Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Reason to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard?

C

cvahl

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 9, 2007
94
0
Boston
Sorry if this question should have already been posed, but a colleague at work saw Leopard running on my Macbook last week and asked me whether I would recommend him to switch from Tiger to Leopard. I told him to do it, cause I really like it, but I could not give him good reasons because this is my first Mac, so I cannot compare it.

What do you think I should tell him, are there any good reasons right now to switch from a nicely working Tiger to Leopard, or would you advise him to wait till it is really stable and bug free?
Thanks for your help!
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

spaces is so usefull for multitaskers
 
It wouldn't hurt waiting until 10.5.2 but with 10.5.1 out you don't have to worry as much about the release bugs. Honestly, the best way for your colleague to gauge if it is worth it is by messing around on your computer.
 
I'm just now discovering the awesomeness that is Back To My Mac.

That aside, Time Machine alone is worth the price of admission.
 
Its mainly the little things - foreground windows are now more prominent, Mail has an activity monitor, WebClip is cool if thats you're thing,
 
It's actually very difficult to give a solid reason. There are few major differences but lots and lots of of little improvements. If someone said "give me one good reason" I'd be hard pushed.

The biggest reason for me is Time Machine. It's not about the pretty interface, it's about the fact that I can plug in a USB HDD, click a button and forget about it. It's the first time I've kept up backups for more than like 3 days in my entire life (20 years of using computers), even though my photos are important to me.

It came with my new iMac (previously and still a G4 Powerbook user) but I'd easily have paid the £80 for that function alone.
 
You have a decent functional car, nothing impressive, but it works. An old friend from your past calls and asks for a ride to work.... You go to pick her up, and notice she's a stripper now, and still hot, but whatever. While driving her to work, you're thinking, wow, look at that I can't believe she's in here with me. You drop her off, and wave, smiling - but knowing you want nothing to do with a stripper.

Then that (#*$en glitter will never come out of your car, and will track it's way into every corner of everything you own. And the pretty view is gone, and that "hot girl" from high-school isn't really the person you once knew. So you try to remember the old "version" of her - but it gets snapped out of your mind every time you see a piece of that (#*$ing glitter somewhere.

That's been my experience with Leopard. In spite of some advancements, and more flashy items - things were almost better with Tiger. Because even though Leopard is that stripper, and you throw money at them... You want to hang out with your old friend Tiger, deep down inside.

Does that explain everything?
 
1) Spotlight in Leopard is actually useful unlike the early alpha it is in Tiger. In 10.4, it would stall half the time and, when it decided to work, you could not search phrases or do Boolean searches.

2) Say bye-bye to Classic and Photoshop 7 (Mostly sarcasm, but actually, Leopard might push you to finally upgrade some of your old apps if you have those).

3) Networking in Leopard actually works, again, unlike the early alpha it is in Tiger. There might be some rough edges still in 10.5, but they should be fixed soon.

4) Time machine might be useful, since it is one of the few practical solutions for incremental backups. (If you saved a file over the previous version that you now want to retrieve, regular backup software is less likely to help you).

Other things are mostly geeky and/or gimmicky and will unlikely help you earn more money if you are using your Mac as a workhorse, but might nevertheless be useful. Some quirks are expected, such as the stacks and transparent menu bar, but they are mostly livable.

Some Mac users still do not know how to use Expose, let alone other things (rather smart people, actually). For those, there will be no benefit from upgrading.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back