Mac OS X Version 10.5.4 Leopard

Manufacturer: Apple List Price: $129.99 Our Price: $103.99

Refined Perfection. The perfection expected of Apple has once again evolved and, as always, continues to surpass it competitors. There are vast improvements on every level. Leopard makes me look at Vista and say "Wow... How absolutely prehistoric." A Solid Update I picked up Leopard on Friday and installed it Saturday morning in my MacBook Pro, which has 4 Gigs of RAM and the 2.2 Ghz Intel Core Duo Processor. The installation took about two hours (including 45 minutes for "disk verification", which I'm guessing you could skip) but virtually none of my time -- I started the process up, picked my language, and sent the installer on its way. I came back two hours later to a finished installation. I use VMWare's Fusion to run Windows XP on my Mac, and my biggest concern was whether I would run into compatibility problems between Fusion and Leopard. The VMWare website is only mildly reassuring, with a statement in the FAQ's that boils down to "gee, we think it'll work." I had pre-installed the Fusion Ver. 1.1 "Release Candidate" from VMWare's website before installing Leopard, and had absolutely no compatibility issues turn up over the weekend -- the Windows programs I use all worked just fine. In fact, the only compatibility issue I ran into was with Lightscribe's little utility program for burning Lightscribe CD labels using the Mac (I have an HP Lightscribe external burner). The utility prgram stopped working in Leopard, although the Windows version of the same utility probram worked just fine in the Fusion Virtual Machine with the HP burner connected through a USB port. As an ugrade, Leopard is solid, but not remarkable -- most of the new features are minor tweaks, fancy frills, or features that will appeal mostly to niche users, with two very important exceptions. The first is Time Machine, which is easily the most useable consumer backup program on the planet. To make it work, you need an HFS+ formatted hard drive, and it works best with a Firewire connection. The La Cie Quadra hard drives for Mac, with their "auto on" switch feature, are perfect. Plan on it taking an hour or two for Mac to make the first backup, but after that Time Machine is completely seamless and quietly makes regular back-ups of your files. The interface for finding backed-up files and restoring them is nothing short of brilliant. The second remarkable new feature is Spaces, which is (for all you old-time Mac users out there) essentially Switcher on steroids -- MAJOR steroids. You can create multiple work spaces and put different programs in each workspace -- and if you have a background activity (like a download) going in one workspace, you can switch to another and the background activity cheerfully continues, out of sight. So you can work on a PowerPoint presentation in one screen while having your browser open in another, so they aren't constantly getting in each other's way. This feature is particularly useful with VMWare's Fusion --you can assign a full-screen Windows environment to its very own separate Space. In theory, up to sixteen "Spaces" are available. Incidentally, if you have a Mighty Mouse, try assigning Spaces to the trackball button -- you click on the trackball to pull up all the active Spaces, and then use the trackball to switch between them. Very spiffy. I imagine that over the next few weeks some glitches will appear, but overall the Leopard upgrade seems very stable and bug free. My only gripe is the price, really -- while Time Machine and Spaces are great achievements, most of the rest of the changes seem like trinkets, and the price seems a little high. But not so high that I wouldn't recommend adding it to any Mac eligible for the upgrade. Best Operating System So Far I've only been using Leopard for a couple days, but so far it's worked perfectly for me -- better, actually, than 10.4.10 was. Here's a short list of the features that I like: 1. Quick View/Finder Icons -- all my documents, PDFs, pictures and Excel files show up as icon previews in the Finder. When I press the space bar, a large version pops up. Now I no longer have to open an application to read over a file quickly. It's also nice for photos 2. Spotlight -- That's the quick find search box in the upper right corner of the screen. It's WAY, WAY, WAY faster than in the previous OS X and can do complex searches if you like. Plus, now when I type a math problem (for example "123-25") in the box, Spotlight shows the result (i.e. "123-25=98"). If I type in a word I don't know, the definition also appears with the other search results. 3. Preview -- Anyone who's ever opened the regular version of Adobe Acrobat knows how dog slow this application is (plus waiting for the updater takes forever). When I open a PDF in a web browser, I have to wait like 10-20 seconds for Acrobat to load. No more. Preview can open PDFs, and now it has lots of controls that make it useable. I can highlight text, write comments, draw shapes on PDFs without opening Acrobat. Yeah!!! 4. Mail -- This is Apple's email client, and it's finally good enough to replace Microsoft Entourage. It's integrated with iCal and Address Book, so everything is connected while still being easy to use. For example, Mail will find stuff that looks like an invitation to do something and offer to put it in your calendar if you hover over that part of the text. By the way, it's also very FAST, especially when showing fancy html messages. 5. Speed -- Overall, this system is just speedier and eliminates a lot of minor inconveniences. By speedier, I don't mean that you really don't need to wait for things to happen. Photoshop opens a lot faster than before, and Safari is also faster. I noticed that some people are having problems. Of course, you can never predict other people's problems, but here's two tips that may help some people: 1. After you first upgrade, Spotlight needs to create an index of your computer. This can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour, but the computer will be slow until it finishes. Don't worry, this only happens once. 2. Make sure you have enough hard drive room on your computer. The operating system takes nearly 9 gigs of space. Keep in mind that you want at least 10 percent of the space free on your hard drive, otherwise it will slow down. Try deleting or backing up unused files (or buy a bigger hard drive). Good stuff. While I initially wanted to wait for the company to iron out bugs, I was convinced to install 10.5. I am happy to say, no bugs that I can see. The networking improvements are astounding. It finds and shares computers effortlessly, you can share screens with your friends on the other side of the country if you grant them permission or invite them to share. The plug and play of everything is simply astounding. I am very impressed. It was worth the upgrade. Outstanding.