Mac OS X Leopard: First Impressions

[chrisconfessed]

I have just installed Leopard, and all I can say on first impressions is: wow. I converted to Apple a few months back when I purchased a new 20" mac, I'm angry at myself for not switching sooner. Unfortunately I was two days out of the buy a mac now and upgrade to leopard for £10 - nevertheless, so impressed with Tiger was I that today Leopard has been installed on my mac. Tiger was impressive - years ahead of XP in design and functionality and now Leopard beats Tiger, XP and Vista out of the water. My brother runs Vista on his recently built, super-duper PC and boy is it slow.

Anyways back to Leopard... I love Spaces, the Cover flow and especially all those cosmetic changes. I have read how people dislike the transparent bar at the top and the reflective dock, but I must admit I like them. I don't really see how anyone could really dislike them, sometimes I don't even notice the changes.

Saying all this however comes only after half an hour of using Leopard. I might experience problems soon, but here's hoping I don't!

 

[heatmiser]

Long live Tiger and XP!

Ditto. I have as much desire to install Leopard as I do to install Vista--zero. They're both pieces of bloat that would decrease, and not increase, my productivity. Why upgrade for the sake of upgrading?

 

[macDonalds]

Ditto. I have as much desire to install Leopard as I do to install Vista--zero. They're both pieces of bloat that would decrease, and not increase, my productivity. Why upgrade for the sake of upgrading?

I'll have to disagree. With the addition of Spaces and increase in speed overall your productivity would go up.

 

[PCMacUser]

I'll have to disagree. With the addition of Spaces and increase in speed overall your productivity would go up.

Spaces is nicely executed in Leopard, but I just never used it. Command+TAB still works a treat for me. And there's nothing to configure.

And as for speed increases in Leopard - this might be true, but I've never witnessed it myself on my iBook or the Macbooks at work. In fact, my iBook now flies with Tiger back on it.

Having said all that, I think that in 12 months (after a few updates) Leopard could really be okay. It's just not really usable now IMHO, and my workplace won't even allow it to be installed yet because it breaks too many programs.

 

[DerChef]

Ok yesterday I switched back to Tiger

After initially being very positive (see my early posts) about Leopard 6 weeks of random keyboard and mouse random freezes on my black macbook I have had enough. (yes I have done all the firmware updates and was running 10.5.1, had no 3rd party plugins running)

Small personal ascetic preferences about menu bar style and dock transparency I could not give a fig about. However when basic functions of the computer stop that is serious. Yes Vista on my PC has been as slow as a cart horse but at least it has always been stable

One of the things that attracted me to OS X was a specific OS written around specific good quality hardware producing something that is rock solid.

Indeed thats exactly what I got in 2005 with my Powerbook and subsequent Tiger upgrade (Only one system wide crash in 2 years and that was when installing software).

Apples quality has for me gone the pan and sad to say I think the rot set in with the Intel switch.

I still have Leopard as a back up bootable volume and can switch to it at anytime I may try again with 10.5.2 or 3. Will miss quicklook and the icon previews but thats about it.

Another issue is Apple seem to be being left behind in terms of small electronic products yes I am including the iPhone ! To me Samsung are the best in this area see their new 5 mega pixel camera phone at about 1/3 th price . Sometime this year I was going to replace my aging PC destktop with an iMac but now it could well be another PC.

This has really knocked my confidence in Apples quality and they will have a lot of bridge building to do in the next 6 months

 

[dtklamf]

i love this coverflow idea and spaces.

 

[superspud]

just did a delete and install on my Macbook 2.16 core 2 duo with 2 gigs of memory.


install took right at 30 minutes. no problems whatsoever, couldnt have gone smoother.

first impressions in the 45 minutes ive been messing around is that i love the look of it. everything is crisp and sharp. ive read all of the nit picking of "omg this looks horrible" or "why did they make this look that way".... if you didnt want change, you shouldnt have gotten an new operating system.... i like the overall look, thats one of the reasons i got it, to have a different look.

so far everything is working as fast if not faster than tiger... safari is VERY fast, i've noticed a big difference in speed. ichat is better b/c it has my buddy groups (thats the extent of my toying with ichat)

i do see what eveyone has been talking about with the "open icon" on the dock. it is very hard to see what is open, they should have made a bigger dot of a different color, but i'll live.

havnt delt with stacks yet, but is there an easy way to delete the downloads? on tiger when things downloaded you could just click "clear downloads" adn tehy were gone, is there anything like that?

i will tinker some more and make another post soon

 

[plarusa]

The best OS ever

For me, Leopard is the best OS, no questions. I used them all, the Unixes, the Windows, including the latest Vista SP1 and W2k8. Tiger before it already stood tall above the crowd. But Leopard adds spaces, a better finder, 64-bit support, a case sensitive file system (OS X Server), so now there is no contest. With iLife08, a seamless integration with Unix (NFS, X) as well as Windows (Samba, VMWare, MSFT office) makes the Macbook Pro 17" running OS X 10.5 server the only computer I need

 

[superspud]

after using leopard for a night, i am even more happy i made the switch.

spaces - have been using it since i first started. i imported my entire photo library to iphotos in one space, had my music/itunes uploading in another, had ichat going in the 3rd and safari full screen in the 4th.... i dont know how i lived without it before

safari - even more noticablly faster than before. i finally got to go to all of the websites i frequent and it is faster than before

stacks - still getting used to them, cant decide if i like fan or grid better. i put my applications on there so fan doenst work, there are too many applications so its in grid mode, pretty neat feature, especially since i can just remove them from the dock if i get tired of it

ichat - simply amazing.... i guess i have never done a video/audio chat with someone else who had ichat as well (usually just with someone using AIM) but my buddy just got a SR macbook back in texas and we did a video/conference chat just to see hwo it was... unbelievable.... its like a real time video stream... no choppyness, no lagging.... we were blown away. i like that you can now group all your chat windows to one.

so far all applications i backed up on my external work perfectly. microsoft office 2004, photoshop, vlc player and azureus.... and i believe azureus is on the "horrible blow up your computer if you use it" applications list for leopard... as mentioned, no problems thus far.

cover flow is AWESOME, as is quicklook. both very helpful for organizing files.


overall i am 100% glad i upgraded... im still a leopard noob but i havnt experienced anything negative as of yet that i cant live with....

 

[shov]

Installed Leopard about a week ago. I wanted to an archive and install but missed the options button and so did an upgrade instead. This is on a late 2006 Macbook with 2GB RAM. Install probably took about an hour, I wasn't really paying attention.

First impressions:

Takes longer to boot and shutdown than Tiger; I no longer get a splash screen as OS X is booting, just a blue screen. I like the way you get see your desktop as it shuts down.

Quicker waking up from sleep, but takes ages for airport to connect. With 10.4.11 I used to have problems with the computer rebooting when asleep, but that seems to have gone. Had one crash when starting Parallels 2; this happened a couple of times with Tiger too.

Runs about the same, maybe slightly slower than Tiger, but seems to have sped up from initially being much slower. Safari crashes regularly, but Safari 3 did under Tiger anyway. I like that you can now view pdf's in Safari. Mail sometimes hangs, but seems slightly faster than under Tiger.

I use Quicksilver so my dock's hidden, but I like the downloads stack rather than spraying stuff all over my desktop. Not really bothered by the new UI, it's not much different to the old one, but the transparent menu bar looks a bit silly with windows butted right up underneath it.

Really like quicklook; spaces is almost as good as virtue was, but you can't have a different background for each desktop.

Overall: haven't noticed much improvement over Tiger to be honest, except for quicklook, but it's not the disaster people have been saying it is. Not really sure if it's worth the upgrade fee though.

 

[superspud]

Installed Leopard about a week ago. I wanted to an archive and install but missed the options button and so did an upgrade instead. This is on a late 2006 Macbook with 2GB RAM. Install probably took about an hour, I wasn't really paying attention.

First impressions:

Takes longer to boot and shutdown than Tiger; I no longer get a splash screen as OS X is booting, just a blue screen. I like the way you get see your desktop as it shuts down.

Quicker waking up from sleep, but takes ages for airport to connect. With 10.4.11 I used to have problems with the computer rebooting when asleep, but that seems to have gone. Had one crash when starting Parallels 2; this happened a couple of times with Tiger too.

Runs about the same, maybe slightly slower than Tiger, but seems to have sped up from initially being much slower. Safari crashes regularly, but Safari 3 did under Tiger anyway. I like that you can now view pdf's in Safari. Mail sometimes hangs, but seems slightly faster than under Tiger.

I use Quicksilver so my dock's hidden, but I like the downloads stack rather than spraying stuff all over my desktop. Not really bothered by the new UI, it's not much different to the old one, but the transparent menu bar looks a bit silly with windows butted right up underneath it.

Really like quicklook; spaces is almost as good as virtue was, but you can't have a different background for each desktop.

Overall: haven't noticed much improvement over Tiger to be honest, except for quicklook, but it's not the disaster people have been saying it is. Not really sure if it's worth the upgrade fee though.

as far as your speed related issues are concerned, while i did NOT do the upgrade (did erase and install) i would imagine if yuo back everything up you want to keep then do a full install it would be peppier. as mentioned, i did the erase and install and leopard is just as fast and often faster than tiger in most areas.

 

[one1]

The grey top-bar, folder icons, default desktop image/login desktop image, the dock, the Apple logo (top left corner) and stacks are ugly!

The Window's network shares don't work properly (although I finally got write access with 10.5.1 even still it says "Guest").

Luckily unlike many others I haven't had too many serious issues, but I'm about one step away from dropping a nasty WinXP theme on the GUI to pretty it up some (and I hate the look of XP....blue and green...?!?!?!)!

.......oh wait......the new iMac's are ugly too....black borders bah!

This must be all a part of a hairbrained marketing ploy to entice PC users to switch by giving them what they want: ugly hardware & ugly GUI's...WELL DONE!!

http://t.ecksdee.org/post/19001860

 

[Red Carbon]

Hi, I'm new to this forum, so I'm not all together sure if this is the right thread for this, but anyway, here goes. I'm thinking about buying Leopard for my 20" iMac, however, I'm not really sure if iWork is included on it. When I bought the it back in August, it came pre-installed with Tiger (obviously ) however I didn't realize iWork was not included. Anyway, I basically just want to know if iWork and all its apps are included on Leopard. I really want to get Leopard, but I don't exactly want to spend $130 on it and then have to spend another $80 on iWork (which I basically want for Numbers and Keynote). Any help is appreciated.

 

[Sijmen]

iWork is not included in Leopard.

 

[clevin]

tried in further detail yesterday

1. Space is.... not well designed, Its like desktop wall and desktop expose in linux, but lack the 3D cube. and Space can't be easily activated through mouse click (menu bar icon isn't that convenient)

2. Path bar is useless since it offers next to zero functionality

3. coverflow is..... indeed useless in most situations.

4. color switch for de-activated windows is a bit too much...IMO

more to come

 

[Greasybaz]

A couple of months ago i wandered into an apple store and played with logic on a couple of macs. I wandered out. Bought a CD. Had some lunch. Then it hit me. I'd just be using Leopard. I hadn't noticed. Of course now I know whats new but back then i plain didn't notice. I'm not saying thats a bad thing, familiarity can only be good. That was my first impression.

Second impression once I was on leopard and knew it. Boot camp = good. Time machine = unrevolutionary backup with graphics to make backup suddenly cool. Spaces = somewhere to hide ichat. Hmm. My conclusion has to be that getting excited about a new operating system is very much like getting excited about a spanner. Its new. Its shinny. It does everything you expect a spanner to do. But its still a spanner.