How deep are Leopard's changes?
Our review of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard last Thursday lauded its lovely interface innovations but withheld judgment about the operating system's speed until we could put it through its paces.
Tests returned from CNET Labs on Saturday show that Leopard didn't perform noticeably faster than Mac OS 10.4.6 Tiger. (See the chart in CNET's review of Tiger.). Because Leopard's improved speeds of between 1 percent and 3 percent fall within the 5 percent margin of error, it's fair to call Leopard and Tiger even.
GarageBand wouldn't run the first time we opened it in Leopard.
Lab tests explored Leopard's boot time, multimedia multitasking, and handling of the Quake 3 game. Similarly, the 2005 release of Tiger did not demonstrate vast speed improvements over Panther, a previous version of Mac OS X.
Still, some users commenting on Leopard-related message boards and stories at CNET and elsewhere swore that they detected faster performance with Leopard.
Unfortunately, CNET Labs could not vouch for the performance of Adobe Systems' Photoshop CS3, which, for reasons not yet understood, wouldn't run on Leopard in our usual battery of automated tests. Don't jump to conclusions, however; the photo-editing application seemed to behave under normal conditions, and Adobe insists that Photoshop can run in Leopard.
However, full Leopard support for all versions of Adobe Creative Suite 3 won't become available until Adobe releases updates in three to four months. Among the applications needing updates are AfterEffects, Premiere, Soundbooth, and Acrobat Pro 8.1.2 (PDF). Sadly, Adobe fans cannot count on running earlier iterations of the Creative Suite or Macromedia Studio uneventfully within Leopard.
Although we find Leopard's interface relatively seamless, the same can't be said for everyone's experience getting started. Some people reported installation headaches, including the famed "blue screen of death," which historically has made so many love to hate the rival Microsoft Windows. Apple has acknowledged that issue as a glitch with third-party software.
Another application that won't run properly in Leopard yet is FileMaker Pro 9, due for an update next month. Some at CNET have found other applications, such as Groupcal and Parallels, failing unexpectedly in Leopard. And although only Safari was also running at the time, GarageBand wouldn't run in our first two attempts to open it in Leopard. A reboot seemed to do the trick.
Leopard also appeared to be converting some Mail settings from administrator to standard accounts; MacFixIt explains a solution. We're looking into these and other issues, and will continue to update our Leopard review as we learn more.
Our conclusion remains that you must have Leopard if you need to run Boot Camp, and you'll want it if you eagerly await Time Machine's elegant backup system. Developers will also like the full, native 64-bit support for both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs.
Yet the majority of obvious improvements are on Leopard's surface. That isn't necessarily a bad thing; interface tweaks like Cover Flow, Quick Look, Spaces and Stacks offer powerful, practical improvements that make it easier to multitask. The operating system overall is a treat to use, even if it's unlikely to deliver preternatural speed.
So unless $129 feels like a trifle to spend, holding off on this upgrade wouldn't hurt. Depending upon your software toolkit of choice, waiting for third-party applications to catch up to Leopard might even save some frustration.
in new hardware just to TRY to make it work. I'm just sayin'.
I just upgraded to Leopard a couple days ago, and for the most
part I like it. I don't think the author was trying to badmouth
Leopard. In some ways, it does feel rushed and I think Apple
needs to be called out on it.
The third party issues aren't Apple's fault obviously, but some of
the problems other people are having (faulty JPEGs crashing
Finder) should have been ironed out long ago.
The next update will hopefully make the operating system even
more of a joy to use than the it already is.
new 20" iMac with 1 GB of memory and a clean install on my
MacBook with 1 GB of memory. I didn't have any issues with iWork
'08, iLife '08, Adobe CS3 Master Collection, or any other
applications. Personally it sounds like whoever did the upgrade
didn't know what they were doing if they had that many problems
even with Garageband. As with anything user error is usually the
main cause of problems.
iMAC 24" DUAL 2.16 Ghz 2GB memory
about 90 min for the install incl. extra software bundle
leopard took about 24 hours to really settle down, finish all of
the background processor work i.e. backing up 100 Gb to
external drive + Spotlight, and Safari was running really sluggish
until all the page caches were loaded
system is really zipping along today
I did notice that when leopard was rebooting after the initial
install it took a LOOOOng time to get to the log in window, gray
(like a kernal panic!) screen and then the blue screen appeared
but it was just processing data and I left it alone. . .successful
reboot after maybe 20 minutes
I find most of the time that just letting the machine do what it
has to do is the wisest course of action
Couple of complaints:
1-the desktop option for the clock is GONE! only shows up in
the menubar, too small to read easily
2-Activity Monitor application no longer gives a readout of
network speeds, stays at 0 Kb/sec (I went to third-party
shareware to get this back)
3-Safari does seem to have some difficulty multi-tasking i.e.
managing 2 or 3 types of network traffic at the same time, but
that seems to have mostly resolved itself
I have also been contemplating running Vista with Boot Camp,
have access to a free (discarded) copy of it, but then I'd have to
invest in a lot of anti-virus software etc.
one cool option would be the wireless backup feature that was
included in one beta version of Leopard, but I'm sure that'll be in
a future software update
I love the new iChat background feature. . .
isn't worth it. Was that the only thing you considered or were the tons of new features just
overlooked? Given that Tiger wasn't that much faster than Panther, as you said, was a speed
boost in Leopard expected? An OS can tweak out a little more performance, but at the end
of the day, it's the speed of the hardware, really.
The upgrade issues were caused by some third party software (Application Enhancer for one
- Apple themselves warn against using it) not properly working with Leopard and breaking
stuff. This is why I always recommend an Archive Install, or a format and reinstall - a new
fresh system works the best.
I think the upgrade is worth it though - Spaces will be very nice and Core Animation looks
awesome from a developer's point of view for me especially. Nice to see that they fixed the
Finder, but I wonder if everyone will be happy?
You did state that most of the changes were on the surface - not really true if you read all
the Developer documentation - there's some quite significant changes "under the hood", the
largest of which (IMO) is Objective-C 2.0 (Objective-C gets data collection!), but there are
others including the new Core Animation, the new Quartz Composer, heaps of new API
methods and classes and much more.
be MONTHS before CS3, along with other Adobe products, are
optimized to run on Leopard. By the time that happens, OS X 10.6
will be out...
And to think they charge so much for their software...
each individually OR purchase a full Suite to start getting upgrade
prices.. insane how Adobe treats it's early adopters and most loyal
users.. they feel like Verizon Wireless...
big leap for developers, so it's reasonable to allow them a lag time.
However, the one thing I have against Adobe is that they never
converted the most elegant and full-featured word processor/page
layout program, FrameMaker over to OS X. This program was a joy,
and had the most beautiful and useful user manual.
Tiger runs perfectly on that system (that my kids use) and I have no performance issues.
It's faster as you do not have to click on windows or close applications at all.
Tiger or did you perform an Archive and Install?
On at least 3 different machines, I experienced problems with
performing the "Upgrade" function of the install process. When I
went back and used "Archive and Install" everything worked
much better. No problems after that.
The system is more responsive and programs and other
functions that were giving me problems now run smoothly.
Leopard. http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars
- you are write
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by FutureGuy
October 30, 2007 12:20 PM PDT
- a lot has changed ;)
-
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