Apple’s Newest Revision
Apple’s new operating system, Leopard, has been winning wide praise since its release. Still, a few are left wondering if Cupertino’s latest is mostly hype.
A recent review in InfoWorld offer truly obscene praise for Leopard. The operating system (which he insists is actually an “application platform” in OS X’s case), writes Tom Yager, is a “perfect 10.”
People buy Macs because the platform as a whole is perfect, full stop. Leopard is a rung above perfection. It’s taken as rote that the Mac blows away PC users’ expectations. Leopard blows away Mac users’ expectations, and that’s saying a great deal.
“A rung above perfection?” Sounds unlikely. Well advised is suspicion of reviewers unable to find a single flaw. The explosion of tweaks and hacks following Leopard’s release would seem to suggest otherwise. I suppose the real question is not if Leopard is truly perfect, but if it is superior to the current alternatives.
Paul Thurrott, who has been critically reviewing Microsoft’s products for years, seems to think otherwise. Thurrott acknowledges OS X is a strong operating system.
Indeed, if anything, Apple is in an enviable position: OS X is so solid, so secure, and so functionally excellent that it must be getting difficult figuring out how to massage another $129 out even the most ardent fans.
As to whether Leopard offers much new, he is less convinced “Folks, Leopard is good stuff. But then that’s been true of Mac OS X for quite a while now.” Ultimately, Thurrott finds little new in Leopard compared to either Vista or Leopard’s predecessor, Tiger.
Apple advertises that Leopard includes over 300 new features, but even a casual examination of the new feature list reveals that the vast majority of those “features” are hardly anything to write home about. For example, the DVD player application has been updated for this release, and one might charitably describe that as a “new feature,” in the sense that any improvement is, at least pedantically, new. But Apple doesn’t break things down that way. 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. (Yes, seriously.) 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.
…Oddly enough, even the few major new features in Leopard will look familiar to users of other operating systems. There’s Time Machine, a bizarre take on the Previous Versions feature in Windows. And there’s Spaces, a pleasant graphical front-end to the workspaces functionality that’s been available in UNIX and Linux since, well, forever. What’s old is new again.
Thurrott’s final take? Leopard is mostly a missed opportunity.
But the biggest problem with Leopard is that it doesn’t really offer enough of an advantage over Vista to make anyone want to switch. For all the baloney news stories about Vista’s supposed problems, Microsoft’s latest operating system is actually a solid effort that finally closed the gap with Mac OS X. Leopard was Apple’s chance to once again leapfrog Windows, and given the five years of delays Microsoft put us through, it should have been a slam-dunk. That Apple was only able to come up with something that’s roughly as good as Vista is both surprising and telling, I think. Leopard just isn’t better than Vista. And it should be.
And then there is the ugly. PC Mag’s Oliver Rist writes that OS X is a serious step backward for Apple.
I’m not sure what ticks me off more about Leoptard (I can’t take credit for that nickname—some Brit coined it): the fact that so many of the semi-important changes don’t work, the fact that Apple turned a stable OS into a crash-happy glitz fest, or that the annoying, scruffy Live Free or Die Hard actor infecting my TV (and our Web site, by the way) is pretending that Leopard is better than Vista. It’s not better than Vista. Leopard is Vista.
Parts of each review resonates with me. My own Leopard experiences on my first Mac have been mixed. For the most part, I find OS X to be a tight, well conceived, well executed product. Still, I have no plans to transition fully from Windows XP. My mostly empty, entirely unmolested recent installation of OS X seems dramatically less stable than my year old copy of XP. Then there is OS X’s utterly illogical take on multitasking and application launching: the dock - perhaps I’ll expand on this another time. Performance is not terribly impressive and applications take much longer to launch than on my XP desktop, despite having hardware two generations more advanced on my Mac. Overall, though, it is a pleasant experience, if a little inefficient in all regards.
4 Comments
I will certainly agree that most of what’s in Leopard is not new. People have developed solutions to the issues these updates correct for a long time. Here’s what I think the quoted article misses:
The vast majority of people, even university students in the US, are not computer savvy enough to establish good operating routines for their machine.
Time Machine is the perfect example. Even for those of us who know that regular backups are a good thing, finding a backup utility was a pain and the process wasn’t “fun” in any way. Leopard changes that, by making backups another part of the OS and making searches for old files a “fun” and intuitive process.
Having suffered through working in the HAC lab for 2 years and seeing some future graduates of JHU struggle with basic applications like MS Word, I can only assume that the majority of people out there have similar difficulties.
In that light, Leopard seems like a move in the right direction. Powerful computing for dummies - thumbs up.
I completely disagree. One of the biggest problems with time machine is that it requires and external drive to function. This has at least two significant ramifications. First of all, mobile users will find it broadly useless, as they are unlikely to always be carrying around an external hard drive. More importantly, this means it is disabled by default. Accordingly, those very users you are concerned about will probably never use the feature.
Windows XP’s restore point feature is enabled by default and works without the need for external storage. While it doesn’t have the same granularity of control (ie, it’s system wide restore), Vista’s Shadow Copy feature is much more useful than Time Machine. has a much more functional and usable Shadow Copy feature.
Thurrott sums it up nicely.
It’s true. Carrying around a 500GB external when you go on a business trip is probably not very practical.
However:
Even if one travels frequently for business, one presumably has a home. Even if one returns once a week, that still guarantees a weekly backup of all updated files.
It’s great to have previous versions stored locally, but what happens when the HD fails? We all know this isn’t a question of IF but WHEN. Something tells me that having all one’s files backed up locally fails to protect against this inevitability.
As to being disabled by default, Time Machine is incredibly simple to set up. Steps include:
1) Buy external
2) Plug said external in
3) When prompted by Leopard, click “Yes, make this my Time Machine drive”
That’s fair, and you’re right - backing up files is important and Apple should be lauded for encouraging it. But I am still flummoxed as to why backing up files must be conflated with versioning. Time machine goes miles beyond mirroring. The entire “time machine” metaphor alludes to the versioning aspect of the product. It is designed to offer people an intuitive alternative to setting up their own subversion repositories. This concept is distinct from disk redundancy and one cripples the product by alloying the tasks.