How did you install Leopard? Quite a few people found that an 'upgrade' install caused a few problems, but when they did 'erase and install', things got better. If you have a separate hard drive to clone your old system to, you can use the migration assistant to move the data.
It may not work for everyone, but it helped for some - if you want to try Leopard again.
Personally, I don't think I'd bother. There aren't all that many 'must haves' in Leopard for my taste.
The Macbook Pro came with the last version of Tiger and arrived just as Apple announced the Leopard upgrade. So i ordered the upgrade and installed Leopard over Tiger with no third-party apps at this stage and it was still flaky. I updated to 10.5.1 but still not a nice experience which is something i'm used to with Apple.
As i said in my previous post Mail just used to go offline, cursor used to freeze, when i finally installed some third-party Leopard friendly apps (most of the Adobe CS3 apps) some just crashed. I sent more bug reports to Apple in a week than i care to remember. Now were back on Tiger it's a breeze.
On saying that the wife's Macbook 2.0GHz is fine fine fine running the Leopard upgrade.
I have Leopard on 2 machines and I am very happy with it. I made a clean install on a MBP and, after the 10.5.1 release, update on an iMac. The iMac is pretty new and the system was relatively clean ( no dozens of apps and hacks, no fancy peripherals). Have a lot of colleagues with macs who upgraded. All of them seem to be happy with the updates.
Some of the most advanced users among them are developers. It seems they had more compatibility issues here and there but they know how to look for workarounds
There a couple of reasons for Leopard problems:
There are substantial changes under the hood, even the Objective-C runtime have been partially rewritten. 64-bittiness is also a huge change technically. There is little benefit for the users now but this is where the future is headed.
Leopard was not widely tested (e.g. no Public beta) and was rushed out of the door a bit early. This is the usual Apple approach since 10.0. This is not as easy to fix as it seems: Leopard is a huge improvement for Cocoa developers and further delaying the product would block the release for those who were ready with Leopard apps.
Vista has a lot of under the hood changes as well. The early Vista adopters should have been aware of that. The problem for MS was that:
It was delayed way too much.
It was overhyped and the expectations were set very high.
A lot of major [advertised] features were dropped which added to the frustration and disappointment. Apples secretive approach was an advantage here.
On the positive note, I think that under the hood changes in Leopard are here to stay for a while. With the next few releases apple will fix/refine these changes and will capitalize on their presence adding more features which are directly visible by the user but are not that destructive (don't require a lot of low-level changes which tend to break compatibility the most).
[*]Leopard was not widely tested (e.g. no Public beta) and was rushed out of the door a bit early. This is the usual Apple approach since 10.0. This is not as easy to fix as it seems: Leopard is a huge improvement for Cocoa developers and further delaying the product would block the release for those who were ready with Leopard apps.
You might be surprised at the extent of testing that Apple does both in house and outside. The fact that they don't do a public beta doesn't automatically mean that it wasn't widely tested.
I upgraded my iMac G4 running at 1.25GHz to Leopard and it broke a few applications (Photoshop 7, SD3, etc...). I waited for 10.5.1 before installing Leopard. Leopard still has a bunch of bugs and the delay in 10.5.2 is most likely due to the developers winning over the marketing people after the first point release.
My 5 year old iMac is faster than my 8 month old HP dv6314 notebook running Vista Ultimate. (a 1.7 GHz core2duo with NVidia 7400 mobile graphics with dedicated video memory and 2 Gigs of RAM) on almost every single day-to-day task. As usual, Linux still beats both OS X and Vista when it comes to raw performance.
Overall, I like Leopard. Any operating system that gives a lease of life to your "old" hardware by opening up access to new applications and features without significant degradation of the user experience is a winner in my book. (Note: I still use a old version of iLife - the system requirements for the new versions are ...)
I'm happy with Leopard on my new Intel iMac, but not so happy when I installed it on an iMac G4. The first thing I noticed was a significant slowdown, but not so bad that I couldn't live with it.
What really bugged me was when I tried to open a Classic application and found that Classic is no longer supported even on a PowerPC. I don't think I saw that advertised or reported anywhere.
Now I have to either reinstall 10.4, or boot from an external drive when I need to access Classic applications. The main problem here is that I have to access some old accounting records. My software is updated to run under rosetta, but I have prior years records that can only be accessed using Classic.
I don't see why they had to stop supporting this on PowerPC machines.
I like leopard but disagree with the extrapolations found in this report.
If anything, the initial release of leopard was (relatively) buggy and aggravating to users. Major new releases are always more buggy than the mature/patched version of the previous release.
Sounds like they just pulled a reason out of their ass and tacked it on the end of their otherwise, quite informative data.
I had periodic Safari crashes. Then I maxxed out my RAM for $80 at newegg.com and Safari crashes occur very infrequently now. There are a few offers that are similar, but here's the one that I used:
i have 16GB of RAM under 10.4.11 and Safari still crashes. When 10.5 came out it forced an update to Safari 3.x on 10.4 users, so it's more likely an issue with Safari 3.x Hence i use Camino!
I like leopard but disagree with the extrapolations found in this report.
If anything, the initial release of leopard was (relatively) buggy and aggravating to users. Major new releases are always more buggy than the mature/patched version of the previous release.
Sounds like they just pulled a reason out of their ass and tacked it on the end of their otherwise, quite informative data.
I'm happy with Leopard on my new Intel iMac, but not so happy when I installed it on an iMac G4. The first thing I noticed was a significant slowdown, but not so bad that I couldn't live with it.
What really bugged me was when I tried to open a Classic application and found that Classic is no longer supported even on a PowerPC. I don't think I saw that advertised or reported anywhere.
Now I have to either reinstall 10.4, or boot from an external drive when I need to access Classic applications. The main problem here is that I have to access some old accounting records. My software is updated to run under rosetta, but I have prior years records that can only be accessed using Classic.
I don't see why they had to stop supporting this on PowerPC machines.
I believe that it was stated a while ago that 10.5 no linger supported Classic.
Just goes to show that each machine is different. All this depends on the other software available, the particular hardware, and even the setting of the prefs.
AUGGHHHHHH!
Just a little while ago, Safari not only beach-balled, but did the beachball that spins, STOPS, and then spins (and stops, and spins and stops...) forevermore.
Force Quit is becoming my new BFF, thanks to this one app. Quick Steve, to the coder's cave, STAT! Taze some sense into these ppl! \
Just a little while ago, Safari not only beach-balled, but did the beachball that spins, STOPS, and then spins (and stops, and spins and stops...) forevermore.
Force Quit is becoming my new BFF, thanks to this one app. Quick Steve, to the coder's cave, STAT! Taze some sense into these ppl! \
.
Probably corrupt preferences. Leopard, in my experience, has huge problems with corruption/random changes of preferences. This morning I noticed that my Mail wasn't filtering properly and I went to Rules and over 1/2 of them were now off. I had not touched them, nor are they being sync'd anywhere.
One thing I'll point out is the difference between *NEW* buyers and *OLD* Macbrethren. I bought my Macbook at the end of June, after it became clear that Leopard was not going to be out until November at the earliest, because my previous HP laptop (running Windows XP) was dying and I had sworn a blood oath that I was *never* going to subject myself to the atrocity that is Windows Vista (which is all that the replacement Windows laptops that I looked at were available with). This was my first Mac.
So when Leopard did come out, I did not have problems with old applications not running, because I didn't have any old applications (duh, I'd only owned my Macbook for five months). And because I haven't hacked or tweaked my MacOS, the upgrade happened pretty smoothly. And while the initial release of Leopard had some problems with random freezes where the keyboard would quit responding for a while, and with X11 causing ssh to lock up when ssh'ing into my Linux development box at the office, the updates have fixed all that. As for the Safari problems that people report. I have no idea why they're having problems. I don't. But then, I changed Firefox to be my default browser too .
Oh, my comment about the Mac vs. previous Windows laptops? The Mac just... friggin'... *WORKS*. No more "remove driver, re-install driver from vendor CD, re-boot, let Windows hopefully install it right" stuff. No random lockups. No instabilities. When I close my Macbook it goes to sleep. When I open my Macbook, it wakes up. With any of the three Windows laptops I owned prior to the Macbook, there was about a 20% chance that when I opened it back up, it wouldn't come back up. When I want to plug in a USB sound system to my mixer and record something with GarageBand, it... just... WORKS. No fiddling with vendor-supplied USB driver vs. Microsoft-provided USB driver and various attempts to make it work, no frustration at sometimes trying to record and the software just doesn't get any sound from the USB sound system, it just works. And if I want to record a CD or DVD, the process isn't particularly intuitive with MacOS (though better with Leopard) , but I don't have to go search out some third party software and cross my fingers. It just *works*.
So yeah, I am still very happy with my Macbook seven months later, even if Apple did do a silent refresh on the hardware a few months after I bought it that I wish I could have . Sigh, 2 gigabytes vs. 4 gigabytes of RAM, 64mb video memory vs. 192mb video memory, ah well, my Macbook still cooks, and a lot of that is because of MacOS -- when I boot into XP via Boot Camp, my Macbook suddenly runs as slow as my old HP laptop. And Vista is even slower. Tells ya why Vista has such a low satisfaction rating, eh?
(Oh, my take on Leopard? Meh. The integration of xterm into Terminal is a nice touch, Time Machine is a limited but useful bit of functionality, but the upgrade from iLife '07 to iLife '08 was much more important for me because it made iPhoto actually *usable* for those of us with thousands of digital photographs, iLife '07 was much too slow handling large collections of photographs to be useful. Oh, and Spaces, which I thought I wanted/needed? I don't use it. Expose' is far more useful at getting to the right window to do whatever I want to do at a given time).
Probably corrupt preferences. Leopard, in my experience, has huge problems with corruption/random changes of preferences. This morning I noticed that my Mail wasn't filtering properly and I went to Rules and over 1/2 of them were now off. I had not touched them, nor are they being sync'd anywhere.
The Mac in question is running 10.4.11, not Leopard. \
Just a little while ago, Safari not only beach-balled, but did the beachball that spins, STOPS, and then spins (and stops, and spins and stops...) forevermore.
Force Quit is becoming my new BFF, thanks to this one app. Quick Steve, to the coder's cave, STAT! Taze some sense into these ppl! \
.
I find that Quicktime Player doesn't seem to play as many AVI's as it did before, and crashes. VLC will play them without a problem. I wonder if that's a step backwards.
I've never understood why a program crashes when it finds a "bad" file.
In the old days, when I did program, I simply had programs interrupt operation, and give the user a message. Crashing is inexcusable.
I find that Quicktime Player doesn't seem to play as many AVI's as it did before, and crashes. VLC will play them without a problem. I wonder if that's a step backwards.
I never have issues QT playing AVIs, every now and then a MKV won't play sound through QT while VLC will, but that is it. Are you using Perian v1.0?
Comments
How did you install Leopard? Quite a few people found that an 'upgrade' install caused a few problems, but when they did 'erase and install', things got better. If you have a separate hard drive to clone your old system to, you can use the migration assistant to move the data.
It may not work for everyone, but it helped for some - if you want to try Leopard again.
Personally, I don't think I'd bother. There aren't all that many 'must haves' in Leopard for my taste.
The Macbook Pro came with the last version of Tiger and arrived just as Apple announced the Leopard upgrade. So i ordered the upgrade and installed Leopard over Tiger with no third-party apps at this stage and it was still flaky. I updated to 10.5.1 but still not a nice experience which is something i'm used to with Apple.
As i said in my previous post Mail just used to go offline, cursor used to freeze, when i finally installed some third-party Leopard friendly apps (most of the Adobe CS3 apps) some just crashed. I sent more bug reports to Apple in a week than i care to remember. Now were back on Tiger it's a breeze.
On saying that the wife's Macbook 2.0GHz is fine fine fine running the Leopard upgrade.
Some of the most advanced users among them are developers. It seems they had more compatibility issues here and there but they know how to look for workarounds
There a couple of reasons for Leopard problems:
- There are substantial changes under the hood, even the Objective-C runtime have been partially rewritten. 64-bittiness is also a huge change technically. There is little benefit for the users now but this is where the future is headed.
- Leopard was not widely tested (e.g. no Public beta) and was rushed out of the door a bit early. This is the usual Apple approach since 10.0. This is not as easy to fix as it seems: Leopard is a huge improvement for Cocoa developers and further delaying the product would block the release for those who were ready with Leopard apps.
Vista has a lot of under the hood changes as well. The early Vista adopters should have been aware of that. The problem for MS was that:- It was delayed way too much.
- It was overhyped and the expectations were set very high.
- A lot of major [advertised] features were dropped which added to the frustration and disappointment. Apples secretive approach was an advantage here.
On the positive note, I think that under the hood changes in Leopard are here to stay for a while. With the next few releases apple will fix/refine these changes and will capitalize on their presence adding more features which are directly visible by the user but are not that destructive (don't require a lot of low-level changes which tend to break compatibility the most).[*]Leopard was not widely tested (e.g. no Public beta) and was rushed out of the door a bit early. This is the usual Apple approach since 10.0. This is not as easy to fix as it seems: Leopard is a huge improvement for Cocoa developers and further delaying the product would block the release for those who were ready with Leopard apps.
You might be surprised at the extent of testing that Apple does both in house and outside. The fact that they don't do a public beta doesn't automatically mean that it wasn't widely tested.
My 5 year old iMac is faster than my 8 month old HP dv6314 notebook running Vista Ultimate. (a 1.7 GHz core2duo with NVidia 7400 mobile graphics with dedicated video memory and 2 Gigs of RAM) on almost every single day-to-day task. As usual, Linux still beats both OS X and Vista when it comes to raw performance.
Overall, I like Leopard.
What really bugged me was when I tried to open a Classic application and found that Classic is no longer supported even on a PowerPC. I don't think I saw that advertised or reported anywhere.
Now I have to either reinstall 10.4, or boot from an external drive when I need to access Classic applications. The main problem here is that I have to access some old accounting records. My software is updated to run under rosetta, but I have prior years records that can only be accessed using Classic.
I don't see why they had to stop supporting this on PowerPC machines.
If anything, the initial release of leopard was (relatively) buggy and aggravating to users. Major new releases are always more buggy than the mature/patched version of the previous release.
Sounds like they just pulled a reason out of their ass and tacked it on the end of their otherwise, quite informative data.
I had periodic Safari crashes. Then I maxxed out my RAM for $80 at newegg.com and Safari crashes occur very infrequently now. There are a few offers that are similar, but here's the one that I used:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231135
i have 16GB of RAM under 10.4.11 and Safari still crashes. When 10.5 came out it forced an update to Safari 3.x on 10.4 users, so it's more likely an issue with Safari 3.x Hence i use Camino!
I like leopard but disagree with the extrapolations found in this report.
If anything, the initial release of leopard was (relatively) buggy and aggravating to users. Major new releases are always more buggy than the mature/patched version of the previous release.
Sounds like they just pulled a reason out of their ass and tacked it on the end of their otherwise, quite informative data.
What extrapolation?
What extrapolation?
That leopard is driving explosive mac sales.
I'm happy with Leopard on my new Intel iMac, but not so happy when I installed it on an iMac G4. The first thing I noticed was a significant slowdown, but not so bad that I couldn't live with it.
What really bugged me was when I tried to open a Classic application and found that Classic is no longer supported even on a PowerPC. I don't think I saw that advertised or reported anywhere.
Now I have to either reinstall 10.4, or boot from an external drive when I need to access Classic applications. The main problem here is that I have to access some old accounting records. My software is updated to run under rosetta, but I have prior years records that can only be accessed using Classic.
I don't see why they had to stop supporting this on PowerPC machines.
I believe that it was stated a while ago that 10.5 no linger supported Classic.
Just goes to show that each machine is different. All this depends on the other software available, the particular hardware, and even the setting of the prefs.
AUGGHHHHHH!
Just a little while ago, Safari not only beach-balled, but did the beachball that spins, STOPS, and then spins (and stops, and spins and stops...) forevermore.
Force Quit is becoming my new BFF, thanks to this one app. Quick Steve, to the coder's cave, STAT! Taze some sense into these ppl!
.
AUGGHHHHHH!
Just a little while ago, Safari not only beach-balled, but did the beachball that spins, STOPS, and then spins (and stops, and spins and stops...) forevermore.
Force Quit is becoming my new BFF, thanks to this one app. Quick Steve, to the coder's cave, STAT! Taze some sense into these ppl!
.
Probably corrupt preferences. Leopard, in my experience, has huge problems with corruption/random changes of preferences. This morning I noticed that my Mail wasn't filtering properly and I went to Rules and over 1/2 of them were now off. I had not touched them, nor are they being sync'd anywhere.
So when Leopard did come out, I did not have problems with old applications not running, because I didn't have any old applications (duh, I'd only owned my Macbook for five months). And because I haven't hacked or tweaked my MacOS, the upgrade happened pretty smoothly. And while the initial release of Leopard had some problems with random freezes where the keyboard would quit responding for a while, and with X11 causing ssh to lock up when ssh'ing into my Linux development box at the office, the updates have fixed all that. As for the Safari problems that people report. I have no idea why they're having problems. I don't. But then, I changed Firefox to be my default browser too
Oh, my comment about the Mac vs. previous Windows laptops? The Mac just... friggin'... *WORKS*. No more "remove driver, re-install driver from vendor CD, re-boot, let Windows hopefully install it right" stuff. No random lockups. No instabilities. When I close my Macbook it goes to sleep. When I open my Macbook, it wakes up. With any of the three Windows laptops I owned prior to the Macbook, there was about a 20% chance that when I opened it back up, it wouldn't come back up. When I want to plug in a USB sound system to my mixer and record something with GarageBand, it... just... WORKS. No fiddling with vendor-supplied USB driver vs. Microsoft-provided USB driver and various attempts to make it work, no frustration at sometimes trying to record and the software just doesn't get any sound from the USB sound system, it just works. And if I want to record a CD or DVD, the process isn't particularly intuitive with MacOS (though better with Leopard) , but I don't have to go search out some third party software and cross my fingers. It just *works*.
So yeah, I am still very happy with my Macbook seven months later, even if Apple did do a silent refresh on the hardware a few months after I bought it that I wish I could have
(Oh, my take on Leopard? Meh. The integration of xterm into Terminal is a nice touch, Time Machine is a limited but useful bit of functionality, but the upgrade from iLife '07 to iLife '08 was much more important for me because it made iPhoto actually *usable* for those of us with thousands of digital photographs, iLife '07 was much too slow handling large collections of photographs to be useful. Oh, and Spaces, which I thought I wanted/needed? I don't use it. Expose' is far more useful at getting to the right window to do whatever I want to do at a given time).
Probably corrupt preferences. Leopard, in my experience, has huge problems with corruption/random changes of preferences. This morning I noticed that my Mail wasn't filtering properly and I went to Rules and over 1/2 of them were now off. I had not touched them, nor are they being sync'd anywhere.
The Mac in question is running 10.4.11, not Leopard.
.
The Mac in question is running 10.4.11, not Leopard.
.
Oops. I still would trash preferences as this has fixed this for me in the past. Also, once, some 'funky' cookies.
Oops. I still would trash preferences as this has fixed this for me in the past. Also, once, some 'funky' cookies.
How much space do you have remaining on your HDD?
That leopard is driving explosive mac sales.
Customer satisfaction driving sales seems a very reasonable conclusion to me!
AUGGHHHHHH!
Just a little while ago, Safari not only beach-balled, but did the beachball that spins, STOPS, and then spins (and stops, and spins and stops...) forevermore.
Force Quit is becoming my new BFF, thanks to this one app. Quick Steve, to the coder's cave, STAT! Taze some sense into these ppl!
.
I find that Quicktime Player doesn't seem to play as many AVI's as it did before, and crashes. VLC will play them without a problem. I wonder if that's a step backwards.
I've never understood why a program crashes when it finds a "bad" file.
In the old days, when I did program, I simply had programs interrupt operation, and give the user a message. Crashing is inexcusable.
I find that Quicktime Player doesn't seem to play as many AVI's as it did before, and crashes. VLC will play them without a problem. I wonder if that's a step backwards.
I never have issues QT playing AVIs, every now and then a MKV won't play sound through QT while VLC will, but that is it. Are you using Perian v1.0?
How much space do you have remaining on your HDD?
33.8 gigs (GB).
.