In fact, he considers using Leopard akin to the Windows experience:
I’ve given Leopard a chance, but it’s pretty clear, this is not a good operating system release.
I’ve been out of the Mac loop for most of the last decade, just got back in a bit over 2 years ago. I don’t know if early OS releases are generally as crappy as this one, but I wasn’t prepared for where we’re at now. If I had known, I would have waited, instead of upgrading most of my Macs to the new system.
Talking with a friend a few days ago, he asked what I thought of Leopard. He had installed the new version, like me, the first day it came out. “I’m not liking it,” I said. He said something that was simple, profound and revealing: “It’s like Windows.” It is. It’s that unpleasant to use. It disappears for long periods of time. Systems that didn’t used to crash now crash regularly. On one system three hard disks were rendered unusable, and I lost a couple of full days restoring them (luckily I had good backups). The user interface is quirky. The new networking interface is a big step backward. The firewall moved and lost features! That’s simply never done, you don’t charge customers to remove features, esp security features. I think Apple doesn’t understand how many people depend seriously on their Macs.
To Apple, I left Windows because it held my time and work in low regard. I was happy with the Mac because it seemed reliable. Now it seems my friend was right, I’m using Windows again, and I’m not happy about it.
I don’t know what the story is here. From my angle, Leopard has been flawless. The only thing that doesn’t work are some Adobe CS3 apps, a situation that has been well documented. Other than that nit, everything works perfectly. I’ve not had a single lockup or crash, and no data has been lost. My firewire drives are fine. Most everything in the OS is quite noticeably faster than it was under Tiger, and nothing is slower. It boots quicker. Apps launch faster.
Overall, I couldn’t be happier with my Leopard install experience. It’s been that smooth.
As a matter of note, I performed an Archive and Install. Others do a straight upgrade, and while that seems like that’d be the most tested migration path, that’s the scenario that seems to be generating most of the bugs.
So, you have stories of of bad experiences and impressions, and you have good ones, like mine. It’s anecdote versus anecdote. I’ve been pounding on Leopard pretty hard, and it’s yet to hiccup on me.
I wonder, however, if unreasonable expectations have something to do with this. And I don’t mean just with respect to Apple and OSX.
Winer suggests that he moved to Apple for the reliability and stability. Now, he has all sorts of (fairly large) issues with Leopard, yet he doesn’t provide that much detail. Not that it matters, because his perception is his reality.
I wonder if the larger question is this: has the PC (let’s use that term for any personal computer running a mainstream desktop OS) and its software ecosystem become too complex for a standard beta process to sufficiently ensure satisfactory quality? Meaning: is any popular “.0” release of an OS that has to support mainstream applications and everything the web cloud has to offer going to be considered of high quality?
Vista sure wasn’t. And now, the more you look, the more you see that Leopard is getting its share of bitching and grumbling.
Has personal computing technology gotten to the point where early adopters will almost certainly get burned? How can the beta structure — and in Apple’s case, a private, closed beta — realistically come close to providing the test coverage required by the OS’s userbase and their use cases?
I think we may have hit critical mass for quality (or lack thereof) with .0 releases of major operating systems.
Regardless of the reality that underpins all of this, the 10.5.1 release is going to be widely anticipated, if the web buzz is to be believed.
23 responses so far ↓
Chris Pirillo // November 5, 2007 at 10:40 pm
I find Leopard *SO* much different than Windows, in a good way…
Jeff Ventura // November 5, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Chris: so do I, but the stories from around the web are somewhat concerning.
Like I said, my Leopard experience has been pretty much perfect. No complaints.
Chris Pirillo // November 5, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Some Tiger users may not be happy with the change, but if you’re moving *FROM* Windows, the change is completely different (read: better).
J // November 5, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I seem to recall Apple recommending “Archive and install” as the best way to avoid problems with 3rd party software.
Paul Johnson // November 5, 2007 at 11:19 pm
This Winer article smacks of personal illwill in its invective and lack of detail. You don’t have to search Google very long to find lots of other instances of this kind of Wining behavior. Maybe Leopard made some of Winer’s software investments redundant or obsolete?
Tim Yu // November 5, 2007 at 11:19 pm
To reinforce J’s comments. I’m loving Leopard and haven’t had the problems that are being reported. Maybe it’s because I never trust the “Upgrade” option and always swear by Archive & Install.
Funny. If I weren’t already happily running Leopard problem-free, I would be scared to install it myself, based on the reports I read on the web. To me that just goes to emphasize that public forums tend to enrich mightily for the complainers.
Jeff Ventura // November 5, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Tim: That’s EXACTLY right.
Bill // November 5, 2007 at 11:31 pm
I upgraded my Pro Tower [without archiving] without a glitch, then decided to upgrade Tiger on an 8yr old G4 with an OWC 1.25 GHz upgraded CPU[again without archiving]. Flawless install and same speedy increase. The G4 had Logitech Control Center, which I read had APE, but there was no BSD. Dave is crazy.
I have been using Leopard and it has been flawless. I created a family DVD from a miniDVD camcorder with iMovie and iDVD 06′ in record time. MS Office2004, palm desktop, and a lot of other apps work perfectly.
Wadhah Hussain // November 6, 2007 at 12:55 am
I’ve been running Leopard since its release day. Everything has been flawless. However I think the problem relies on the customer’s expectation of Apple. Until today, Vista has issues. There are still drivers that simply do not work on Vista. However, no matter how stable or smooth Leopard is, people still want more, for the simple reason that it is an Apple product. Yes Leopard was delayed, but what release hasn’t been delayed when it comes to the OS world. Software makers have to be able to know a 110% that their software will work when deployed on millions of computers. MS can get away with it simply because they are known for their faulty software.
Rollie Pohlie // November 6, 2007 at 12:56 am
He didn’t supply enough info or any good un-biased points for his opinion to be taken seriously.
Nat // November 6, 2007 at 1:29 am
I ‘ve been running Mac for like, my whole life, and Leopard is easily my favourite OS so far! I’ve only had one grievance with it, a connection issue involving MSN messenger and Adium, but it was easily resolved. All my other programs run smoother, faster, better. I love cover flow and quick look and spaces is awesome! I’m yet to acquire a large enough external hard drive to use Time Machine with, but I’m keenly anticipating it. Leopard trumps Windoze, hands down!
Terry Grant // November 6, 2007 at 1:29 am
I’ve installed Leopard on two machines with the simple “upgrade” option, one an Alu iMac, the other a iBook G4. No problems on either. Both running daily with minimal RAM. I don’t get the issues that some seem to be having.
Jeff Harrell // November 6, 2007 at 1:34 am
I also belong to the group of people who haven’t seen any problems at all with Leopard.
I’ve heard stories, yes. Nobody I know personally has had any problems, but I’ve heard friend-of-a-friend stories. The common thread in all these tales seems to be the correlation between people who’ve allegedly had problems with Leopard and people who make a habit of installing piles and piles of third-party software of dubious quality.
There’s that old saying: When you stir a teaspoon of crap into a gallon of ice cream, you get a gallon of crap. No matter how reliable Leopard itself might be, one wonky kernel extension can render it useless. The less crap you stir into your laptop, the happier you’ll be.
Andy // November 6, 2007 at 1:49 am
I agree… having installed and used Leopard on three Macs including a Mac Pro, dual G5 and iBook G4 it has been almost all good with very little bad. Other than some minor glitches with certain applications, I have not had any trouble. I did archive and install. If I recall correctly, Winer abandoned development of his various script software on the Mac platform prior to the first release of Mac OS X due to gripes with Apple. It was a highly publicized and discussed event on the Mac web at the time since he was previously viewed as a pro-Mac developer during the dark days in the mid to late 90s when Apple was “going out of business any day now.” Now I’m reading that he “left Windows because it held my time and work in low regard.” It doesn’t seem to me that he will be happy with any OS… not sure why anyone should pay any attention to him anymore. He’s just a bellyaching griper at this point. And what the heck is he doing with his Macs that requires days to restore? A daily Carbon Copy Cloner backup of multiple volumes can be restored in hours, not days. I’ve been fortunate and not had to do it as the result of a failure but I have upgraded hard drives and it doesn’t take “days” to move the drive’s contents, complete and bootable, from one drive to another. Perhaps he backs up to floppy disk? Anyway, I hope he finds the OS nirvana he seeks.
Mike // November 6, 2007 at 5:11 am
Generally speaking, I like Leopard and I’ve had no real problems with it nor really with 3rd-party apps on it. (FWIW, I used erase and install and restored by data, which I’d backed up with rsync.)
However, *this* bug is really bad, and is rightly getting attention at the moment:
http://tomkarpik.com/articles/massive-data-loss-bug-in-leopard/
Andy Piper // November 6, 2007 at 6:35 am
I have to say that my experience has been broadly positive, but a commenter on my post has had a lot of issues getting it installed. I’m sure the next patch will help to clean up a lot of the minor issues, but generally speaking I’ve had nothing significant go wrong for me so far.
MMissive // November 6, 2007 at 10:08 am
Leopard has given me a great deal of trouble (freezing up without warning, crashing, slow) on a G4 dual 1GHz with 512 MB RAM (which is below requirements), but runs wonderfully on a G5 dual 2GHz with 1 GB RAM. I’m wondering how many other people are trying to run it without the correct amount of RAM.
Apple should back up and work on stability here, though. Slowness with insufficient RAM is acceptable, freezing up is really not.
Jay // November 6, 2007 at 10:20 am
Andy - I’ve had the same perception about Dave for at least the past few years. He’s been a true malcontent, yet so many bloggers kneel at the throne of the great and wise Winer. I challenge anyone to find a glowing comment from him about anything Apple.
And he shouldn’t be advertising that it took him days to restore…anything. That just makes him look worse.
Personally, I’ve had enough of him.
Tom Clarke // November 6, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Did a one click update on my iMac and I’ve had absolutely no problems whatsoever. My machine runs faster, Finder is better, Spotlight is better, even the dock has grown on me. I too am pretty sure that this comes down to having dodgy 3rd party apps/hacks installed.
Greg Reinacker // November 6, 2007 at 1:50 pm
I’m coming from Windows, and I’ve been totally happy with Leopard. A couple minor little glitches here and there, but that’s to be expected…
Jim // November 6, 2007 at 8:53 pm
I’ve had almost zero problems with Leopard on my aging G4 17″ 1.5 ghz pb. I did the prudent homework of getting rid of old, useless apps, as much cruft as I could find and making sure the Tiger setup was as stable and clean as I could - I actually had to do an archive and install of tiger to get rid of something nasty in the system that wouldn’t let me create bootable backup. The only glitch with Leopard was at the front end of install - the installer could seem to find the disk in the pb. Once I stepped back and ran the disk utility and the drive showed up there, all was well. It’s snappier, I generally like the new treatments of things. For a zero release it’s damn good. I’m not sitting here hoping for an early .1 update.
I’ve been watching Dave and his stuff for a long time. He pushed into some important spaces that moved the web and blogging and RSS and such a long way. We’re all getting older, and the older I get the more license I take to be a crank once in awhile. Dave’s been mastering that art for years. But again, he’s stimulated this comment set that pretty fairly gives us a picture of how well Leopard is really doing. Pretty well, by all accounts.
geebee // November 6, 2007 at 11:22 pm
Simple update to our schools iBook G4 1 GHz, 1 gig RAM = painfully slow machine, Same to MBP 2.4/2 gig Santa-Rosa 17 = three hours of ‘four minutes to go’ but machine ran like a rocket-ship on rails once finalised. Honestly, five mac veterans watching the instal were teetering on the decision to pull the plug and start from scratch with a fresh, clean instal, such was the lack of feedback from the installer, however, patience (and indecision) were rewarded.
The MBP was cataloguing it’s guts out for spotlight in the BG while we put mail, safari, and spaces through a severe work-out. We were all stunned to see how well the Mac ran these apps, while it also ran Microsoft XP Pro, Virtual Studio, and more in Parallels, and Vista in Fusion!
I am thrilled to see how well Leopard seems to have addressed the multi-processor and 64bit resource wastage that was an embarrassment with Le Tigre, but I will wait till about .2 or .3 before installing on my own machine.
I am also appalled at the longevity of the “glaring finder bug”, but am relieved to discover that I am not brain-dead after all, and my mac really did gobble up data on a number of occasions! Whew! Looks like I can still have a quiet puff on a Saturday night,
David Gustavson // February 27, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Well, here it is nearly 4 months later, and we’re at X.5.2 now, and despite an erase and install I’m unable to find anything at all in the content of my emails.
The problem is, the system looks and sounds so good, I finally switched from Eudora to Mail–seemed like it was time, Mail was finally ready. I switched my wife too, which greatly compounds this catastrophe. I’ve found many recipes online for fixing the problem, but within 24 hours the fix has always come undone and the content has become unsearchable again. There are a lot of things I love about Leopard, but the pain of losing easy access to my mail overwhelmingly dominates this experience. (I’ve used emails for 15 years as my personal memory aid and informal database, worked very well in Eudora with 100MB mailboxes totaling several GB).
So the lesson is, when things get better, people try to use them, and expose new problems, making things seem worse instead.
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