It seems like a step towards the future - having your copious amounts of data shared over vast numbers of network drives, and as I work with at least 5 network drives connected throughout my day, it's part of my life.
Tiger would cope seamlessly with network drives. In Finder, you'd simply select Network then click on the machine or drive you'd want and it would mount your network drive.
But in Leopard, network drives are no longer mounted on the desktop, and there is no Network browser anymore - it's now simply a "Shared" list which only lists very few machines on your network.
If I hadn't kept my aliases from Tiger when I upgraded, i'd have a daily nightmare trying to connect to my digital storage...
Hi, no problems whatsoever on the 30 Macs we have in the office. They are all running 10.5.2, and all have Creative Suite 3, Acrobat 8, Final Cut and all the standard software running on them daily. My Mac Pro has a 1TB external hard drive which all 30 Macs use as their Time Machine drive.
All works very smooth, and absolutely no problems at all.
I recently bought a Mac Mini as a first move into Macs, with Leopard 10.5.2 pre-installed.
No problems at all, no crashes, easy to configure, easy to install the extras I want. Just like Linux really - in fact I was very taken by the similarity (not surprising considering what's underneath).
So I will definitely not be moving any machine to Vista - I will have one Mac (maybe more in future since the Mini is a good cheap way of getting one), one machine with Win XP kept for games, and the others (main office machine, server, laptop) using Linux - since it runs fast on the ancient hardware accumulated through upgrades needed to run increasingly resource-hungry versions of Windows.
I have a 4 yr old 15" powerbook with 512ram and installed Leopard in January and ive had no problems with speed or anything else for that matter and im quite pleased with the overall performance.
I have to say that Leopard has been a joy to use. I personally find it quicker than Tiger especially stuff like Spotlight. It isn't perfect. When I first got it, it was a bit buggy and would crash. Plus I really wasn't liking the translucent title bar. After a couple of updates though I thing it is about as stable as Tiger and a proper title bar is back!!
Not to be smug either for all those Vista users but it is running great on my old MacBook and iMac and all my devices still work.
i have been using window machines for most of my young life, every time a new operating system was released i had to buy a whole new unit. i used to be one that shunned Apple and all that it stood for but after purchasing the iPhone i was compelled to get my hands on a mac. the simplicity of everything and the ease of integration is something Microsoft could never manage because Microsoft don't integrate fully hardware with software like Apple can. if it weren't for MSN messenger being poor on the mac (which Microsoft developed not apple) then i would have chucked my vista machine a long time ago. leopards offers an all in one simple interface which i have found myself enjoying more each day especially when i find out about another feature thats hidden away. Vista offered me nothing but networking nightmares and when it did work it then crashed. leopard's bonjour is amazing just sorts itself out. and time machine, which airport also now supports, is the most simple backup feature i have come across. i have never backed up a windows machine because its been too laborious.
You may believe leopard is a disappointment. Perhaps you are expecting too much from the hard working coders. just compare Leopard to vista and its a god send!