It's official: Apple to Ship Mac OS X Leopard on October 26

[AppleInsider]

Apple confirmed Tuesday that Mac OS X Leopard will go on sale Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that the company's online store is now accepting pre-orders for the software.

Leopard is packed with more than 300 new features and introduces a brand new desktop with Stacks, a new way to easily access files from the Dock; a redesigned Finder that lets users quickly browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to instantly see files without opening an application; Spaces, an intuitive new feature used to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; and Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac.

"Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we've ever released," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs. "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129."

Leopard's new desktop includes the redesigned 3D Dock with Stacks, a new way to organize files for quick and easy access with just one click. Leopard automatically places web, email and other downloads in a Downloads stack to maintain a clutter-free desktop, and users can instantly fan the contents of this and other Stacks into an elegant arc right from the Dock. Users can also create their own Stacks for quick access to folders, documents or applications. Leopard's new look extends to all applications, with every window on the desktop offering a consistent design theme and active windows outlined by deeper shadows that make them stand out.

The updated Finder includes Cover Flow and a new sidebar with a simplified way to search for, browse and copy content from any PC or Mac on a local network. Content on any computer on a local network can now be searched using Spotlight, browsed using Cover Flow or copied across the network with a simple drag and drop. .Mac members can also use the new Back to My Mac feature to browse and access files on their remote Macs over the Internet.

Meanwhile, Apple bills Quick Look as the fastest and easiest way for users to look inside files without launching them or even having the application that created them. With Quick Look, users can instantly view full-screen, high-resolution files of virtually anything, even media files, from any view in the Finder.

Another new feature, Spaces, gives users a powerful new way to organize their work by creating customized desktops which can contain only those applications or documents needed for each project, with the ability to quickly switch between Spaces with the mouse or keyboard.

One of the most powerful features of Leopard is a new piece of backup software dubbed Time Machine, which lets users easily back up all of the data on their Mac, find lost files and even restore all of the software on their Mac. With just a one-click setup, Time Machine automatically keeps an up-to-date copy of everything on the Mac. In the event a file is lost, users can search back through time to find deleted files, applications, photos and other digital media and then instantly restore the file. If it's ever necessary, Leopard can also easily restore an entire system from the Time Machine data on an external drive.

Mail has also been updated in Leopard and features more than 30 stationery designs and layouts that look great on a Windows PC or Mac so users can easily send stylish, personalized emails with beautiful graphics and photos. Notes and To Dos help users stay organized by acting just like emails that can be easily created, saved as drafts, synced across multiple Macs and stored in Smart Mailboxes. Data detectors automatically sense phone numbers, addresses and events so they can be added to Address Book or iCal with just a few clicks, and users can keep up-to-date by getting the latest news and blog feeds delivered directly to the their mailboxes with a built-in RSS reader.

iChat, which Apple calls the 'easiest-to-use video conferencing application' on any personal computer, offers even richer video chats in Leopard with iChat Theater, which makes it easy to show photos, presentations, videos or files in a video conference; screen sharing which lets users remotely view and operate another Mac; and Photo Booth effects for fun distortions and video backdrops that can instantly make users appear to be anywhere they choose.

Other new features in Leopard include:
improved Parental Controls, aiding parents in managing their kids' online activities with automatic identification of unsuitable content before allowing website access, plus time limits and activity logs that can be accessed from any Mac on a home network; the complete Boot Camp release, previously available only as a beta, making it possible to run Windows natively on Intel-based Macs; Web Clip, bringing anything that a user wants from a web page to Dashboard as a live widget; new Photo Booth features, helping users create animated iChat buddy icons or fun effects and backdrops with still or video images; an enhanced Dictionary with Wikipedia built in, allowing users to access up to date information on virtually any subject in a snap; a newly updated iCal with multi-user calendaring based on the new CalDAV standard; and an updated version of Front Row, making it even easier to play music or watch movies, TV shows and photos on a Mac using the ultra-simple Apple Remote.
Pricing & Availability

Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard will be available on October 26 at Apple's retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $129 (US) for a single user license, and online pre-orders can be made through Apple's online store starting today. The Mac OS X Leopard Family Pack is a single-household, five-user license that will be available for a suggested retail price of $199 (US). Volume and maintenance pricing is available from Apple. The standard Mac OS Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after October 1, 2007 for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95 (US). Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 Mhz or faster) processor. Full system requirements can be found at Apple's website.

Check out AppleInsider's ongoing Road to Leopard Series: iChat 4.0, Mail 3.0, Time Machine; Spaces, Dock 1.6, Finder 10.5, Dictionary 2.0, and Preview 4.0.

[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]

[rghenderson]

YAY!

*claping*

*celebratory fireworks*

[bobmarksdale]

I guess I'll go get in line now...

WOOT!!

[lenny]

I'm eager to get my hands on final release! I know it's better to wait for 10.5.2 but...

[ros3ntan]

is it an elephant or a giant Leopard???

[sCreeD]

It's Vista-sized.

(Blasphemy, I know)

[troberts]

Originally Posted by ros3ntan

is it an elephant or a giant Leopard???

9GB is not that bad when you realize it is including everything. I bet if you got rid of the development environment, all the drivers you do not need, and the localizations you could free 3-4GB of space easy.

[pax85]

Got a question.
Does the new FrontRow now include iPhoto Events? If not, that would suck hard! Very dissapointing.
Please say it does!

[rickag]

I'll definitely be buying for my family's iMac G5 iSight, then wait for any information how well it runs on a 1.25 Ghz G4 Powerbook to see if my laptop can handle it. Here's hoping it will run fine on my laptop.

[kim kap sol]

Originally Posted by ros3ntan

is it an elephant or a giant Leopard???

Could be a Liger...they're shipping the wrong cat. :'(

edit: pre-emptive message to UK folks... before some brit says that Apple is charging 20% in the UK...it's the VAT. VAT!!!! Stoooopid! You ah so stoooopid!

[crees!]

Interesting how my student discount used to be $79 for Panther and Tiger. For Leopard it is $116. Employee discount is $107, so I'll go with that

[running]

I don't know if it was on old Leopard pages, but if you wonder what these "300+ new features" mean, you can read all of them here on the new Leopard pages (some of them are stupid - MOVIE WIDGET! KEWL! - but some of them are suprise to me, such as ODF support in TextEdit )

[Ireland]

What's all this Aqua that's still present. I'm disappointed in you Apple.

[yama]

Can we now point and laugh at all the posters who insisted that Leopard would never ship this month, or that it was going to be delayed longer than Vista?

[Zoc]

Pre-order done for me

[Jeremy Brown]

I've now pre-ordered. Hurray. And it's cheaper in Australia than what I read it would be in Australian Mac World. Only $145 australian dollars with the education discount, with free shipping to boot. That's not bad, especially considering the price of Vista Ultimate.

SIDE NOTE: Has anyone ever tried to navigate the Microsoft Store? It is a joke. You need to be a detective to find what you want. I think I've contracted RSI from all the click-thrus. I was just trying to find out the australian price of Vista Ultimate.

[green-bee.salsa]

Waitress, get your ass over here. Leopard is ready

[running]

now i realized - Developer tools requires 1GB of memory - so bad :/ I hope I will be able to run it at my Mini with 512mb (in the end, I run Illustrator too, that has 1GB required)

[Druth086]

I don't understand why Apple has started to abandon its student discount. This was one of the very things that could make someone their biggest fan. I realize they still have it on computers, but if they are doing this to their software I wouldn't be surprised if they started to reduce it slowly with their hardware. I paid $69 for Tiger and now I'm paying $116 for Leopard? Doesn't make much sense to me. And I know this post will get flack from everyone who is not a student anyway. Sorry. 8-

[ros3ntan]

Originally Posted by Druth086

I don't understand why Apple has started to abandon its student discount. This was one of the very things that could make someone their biggest fan. I realize they still have it on computers, but if they are doing this to their software I wouldn't be surprised if they started to reduce it slowly with their hardware. I paid $69 for Tiger and now I'm paying $116 for Leopard? Doesn't make much sense to me. And I know this post will get flack from everyone who is not a student anyway. Sorry. 8-

Im with you man...

[Boss Angeles]

For the first time I'm NOT falling for the 1984 hype. After getting hozed by all the malware in iLife 08, and getting high-fived opening night for paying 200 bucks too much for my iPhone, I'll leave the lines and 1.0 kernel panics for others to enjoy. I'm wary of Leopard not changing it's "rush anything to market" spots. The new "quarter to quarter" Wall Street Apple.

[southerndoc]

Leopard isn't shipping on 26 Oct. It's shipping sooner. I was told by the Apple rep that I would RECEIVE it on 26 Oct and that it would ship sooner.

[Boss Angeles]

Originally Posted by Druth086

I don't understand why Apple has started to abandon its student discount. This was one of the very things that could make someone their biggest fan. I realize they still have it on computers, but if they are doing this to their software I wouldn't be surprised if they started to reduce it slowly with their hardware. I paid $69 for Tiger and now I'm paying $116 for Leopard? Doesn't make much sense to me. And I know this post will get flack from everyone who is not a student anyway. Sorry. 8-

They are sooo dumb by not hooking kids in school with a cheap taste of OSX. It's good business, ask any drug dealer.

[Jeremy Brown]

Hey, I've finally found a use for the Dashboard:

I've installed: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashb...ardwidget.html

and set it to count down to Leopard.

N.B. Sorry for being such a fanboy. It's disgusting I know.

[MonaLisa]

Originally Posted by Druth086

I don't understand why Apple has started to abandon its student discount. This was one of the very things that could make someone their biggest fan. I realize they still have it on computers, but if they are doing this to their software I wouldn't be surprised if they started to reduce it slowly with their hardware. I paid $69 for Tiger and now I'm paying $116 for Leopard? Doesn't make much sense to me. And I know this post will get flack from everyone who is not a student anyway. Sorry. 8-

I think at least part of the reason Apple has essentially eliminated the steep discounts for students is because the program has been heavily abused in the past, where non-students take advantage of the honor system and use the discount. It's still cheaper than Vista, and cheaper than a lot of text books.

[MacTel]

I really like the Time Machine box. Looks really coolio!

[Jeremy Brown]

Apple has also put up new info on .mac.

It has a great vid on "back to my mac" and "screen sharing": http://www.apple.com/dotmac/backtomymac.html

These two features make the upgrade worth it for me.

[Eduardo]

Umm, so what was the "secret" that Jobs spoke of when making the initial OS 10.5 announcement. All, but dropped?

[Eduardo]

Originally Posted by Boss Angeles

For the first time I'm NOT falling for the 1984 hype. After getting hozed by all the malware in iLife 08, and getting high-fived opening night for paying 200 bucks too much for my iPhone, I'll leave the lines and 1.0 kernel panics for others to enjoy. I'm wary of Leopard not changing it's "rush anything to market" spots. The new "quarter to quarter" Wall Street Apple.

Me too. I bought iLife '08 like a good Apple Fan Boy only to wait a while until the iWeb problems got settled...I downloaded the "Firmware" upgrade for my first generation Macbook's Superdrive which bricked the DVD player.

I feel they set a deadline and rushed Leopard only because of such. I am not going to be an Apple Guinea Pig.

[Bageljoey]

Originally Posted by rickag

I'll definitely be buying for my family's iMac G5 iSight, then wait for any information how well it runs on a 1.25 Ghz G4 Powerbook to see if my laptop can handle it. Here's hoping it will run fine on my laptop.

Yeah, I have a 1GHz PB with maxed ram. Anybody beta Leopard with something like this? I know it won't do the cool little things, but I want to know if it is "snappy."

Also, the system requirements for the DVD player include a 1.6GHz processor "for improved de-interlacing." Can I assume that DVD player will still work as well as it does in Tiger for those of us without?

thanx...

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by running

I don't know if it was on old Leopard pages, but if you wonder what these "300+ new features" mean, you can read all of them here on the new Leopard pages (some of them are stupid - MOVIE WIDGET! KEWL! - but some of them are suprise to me, such as ODF support in TextEdit )

The 200+ new features in Tiger were mostly lame. Automator was one of the "big eight" advances for Tiger but it's hard to find people that used it or liked using it because it wasn't very good and had very curious feature omissions, like it can append a series of PDFs into one file but there was no command offered to tell it where to save the finished PDF.

"Copy Files Between Mac OS X and Windows"
"Leopard understands the FAT 32 disk standard" WTF!? SO DOES TIGER. And probably every previous revision of OS X for all I know. My CF digital camera does too. That's hardly anything special. I'd be impressed if they had full NTFS read/write support in Leopard.

[Joe_the_dragon]

Originally Posted by Eduardo

Umm, so what was the "secret" that Jobs spoke of when making the initial OS 10.5 announcement. All, but dropped?

It may be like what happed with vista delays pushed it back.

[TFrank2]

Well I'm siked for the release. I'll be at the Leopard World Premiere from 6-10 p.m. :-)

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by Bageljoey

Yeah, I have a 1GHz PB with maxed ram. Anybody beta Leopard with something like this? I know it won't do the cool little things, but I want to know if it is "snappy."

Also, the system requirements for the DVD player include a 1.6GHz processor "for improved de-interlacing." Can I assume that DVD player will still work as well as it does in Tiger for those of us without?

It sounds like they are still relying on software to do deinterlacing and likely, decoding too. It's too bad they can't use the hardware that's in the graphics chip to do that. All that fancy CoreImage and CoreVideo frameworking and they can't use that for the deinterlacing.

[mrpiddly]

Originally Posted by Eduardo

Umm, so what was the "secret" that Jobs spoke of when making the initial OS 10.5 announcement. All, but dropped?

you already saw them.

[TFrank2]

Anyone else notice that they wiped the OS X Tiger page off of the Apple website? Kinda sad haha.

[JeffDM]

Originally Posted by mrpiddly

you already saw them.

I don't think so. People have been asking what the secret features were for some time and no one has specifically stated anything that wasn't shown in the original Leopard presentation.

[zzcoop]

Still looks inconsistent to me. The new Mail buttons suck, the Dock divider thingy isn't in the proper perspective and WHY ARE WE STILL STUCK WITH THOSE UGLY AQUA SCROLLBARS?!!

[sarib]

hi i want to buy macbook pro but its still selling with tiger. any idea when leopard will start coming preinstalled?

[asdasd]

This is good

# AutoFS

Automatically mount and dismount network filesystems on separate threads to improve responsiveness and reliability.

No more Finder hangs on network disconnect, I take it.