While the Apple hype machine and its fanatical followers would have you believe that... Still, I'm amused that simply stating such an obvious fact is enough to send the crazies rushing out of the wood pile...
Flamebait to attract eyeballs. Irrelevant to content, but foreshadowing article tone.
Jobs and Company have spent the past several years being more fixated on Vista than perhaps even I've been.
Nothing.
Windows Vista has been rearchitected from the ground up into a componentized new OS... Microsoft abused this functionality and its user base by bifurcating the Vista product line into far too many versions
"Bifurcating" into "many" versions? Etymology! Anyway,
Windows XP Embedded. And "ground up" - what kernel features have made it easier to separate Ultimate from Basic? It's just a matter of enabling or installing particular executables; don't confuse "an if statement" with "rearchitecting from the ground up".
Leopard... no major architectural changes, which makes me wonder why Apple is even charging for it: In the Windows world, such releases are called service packs.
"I'm not paying $20,000 for this new car! It's architecturally very similar to the old one! I'll pay for materials only." Earlier in the article, Thurrott states:
If it ain't broke, it's hard to fix.
He has the right idea, but isn't applying it in the right place.
...while Apple fanatics will blissfully skip over any...
"Please, Apple fanatics, make angry responses, then I'll get more hits. I'm big in the Windows world but I want my name in the Mac world."
They'll quibble that I'm not getting it because Leopard is the basis for future iPhone releases or whatever, or because I just need to wait and see what developers will do in the future with the unbelievable underlying new technologies
Strawman.
No, the updated DVD player in Leopard is responsible for fully 10 of the operating system's new features. Among these "new" features are a time slider, auto zoom, and the ability to display the DVD player application on top of other windows. If Microsoft used this loose definition of the word new, it might have advertised Vista as having 11,000 new features. Heck, maybe it should.
If I add 4 new features to an app, that's 4 new features - in both layman and engineering terms. Apple's chosen 300 (of many more) features that it considers worth marketing. Any user that was expecting 300 new "major architectural" changes, or whatever, will be in for a surprise - non-research OS design is fairly routine, and I'd have trouble listing 300 major decisions that define any particular OS. Fortunately, this is another strawman - only Thurrott is claiming that users would expect 300 new major features and then knocking down the argument. Anyway, Apple makes it quite easy to
read the full list before purchase - if you purchase on the tagline alone, you need to review your spending habits.
feature must actually be new (i.e. have not appeared in any form in a previous version of the product)
All software can be compiled for a
One Instruction Set Computer. The same instruction, just appearing in a different "form" in a "previous version of the product" (or any other product) - eep, no new software has
ever been written!
exactly two major new features in Leopard
Let me guess, he's going to list the most interesting features for me... garbage collecting Objective C 2.0 and the new security framework support for MAC/sandboxing/code signing? No? Two completely different answers? Hmm.
Time Machine is Apple's version of Microsoft's Previous Versions feature, which first appeared in Windows Server 2003 over four years ago.
How is it similar? Don't just list two features and say they're similar, give me evidence. For example, is Previous Versions targeted at home users? That one's easy to answer - no, because it's only available in Business/Ent/Ult. I need explanations, not handwaving conclusions.
Apple also blows it by requiring a second hard drive:
And that falsehood is evidence that he's never even tried the product he's reviewing. You get a warning - "Are you sure you want to back up to the same disk your original data is on?" - and right below, the button "Use selected disk". Much as the Harry Potter fad annoys me, I'm going to confess never having read even a whole chapter of one of the books, so I'm not about to write a review.
Time Machine has a very basic problem. If you've unplugged the drive that's storing all those backups, you're out of luck: You'll simply get an error dialog if you try to run Time Machine.
Wait, you're telling me that if a piece of computing hardware is unplugged, I can't use it? I am biting my lips here resisting the urge to warn users that their new Dell Vista box in the living room won't display if they carry their LCD to their neighbour's, plug it in to a random power outlet, and hope really hard. As above, use a partition on your internal drive.
though I wish Apple would consider adding a Pro interface as well.
- Find Time Machine volume.
- Double-click Backups.backupdb, then volume name, then date or "Latest", then volume name again.
- Browse, restore at will.
What do I win? I can make a soft link to the "Latest" directory or lower if I want to skip steps 1 and 2.
Spaces is one of those power-user features that sophisticated users will latch onto immediately
I've never taken to multiple desktops, though I've had it available since the mid-'90s using NetBSD. Covered, docked, reduced to title bar, even*made invisible, I want elements of my desktop *on my desktop*. It's great that Leopard introduces the feature, as some love it, but the "will latch onto" language betrays Thurrott's "my opinion is your opinion" approach.
you can tap CTRL + one of the arrow keys to move between the various spaces. (I found this to be problematic because I'd often inadvertently tap CTRL + RIGHT ARROW, for example, while trying to navigate word-to-word in Microsoft Word documents.)
So, from the same Pref panel that you enabled Spaces, change the shortcut modifier.
Now, not only are menus more translucent than ever in Leopard,
No.
Third image of 10.0.
Worse is the updated Dock, which now sports a gratuitous and pointless "3D" shelf effect.
Unless placed on the sides. (And you have the com.apple.dock no-glass pref to fix it at the bottom.)
That's Abbey Road, I'll have you know ;-).
suspect it will lead to Dock overloading as some users will be tempted to keep aliases off the desktop and use Dock-based Stacks instead.
You can bet your bottom dollar I'll not be filling my desktop, which
is behind everything, with aliases. Although this does seem to be a choice for some people, I want the background to be clean - otherwise it is noise distracting me from the content of windows that aren't fully covering the screen. Anyway, "lead to Dock overloading" implies some sort of obligation. "If I give an adult a knife to cut his food, it will lead to stabbing". No it won't. Make a stack from a folder full of aliases, keep your folder under control.
Leopard finally sports a consistent look across all applications.
This rare compliment is misplaced. Consider iTunes scrollbars and the buttons on the Time Machine pref pane. It's like Apple was edging away from Aqua blue, then changed its mind at the last moment.
(Shared is disabled if you're offline)...(It will also include a link to iDisk if you're one of that service's 17 users.)
For me, Shared is "disabled" if OS X decides it can't find any shares, which is more often than just when the Ethernet lead is unplugged (however, that
might be a bug, looking at other posts). I'm not one of iDisk's "17 users", but I still have a link to iDisk - so why add the "if..." clause? I want to stop pointing out all these inaccuracies, but I don't see the point in writing a detailed review that is full of little errors.
And as with Vista, you can easily rearrange these shortcuts, remove shortcuts, or add new shortcuts.
But not, apparently, add new shares, which is what we were just talking about.
Quick Look...apparently modeled after the preview feature in Windows Desktop Search
Or the ability to take a quick look at something in a folder in a physical drawer without actually taking it out and putting it on your desk.
It's typical Apple: Over the top and flamboyant, but very attractive.
The Time Machine starfield is probably OTT and flamboyant. How could Quick Look be made
less minimalist? (yes, I can think of some answers, but to call it "OTT and flamboyant" is stretching it).
Cover Flow... It's attractive put pointless... There's also a completely pointless preview mode for multi-page PDFs
I guess when I was showing someone a quick slideshow yesterday and they could be reminded of what photo they'd just seen / were about to see for context, it was "pointless". "Over-hyped" perhaps, but "pointless" has a specific meaning.
When Apple copied Microsoft's instant search
Why is there this desire for competition? Everyone's done something similar before. Every change is evolutionary. A few weeks ago I was studying the three decades leading up to Newton's
Principia; Kepler's laws having been established by observation (but without casual basis), and looking at the retrograde behaviour of the Great Comet contradicting Descartes' hypothesis, the discussions of Halley, Hooke, Wren, etc. and independent Leibnizian calculus, much of what's in the book would have
inevitably been soon developed. Indeed, Newton was threatening to withdraw the third volume when he found Hooke had proposed inverse square law. But is this any insult to Newton? Goodness, no! Brilliant ideas evolve - they don't appear out of thin air - and much of the hard work is about putting those ideas together to form a coherent system. For any "X did it first", I can give you a "no, Y did something similar earlier".
lets you write notes in Mail. This feature is weird because notes have nothing to do with email
E-mails generally contain snippets of info and instructions. Notes generally contain snippets of info and instructions. The two are suitable for exchange. Whether you have a separate notes app and allow it to communicate well with a Mail app is a fair question, but "nothing to do with email" is simply wrong.
Boot Camp lets you dual-boot between Leopard and Windows XP or Vista. Not to be a jerk about it, but this could prove to be Leopard's best feature:
Because multitasking is overrated and it's better to reboot into Windows than run it alongside OS X with
Parallels or
Fusion? And they're cheaper than a Leopard upgrade, too, if that's all you want.
Note that Boot Camp only works with 32-bit versions of Windows for some reason. If you were hoping to use Vista x64 on that Macbook, as I was, you're out of luck.
"For some reason" - research produces answers. Perhaps even ask on these forums, which I'll do right now: Is it actually impossible to install Vista x64 under Boot Camp, or is it just that certain drivers aren't available? Windows Server 2008 RC0 64-bit works fine under Fusion, so solution as above.
Front Row... something very positive has happened since Tiger: It no longer appears to quietly launch iTunes
Why is this "very positive"? The Apple logo has also changed colour, but it's not "very positive".
As is usually the case, Apple has provided a number of updates for developers and other technical users. The AppleScript scripting language and Xcode and Dashcode development environments have been improved somewhat, and the Automator feature that was so heavily promoted when Tiger shipped in 2005 can now record user actions and recreate them as a workflow. UNIX fans can exult in the fact that Leopard is a fully certified UNIX operating system that conforms to the Single UNIX Specification (SUSv3) and POSIX 1003.1. That should move some boxes.
Ah, all the features that will make the OS more pleasant to develop on, so there is better third-party application support, so more people choose OS X, are brushed over in one paragraph. Bravo.
It's not like OS X, which has had no real world viruses or malware attacks over the year, has gotten any more secure in a realistic sense.
If he doesn't want to read the developer docs, perhaps Thurrott could read
this article (the Time Machine example is stretching it, as backups aren't secure).
Taken a step further, there's no real effort with Leopard to attract Windows users, no application compatibility mode,
Only the Boot Camp he was talking about only minutes ago. And, assuming he hasn't forgotten that a Mac isn't an iPhone and
is open to third party development, Parallels, Fusion, and
Crossover (Wine) are also good.
no wizard for moving over documents and settings automatically, nothing of that kind at all.
It's true,
Move2Mac doesn't exist (disclaimer: not tried it, but "nothing of that kind at all" is pretty much disproven).
What isn't debatable is that Leopard does nothing to tilt the scales any further to the Mac side.
That statement contradicts the whole article: for the scales not to be tilted, new features that would appeal would have to be cancelled out precisely by new features that detract from the platform. Since he has identified not more than a couple of feature removals (e.g. the Start Menu style precursor to stacks), for this statement to be true, Thurrott would have to be arguing that all the features he described are completely useless both from a productivity and entertainment standpoint, for end users and developers.
Microsoft has sold 85 million copies of Vista in 9 months, and it's selling 25 million copies of the OS every quarter.
Incl. OEM?
Make no mistake: Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" is the real deal, a mature and capable operating system and a worthy competitor to Windows Vista. But then, so was Tiger, Leopard's predecessor.
"The current product is good. But so was the last one." A proven track record! That sounds like two good reasons to upgrade.
Some of those (ahem) 300+ new features actually require a .Mac subscription at a hefty $99 a year, while others require the latest version of iLife, also updated annually at $79.
I'm sure tech enthusiasts feel that there's some sort of obligation to purchase the latest version of every piece of software the weekend of release, but iLife '06 still works; the juxtaposition with .Mac, which must be paid for yearly to maintain subscription, is misleading.
Another problem with Leopard is the unmet expectations. Apple, like Microsoft with Windows Vista, promised more than it delivered with Leopard, and even went so far as to promise secret new features that never materialized... That's pathologically dishonest and disillusioning.
This one appears to have been worked through at least $n$ times in the archives; the "secret features" quote is iirc from WWDC 2006, and the secrets were revealed by 2007. Pathologically dishonest, indeed

.
Leopard is also incomplete. If you purchase this product on October 26, you'll be getting pre-release quality software that Apple will update early and often... While your garden-variety Mac zealot may bristle at this suggestion, people who actually beta tested Leopard know what I'm talking about.
"People who actually beta tested" will be aware that the GM was not legitimately released to testers before end users: 581-559>0.
(insert pithy finale here)