vs. 
Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off
I had to be talked, wined, dined, and peer-pressured into buying my first MacBook Pro this past January. But once I plunked down the bucks for the slightly less hardware oomph per dollar than I’m used to, I was impressed by one thing: Everything. Just. Worked. Period. Tiger just works. End of story.
But Apple marketing has the swinging pair of crabapples to actually print “Leopard Just Works” on its Web site. Hey, at least Microsoft reps have the decency to look a little abashed when you point out their product’s screwups. Apple reps just glare at you like they’re daring you to say something. Well, I’ve got something to say. Several somethings.
Vista Similarity 1: Wait for a Service Pack—Perpetually
Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz
Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface “Fixes”
Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking
And my personal favorite:
Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck
For Leopard, the sad bundled app-as-feature is Time Machine. To hear Mac moonies tell it, this is the best thing to happen to backup since the letter b. In reality, however, it sucketh and it sucketh huge. Then there’s the annoying marketing ploy showcasing how amazing it is that Time Machine takes a snapshot of the entire file system. News flash: EVERY backup app can take a snapshot of the entire file system. That would be the reason we call them “backup programs.”
At least Apple doesn’t make you take out a second mortgage to buy the upgrade. Also 1 version instead of 5 like in Vista.
I dunno what his beef with Time Machine is; it’s working for me just fine.
“Back to My Mac,” on the other hand: not working at all for me so far.
Win some, lose some, I guess.
I do agree about the unnecessary UI changes; Stacks replaces pretty good functionality with not so good; looked great in the demo, but not that useful in practice.
I’m gonna agree only with the nuked network comment. Back in tiger, you had more control over your wireless network. the leopard network settings do it all automatically, which tends to make the entire network blow.
second, I would have added the firewall as an example of worthless tinkering that didn’t need to be tinkered with. the old firewall had a simple botton, on or off. even today, I still can’t tell if the firewall is even working
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer platform.
I have to say I hate Leopard. I have trouble connecting to my network now as well as it takes forever to boot up and shut down my systems.
Boot camp ate my drive and I had to do a reinstall, plugged in my backup drive to restore all of my music and files and guess what? There was nothing there. 15 gigs of music, pictures and video was gone. Several years worth of money spent on the iTunes store was wiped by Mr. Time Machine. I have 4 Macs, but luckily I’d only installed Leopard on 2 systems.
I’m re-ripping my cd collection slowly on my Vista machine and will keep things there until Apple gets their act together on this one.
5,
You’re lying. Mac OS and Steve Jobs would NEVER do that to you…
Just a matter of time now . . .
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John,
I have to diagree with you on this one. Yeah, it has a couple bugs, but it is no where close to being a big of a debacle that is Vista.
I have both Mac and PC systems here and I have to say something I thought I’d NEVER be saying: I’ve had a lot more problems with the Leopard upgrades than I have had with Vista upgrades.
Hmmm.. Eventually the path to bloatware reaches everyone.
What I think is significant is that Vista is now the baseline of crappy operating systems. In the article, Rist compares Leopard to Vista the way an automotive columnist would compare a car to an Edsel or a Yugo.
Made the upgrade on 3 machines: 2 MacIntel, 1 G4. And the G4 is my wife’s. No strain. No pain.
Had to downgrade security requirements when a couple of visiting Windoze machines arrived – but, that’s always needed to get them on the wireless network.
Time Machine works – automatically – which is the intent for non-geeks.
Poisonally, I think the perpetual defining characteristic of all the whines is hobbyist geek vs. the rest of us. Same guys who whined over losing predominance of the command line. Though they still have Linux.
In fact, it’s the hobbyist geeks who have their fourteen favorite pieces of open source bullshit 3rd-party “utilities” that crap up every OS they come in contact with – who have the problems. The only standards they meet are ideological.
I had my first experience working with Vista last weekend, doing some tech support for my parents.
It sucks. It really, really sucks.
I don’t know about Leopard. But if it sucks as bad as Vista, it must really suck.
Chuckle. Just looked at Rist’s qualifications – aside from the social hookup of geek writers hiring other geek writers. He seem to have found a niche managing profit systems for realtors and property managers.
Matching ethics and character?
Are you kidding? Leopard is great. Definitely improved over Tiger. I think this whole thing is just too subjective. This idiot is finding patterns in Leopard for him that MIGHT have some sort of possible resemblance or something peripherally in common with patterns in Vista, and thus the problem must be the same, Leopard is the same as Vista! Oh my lord stop the presses!
/sarcasm
Leopard works just fine for me, did an in place upgrade on a 5 year old G5, and upgraded to 10.5.1, all is well. The author needs to put a frickin disclaimer in your article that says it is HIS experience before he starts assuming things about every install of Leopard.
Whatever, Leopard works for me. Better than XP did. Vista was a nightmare. People can compare the two all they want. I don’t think that the columnist has a problem with Apples attitude not so much the operating system.
I’ve been using Vista Ultimate x64 since the beta days and it has its issues, but I would never go back to XP. All this whining about Vista is the same whining that happened with XP came out.
I installed leopard on a 1 intel iMac and a powerbook G4. All works great and upgrade was painless I would not go back to tiger.
I also like Vista I originally had some problems with a few drivers but I’m running it on my iMac. Working great now.
>>All this whining about Vista is the same
>>whining that happened with XP came out.
Uh, I don’t think so. I’ve never met a single person who has actually gone out and bought Vista (and I know quite a few people with computers, believe it or not). Everyone I know got it rammed down their throats with a new PC, until the masses became SO enraged with the shitty performance, DRM, and lack of any raison d’ĂŞtre other than the security (which could have been included in XP/ SP3) that they started selling new PCs with an upgrade back to XP. If it weren’t such a pain in the ass, I’d switch this computer back to XP.
I haven’t had any problems with TIger on my Mac, and based on the reviews I’ve seen on Leopard, I won’t be upgrading anytime soon. It seems not to suck quite as bad as Vista, but it’s certainly nothing to run out and spend money on.
I have a few mac’s I upgraded the newer machines and because it won’t load on the older ones, they will stay Tiger…
My favorite? my old thinkpad with BSD Unix and X it just works… Tiger is next… Leopard has worked as advertised… but I may be getting old but I think less is more… I’ll get used to it. I wonder what in heaven could come next? a touch screen like the iphone on the computer? so we can use our fingers as a pointer?
Invest in a screen cleaning co!!! ha!
I don’t know that the hell Apple did to networking in Leopard. It is seriously screwed up. If you need to put a Leopard machine into a multi platform network, you will find that it is seriously lacking.
I’m no dummy.. but I could not get my friend’s Leopard machine to access a WinXP machine on his network. It was always easy with Tiger. I appears that Apple somehow dropped or hide the SMB services that allow OSX to work with Windows File Sharing. I gave up after two hours of trying.
All I found on the net where similar tales of grief with Leopard’s networking “features”. No solutions. And Apple has been zero help.
Gee Apple. How hard is it to get a Mac to see a WinXP box? You used to have Tiger doing it. What gives?
it takes alot of horsepower to encrypt real time data and send it to “the man”
Win98 runs great
All three of my heads are with the Mustinitioamentero on this. In the absence of any compelling reaons to do otherwise, I’m gonna stay wif 10.4.11 for the forseeable future. Maybe by 10.5.4 or so it’ll be worth upgrading…
I’m sorry to hear this about Leopard. I’m so mad a Microsoft that I was hoping to move to a Mac, finally. On my Windows XP machine at work, I’ve just been forced to upgrade to Office 2007 from Office 2003. Now maybe I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but where the hell is all the bitching about this terrible new user interface we all have to learn? And there is no option to go to the regular menu system. Of course there is the option of buying the “Classic Menu for Office 2007 v3.8” from addintools.com for $30, but geez…
>>Now maybe I’ve been out of the loop for a
>>while, but where the hell is all the
>>bitching about this terrible new user
>>interface we all have to learn?
Nobody uses Office 2007 (except dipshits like me, who bought it). That’s why nobody’s bitching about it.
Just wait. I predict corporate productivity will grind to a halt once cubicle dwellers get saddled with that thing.
Better learn all the keyboard shortcuts while you still can (for some reason, Micro$oft forgot to disable them and force users to go through the interface). If you don’t know the shortcuts, you’re fucked. Just close your eyes and enter the keystrokes, as what shows up on the screen before the action is complete will only confuse you.
His biggest gripe is Time Machine?! Does he even understands how it works and why it is revolutionary?
I currently have all my files backed up at various intervals stretching all the way back to the day I upgraded. And all of them are accessible instantly. And despite all this work Time Machine has to do, it does not rescan the entire bloody hard disk for changes every hour. It has a spotlight service called FSevents to keep track of all the changes.
Why not go ahead and try doing incremental backups every hour and come back and tell us how bad your back up software “suckeths”.
Seriously, there are legitimate gripes for leopard. But to claim it is bad because of Time Machine is such a moronic thing to say it is not even funny.
The “point release” argument is a hollow one.
Apple’s use of UNIX is what has prompted the roman numeral X for its OS, then translated into 10. Each major upgrade of GUI features, utilities, and capabilities has had a new name and a higher-number “point” added each time.
10.5 isn’t Service Pack 5 for 10.0, in other words.
#26: I don’t consider myself a dipshit for using Office 2007, which, BTW, “just works”.
>>I don’t consider myself a dipshit for
>>using Office 2007, which, BTW, “just works”.
Yeah, it works just about as well as Office 2003 did, once you get over the learning curve of the new interface (and start remembering to save your files as .doc instead of the useless M$FT format that is the default).
I don’t consider myself a dipshit for using Office 2007, I consider myself a dipshit for buying it. As far as I can tell, it does nothing I want or need over and above 2003.
I just consider that a program that can do FULL sci, notation is a WASTe of my time, AS I DONT NEED IT…