Rush Limbaugh provided a little more detail Wednesday on the Mac issues that have been driving him batty (yes, more so) since he upgraded to Leopard.
The bombastic radio host has been a Mac user for years, but on Tuesday he complained on his show about issues with six Macs that he runs on a network, without providing any details. The story made its way around the Mac community to a mixture of curious and hostile responses, and now Limbaugh has outlined his two main beefs.
Rush doesn't like the fact he can't back up his e-mail with Time Machine.
(Credit: Rushlimbaugh.com)The first one is the Back to my Mac feature introduced with Leopard isn't working on a regular basis. This is supposed to allow you to access files and applications that reside on a Mac running Leopard from any other Leopard Mac. He wouldn't be the first to report problems with Back to my Mac, and Apple has been looking into compatibility issues with third-party routers.
Limbaugh's more puzzling complaint, however, involves Time Machine. Time Machine was considered one of the more compelling reasons to upgrade to Leopard, as it's designed to make backup and restoring files--which few people actually do--a much easier process. Most of the early complaints around Time Machine have involved the inability to use it wirelessly with MacBooks or MacBook Pros unless you buy Apple's Time Capsule product, but that's not what has El Rushbo up in arms.
He's peeved that Time Machine doesn't appear to work with e-mail. "E-mail is everything, and Time Machine will not restore e-mail mailboxes. Restores everything else but that, and ought to restore either a single message or a whole mailbox, and it won't," he wrote on his Web site Wednesday.
However, Limbaugh doesn't get into how he accesses e-mail on his Mac; for example, whether he's reading it off the server or downloading the messages to his Mac. Most people in corporate-style setups read their e-mail off a server, and it's sort of hard to expect a desktop backup system to back up files that aren't actually stored on the desktop.
But if he's downloading e-mail to his desktop, that's another thing. Can he not find the folder where those files are stored? Is there actually some problem with Time Machine's ability to recognize e-mails as data? Who knows.
Apple declined to comment on Limbaugh's issues, and Limbaugh never replied to Wednesday's e-mail for comment on the issue.
The latest update to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard dropped Monday afternoon, with fixes for several different issues.
Apple posted a support document on its Web site and began informing Leopard users through the Software Update mechanism that Mac OS X 10.5.2 is now ready for public consumption. A combo update that includes some security patches is 343MB and can be downloaded immediately. The first update to Leopard, version 10.5.1, was released in November.
The latest version of Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.2, has arrived.
(Credit: Apple)This time around, Apple has fixed some issues with Time Machine, the automatic backup software available in Leopard, as well as Finder. Time Machine now works with a wider variety of external hard drives, and you can now access the application through the menu bar like you would a list of Wi-Fi networks. There's no support for wireless backups, however, unless you pick up Apple's new Time Capsule external hard drive.
Finder now seems more stable, with fixes that should prevent it from crashing in certain situations. And Airport is said to work more reliably with improved stability and security.
Apple also released two separate patches for Leopard users that improve graphics performance and update WebObjects to 5.4.1. It's not clear whether those are included in the combo update; they aren't included in the list of new things in version 10.5.2 on Apple's site.
Tiger users also have some work to do, with new security updates released for both Tiger and Leopard. The Leopard combo update does include the security update released Monday for that OS. About 19 percent of the Mac installed base has upgraded to Leopard, Apple executives said on their earnings conference call last month.
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