My sensible head told me to wait. Tiger was working great for me and did everything I needed. The problem is I love new Apple stuff and after a few days I couldn’t bear reading forum posts and listening to podcasts gushing over how yummy Leopard was. At least by waiting a few days I […]
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OS X Leopard: Was it Worth the Wait… and the Bugs?

Dec 20th 2007 by

OS X Leopard: Was it Worth the Wait?

My sensible head told me to wait. Tiger was working great for me and did everything I needed. The problem is I love new Apple stuff and after a few days I couldn’t bear reading forum posts and listening to podcasts gushing over how yummy Leopard was. At least by waiting a few days I didn’t get caught by the Blue Screen of Death bug caused by upgrading from Tiger when you had Application Enhancer installed: I was able to run an Archive and Install and things worked fine. Sort of…

My main work machine (a MacBook Pro) has been unstable ever since installing Leopard. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to Force Quit apps such as Mail and the number of times I’ve sent Bug Reports to Apple. On two occasions the OS has hung up and I’ve had to hold down the power button to reboot. Not good news for an operating system that boasts it just works and doesn’t crash (from Apple’s GetaMac site: “If you spend more of your precious time figuring out why your PC crashes than you spend taking out the garbage every week, you need a Mac.” – yeah, funny.

I guess I’m fortunate that for me I’ve only had the inconvenience of crashing apps and a hanging OS. Others have reported loss of wireless connectivity and being a Drobo user, I’ve been paying close attention to the DroboSpace forums where many are reporting issues with their Drobo working with Leopard.

Well, it seems that all the bug reporting to Apple will pay dividends – the latest developer release of 10.5.2 is over 350MB and has more bug fixes than any other point release of OS X.

This leads me to the question: did Apple release OS X 10.5 too early? Vista has taken over a year for Service Pack 1 RC1 to be issued and here we are with what appears to be effectively a Leopard service pack two months after release. I don’t know about you, but I get the feeling Apple would have liked more time to release Leopard but the bad publicity caused by a further delay forced their hand. So, Apple released what was really just a beta version of the OS and made the millions of Leopard 10.5 users the largest group of beta testers out there (well, after the Vista users!).

So, was it worth all the hassle?

I love Spaces, Time Machine has allowed me to recover two documents I deleted by mistake (so thanks Apple) and Quick Look is pretty cool even though it’s not a must-have for me.

However, Stacks sucks and the Dock and Menu Bar changes are just eye candy (although I must admit, I really like the eye candy). Also, for me, the other visible day-to-day changes such as to Mail are nothing special.

Yes, the framework has been upgraded and Core Animation will no doubt lead to great apps in the future but right now I’m thinking to myself was it worth the inconvenience I’ve had over the past two months? I’m just not sure it was.

I’d be interested to know your experiences with Leopard and whether you think it has been a worthy upgrade.

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