 Customer Reviews
Not a "must" upgrade, but definitely an evolution, 25 Jul 2008
I have personally found 'Tiger' to be the most efficient OS X to date, and therefore a real favourite for a couple of years when I was working in a graphics department. Their is no doubt Leopard is a beautiful upgrade, containing a stated "300+ upgrades", however, it is by no means essential if you Mac is work work purposes. The extra features we've found are not for the productive side of things, but more for consolidating files, making things visually look better, and a few notable new programs.
In short, Leopard would no doubt be a great update for the Media orientated users, but if you're all work and no play, it's actually not that essential. "Snow Leopard" has already been announced for next year anyway, and was stated would improve performance and stability, rather than functionality, so that'll definitely be worth a look.
No, it's not better than windows. But it isn't worse., 21 Apr 2008
It's in the middle.
I'm tired of reading these articles on how macs are vastly superior to windows based machines. if you consider that microsoft has to tailor an operating system to work on countless configurations of hardware, whereas apple mass produces the same specificiation for every set brand of computer, you may understand why windows crashes a bit more.
macs crash, by the way. mine froze on imovie the first day i got it. impressive, ey?
of course, mac os x leopard is stunning. its fast, its intuitive and best of all, it's simple. but i like windows just as much. they both have their strengths and weaknesses. oh, by the way, the "vista sucks" debate got old when it was discovered none of the haters have even TOUCHED it.
but anyway. great OS, but don't expect it to redefine the operating systems of the future because, as it is, it doesn't do anything new.
Easy and fault free upgrade to Mini Mac with Tiger, 13 Apr 2008
I started over a year ago with a Mini Mac with a Tiger operating system and then subsequently added an I-Mac and Notebook with Leopard pre- installed. So I found myself having to accept the need for an upgrade especially with the ability to better network all our domestic computers using Leopard.
The result was a painless and hassle free upgrade unlike one other Review submission - I have also not found the slow running commented on by others which given I am using the lower end of the Apple range, seems to indicate they may possibly have other usage or memory/RAM issues with their specific machines under the upgrade.
The many features and improvements in Leopard are commented on fully under under Reviews - suffice to say it is not 100% perfect but certainly in the high 90s and compared with the universal problems on Windows launch of Vista (one of the key reasons I experimented with Apple in the first place) I am very happy.
The only problem (as with all Apple OS) is that you get little guidance free and so you will need to budget for purchase of the Missing Manual series on Leopard in understanding the many features and timesaving shortcuts and tricks possible.
Decent upgrade, but released too soon, 07 Apr 2008
I've been using Leopard for the best part of a month, so now it's starting to settle in.
The good - Time Machine is a useful back up tool, combined with either SuperDuper or Carbon Cloner gives you a bootable backup and a file backup which will protect you from any kind of local disaster (you'll need off site backup for fire, theft and flood though). Quick look is handy and spotlight has been improved. Stacks prevents your desktop from getting clogged up with files.
The bad - system stability seems to have been affected - I got two kernel panics in my first week compared to three over three years with Tiger. You'll need to download a 350Mb patch to bring you up to 10.5.2 immediately after installing - it would be nice if Apple would upgrade the discs to 10.5.2. Time Machine fights with your Anti Virus software slowing down backups and restores (sometimes horribly - make sure you've excluded the discs/ partitions from your AV scanning). Leopard also seems to be very RAM hungry, whereas Tiger ran happily on 1Gb, Leopard struggles with 2Gb.
The ugly - the new dock look really just gets in the way, it's harder to tell if the applications is started than under Tiger and every so often when my iMac runs out of memory I get a washed out negative of the dock where the downloads stack is unreadable. This can be fixed by a reboot, but frankly this shouldn't be a problem.
In summary, nice incremental improvements (Time Machine, Stacks and quick look), with some big problems - system stability prior to 10.5.2 is definitely worse than Tiger. On balance probably worth upgrading, but max out your RAM and patch the OS immediately after install.
**UPDATE**
Time Machine is really excellent, I've used it twice now and both times its recovered perfectly. The only problem I had is that sometimes you've got to delete the old file before you replace it (permissions). The second of the two attempts meant I could recover from a botched Office upgrade in less than 20 minutes rather than it taking all night. Strongly recommended! Buy an external Hard Drive and get it with Firewire if you can, your data is worth the £80-100 price tag.
Stability has improved with 10.5.2/3, I've had no further crashes.
Better off with Tiger, 02 Apr 2008
I upgraded to Leopard from Tiger out of curiosity, and I have to say it looks pretty.
But that's not everything you expect your OS to be, and indeed after a while I decided to go back to Tiger. Why?
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with it, it didn't crash or anything like that. I just found it very annoying that it slowed down my Mac significantly (opening new folders in finder was a pain, I had to wait for several seconds to have folder contents displayed), and did various other things that annoyed me. I'm using my Mac for quite a lot of development tasks, and after I found out that the upgrade had messed up my MySQL installation and changed some Apache things which I had to work around I felt this was rather a burden than an improvement. I got it all working again, but not in a way that left me feel confident about the overall setup.
The positive things: Tabs in the terminal application, new finder views (cover flow), and ... that's about it. Multiple work places were nice if you have a lot of windows open (and most of the time I had) but I didn't really use that feature a lot.
After that experience I can't really recommend the upgrade. Leopard's really more about cosmetic changes and some additional gadgets. If you're happy with Tiger, stick to it.
Not a "must" upgrade, but definitely an evolution, 25 Jul 2008
I have personally found 'Tiger' to be the most efficient OS X to date, and therefore a real favourite for a couple of years when I was working in a graphics department. Their is no doubt Leopard is a beautiful upgrade, containing a stated "300+ upgrades", however, it is by no means essential if you Mac is work work purposes. The extra features we've found are not for the productive side of things, but more for consolidating files, making things visually look better, and a few notable new programs.
In short, Leopard would no doubt be a great update for the Media orientated users, but if you're all work and no play, it's actually not that essential. "Snow Leopard" has already been announced for next year anyway, and was stated would improve performance and stability, rather than functionality, so that'll definitely be worth a look.
No, it's not better than windows. But it isn't worse., 21 Apr 2008
It's in the middle.
I'm tired of reading these articles on how macs are vastly superior to windows based machines. if you consider that microsoft has to tailor an operating system to work on countless configurations of hardware, whereas apple mass produces the same specificiation for every set brand of computer, you may understand why windows crashes a bit more.
macs crash, by the way. mine froze on imovie the first day i got it. impressive, ey?
of course, mac os x leopard is stunning. its fast, its intuitive and best of all, it's simple. but i like windows just as much. they both have their strengths and weaknesses. oh, by the way, the "vista sucks" debate got old when it was discovered none of the haters have even TOUCHED it.
but anyway. great OS, but don't expect it to redefine the operating systems of the future because, as it is, it doesn't do anything new.
Easy and fault free upgrade to Mini Mac with Tiger, 13 Apr 2008
I started over a year ago with a Mini Mac with a Tiger operating system and then subsequently added an I-Mac and Notebook with Leopard pre- installed. So I found myself having to accept the need for an upgrade especially with the ability to better network all our domestic computers using Leopard.
The result was a painless and hassle free upgrade unlike one other Review submission - I have also not found the slow running commented on by others which given I am using the lower end of the Apple range, seems to indicate they may possibly have other usage or memory/RAM issues with their specific machines under the upgrade.
The many features and improvements in Leopard are commented on fully under under Reviews - suffice to say it is not 100% perfect but certainly in the high 90s and compared with the universal problems on Windows launch of Vista (one of the key reasons I experimented with Apple in the first place) I am very happy.
The only problem (as with all Apple OS) is that you get little guidance free and so you will need to budget for purchase of the Missing Manual series on Leopard in understanding the many features and timesaving shortcuts and tricks possible.
Decent upgrade, but released too soon, 07 Apr 2008
I've been using Leopard for the best part of a month, so now it's starting to settle in.
The good - Time Machine is a useful back up tool, combined with either SuperDuper or Carbon Cloner gives you a bootable backup and a file backup which will protect you from any kind of local disaster (you'll need off site backup for fire, theft and flood though). Quick look is handy and spotlight has been improved. Stacks prevents your desktop from getting clogged up with files.
The bad - system stability seems to have been affected - I got two kernel panics in my first week compared to three over three years with Tiger. You'll need to download a 350Mb patch to bring you up to 10.5.2 immediately after installing - it would be nice if Apple would upgrade the discs to 10.5.2. Time Machine fights with your Anti Virus software slowing down backups and restores (sometimes horribly - make sure you've excluded the discs/ partitions from your AV scanning). Leopard also seems to be very RAM hungry, whereas Tiger ran happily on 1Gb, Leopard struggles with 2Gb.
The ugly - the new dock look really just gets in the way, it's harder to tell if the applications is started than under Tiger and every so often when my iMac runs out of memory I get a washed out negative of the dock where the downloads stack is unreadable. This can be fixed by a reboot, but frankly this shouldn't be a problem.
In summary, nice incremental improvements (Time Machine, Stacks and quick look), with some big problems - system stability prior to 10.5.2 is definitely worse than Tiger. On balance probably worth upgrading, but max out your RAM and patch the OS immediately after install.
**UPDATE**
Time Machine is really excellent, I've used it twice now and both times its recovered perfectly. The only problem I had is that sometimes you've got to delete the old file before you replace it (permissions). The second of the two attempts meant I could recover from a botched Office upgrade in less than 20 minutes rather than it taking all night. Strongly recommended! Buy an external Hard Drive and get it with Firewire if you can, your data is worth the £80-100 price tag.
Stability has improved with 10.5.2/3, I've had no further crashes.
Better off with Tiger, 02 Apr 2008
I upgraded to Leopard from Tiger out of curiosity, and I have to say it looks pretty.
But that's not everything you expect your OS to be, and indeed after a while I decided to go back to Tiger. Why?
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with it, it didn't crash or anything like that. I just found it very annoying that it slowed down my Mac significantly (opening new folders in finder was a pain, I had to wait for several seconds to have folder contents displayed), and did various other things that annoyed me. I'm using my Mac for quite a lot of development tasks, and after I found out that the upgrade had messed up my MySQL installation and changed some Apache things which I had to work around I felt this was rather a burden than an improvement. I got it all working again, but not in a way that left me feel confident about the overall setup.
The positive things: Tabs in the terminal application, new finder views (cover flow), and ... that's about it. Multiple work places were nice if you have a lot of windows open (and most of the time I had) but I didn't really use that feature a lot.
After that experience I can't really recommend the upgrade. Leopard's really more about cosmetic changes and some additional gadgets. If you're happy with Tiger, stick to it.
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