Waiting for Leopard
On Friday night, I was over at Santana Row in San Jose, just across the street from the Apple Store at the Westfield Valley Fair mall.
Apple's new Mac OS X Leopard
(Credit: Courtesy of Apple)I could have gone over there and bought a copy of Leopard, Apple's new Mac OS X version 10.5, but I didn't, for two reasons. First, I didn't need to-- I'm a member of the Apple Developer Connection (ADC), so I'll get a copy anyway, eventually. Second, I don't intend to install Leopard right away.
This isn't like my decision not to buy an iPhone. I didn't want an iPhone. I still don't. (The hypothetical future iPhone that includes 3G connectivity based on the recently announced Broadcom 3G "Phone on a chip" plus third-party development, more memory, etc. ... well, I'll be all over that one.)
No, I do want Leopard. But I use my MacBook Pro for business, and I can't afford to have it out of service because there's some undiscovered reliability issue or incompatibility with some critical application like Cisco's VPN software (my Vista Tablet PC still can't VPN into the company network because Cisco is months late with the necessary software update).
I figure I'll wait a couple of weeks to see if any problems get reported, and then I'll go for it.
In the meantime, my older PowerBook G4 has been running Leopard since the first beta release, and I'm very impressed. As Apple itself admits, Leopard isn't about big changes; it's just a huge collection of improvements, some bigger than others.
In a sense, I've already spent $848 to get ready for Leopard-- renewing the ADC membership recently was $499, and buying a new iPod classic with enough free space to use as a Time Machine backup drive on the road was another $349-- so I'm quite eager to make good on the investment by doing the upgrade.
Just another couple of weeks, and it'll happen. And then I'll see if I can't find something original to say about it here that hasn't already been said in a thousand other blogs!
Peter N. Glaskowsky is a computer architect in Silicon Valley and a technology analyst for the Envisioneering Group. He has designed chip- and board-level products in the defense and computer industries, managed design teams, and served as editor in chief of the industry newsletter "Microprocessor Report." He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Client 4.9.0.1 - everything has worked like a charm. FTPing in Windows via VM
Ware Fusion through the VPN on Mac 10.5.
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