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Posted on 10/29/2007 4:31:22 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Introduction
At the end of my Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger review, I wrote this.
Overall, Tiger is impressive. If this is what Apple can do with 18 months of development time instead of 12, I tremble to think what they could do with a full two years.
That was exactly two and a half years ago, to the day. It seems that I've gotten my wish and then some. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they've only grown as the months and years have passed. Apple's tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good.
Maybe the average Mac user just expects another incrementally improved version of Mac OS X. Eighteen months, two and a half years, who's counting? Maybe we enthusiasts are just getting greedy. After all, as Apple's been so fond of touting, there have been five releases of Mac OS X in the time it's taken Microsoft to deliver Windows Vista.
But far be it from me to use Microsoft to calibrate my expectations. Leopard has to be something special. And as I see it, operating system beauty is more than skin deep. While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard's worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple's web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what's really changed.
These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they're based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user.
This review will cover all of those angles, in varying degrees of depth. Like all other Mac OS X releases before it, Leopard is too big for one review to cover everything. (After all, Tiger's internals alone can fill over 1,600 printed pages.) As in past reviews, I've chosen to delve deeply into the aspects of Leopard that are the most interesting to me while also trying to provide a reasonable overview for the non-geeks who've decided to take the plunge into an Ars Technica review. (Hi, Mom.)
Okay Leopard, let's see what you've got.
This is an excerpt... read the rest of the article here.
Interesting review, but too much goes to “taste.” I personally like the 3D dock and reflections, the author doesn’t. Shrug. Still the most usable, friendly, stable, secure and beautiful OS on the market.
In particular, Spotlight's improvement has been revelatory.
????? So why the [expletive deleted] am I told that Leopard is recommended for a 867MHz G4 but not for my 800MHz G4 Mac?
This guy calls Time Machine the Marquee feature of 10.5, and gives a sort of backhanded compliment to Spaces, which he acknowledges will be a lot of good for a lot of users.His message seems to be that he has serious reservations about the look of Leopard, and wishes Leopard had included certain wish list items - notably a new file structure - but that there is a tremendous amount of clearing the path for the future embedded in it.
That, ultimately, 10.5 can as much as anything be considered the harbinger of a truly dynamite 10.6. And of enhanced third-party software made possible by much of the under-the-hood stuff. Which certainly looks good for the stock price!
Fascinating read, quite long and a bit over my head. But all in all I'm glad it was posted and glad I took the time to read it.
Even I was zoning out on a lot of it... very technical.
However, the top secret stuff is in there and this is a discussion of all of that.
Good question... I think I would ask the marketing people that question rather than the engineers.
Probably because Leopard is optimized for Intel and PPC support is almost an afterthought.
Also, Leopard uses the graphics card to power a lot of its eye candy and older graphics cards can’t provide the acceleration it needs.
I still think the real value of this review is the focus it brings on the under-the-hood changes that point toward a remarkable OS X 10.6. My takeaways are that Core UI is going to be something special, and that Apple is doing 64-bit the right way, taking the chance to clean up a lot of messes in 32-bit development.
I think this is the "secret stuff" that Jobs was referring to in the MacWorld conference in January. I also think you nailed it.
Well we know that eventually PPC will be denigrated to such an extent that PPC owners will be left by the wayside. Eventually. But according to the section of the article I quoted, each version of 10.X is faster than the one before, on the same hardware - the writer notes that he himself does not own an Intel Mac yet. And you can hardly hold the hardware constant and compare the speeds of the various 10.X es in Intel hardware, which only dates back - what - Tiger, or Panther?Also, Leopard uses the graphics card to power a lot of its eye candy and older graphics cards can’t provide the acceleration it needsSo I'm not sure that that explanation washes.
Now that could actually be the story. It basically proposes that "800MHz" is a good proxy for "slow graphics card." And maybe that is correct. But I'm sore tempted to bet the other way. Although if there is not a technical reason, and Apple is doing it strictly for marketing purposes as Swordmaker suggests, nothing would in fact prevent Apple from synthesizing that condition by determining the CPU speed and deliberately slowing Leopard down when the CPU is below 866MHz.Certainly it is effective marketing, in that I now realize just how slow my CPU is compared to even a Mac Mini.
You’re likely right; under-the-hood features are the “top secret” features from the initial Leopard announcement. Of course, people were expending end-user features to eventually be unveiled... so there’s a level of disappointment there.
The good news is that it looks like 10.6, or perhaps 10.7, will adapt these features for improved end use. Here’s hoping. We should be getting 10.6 just as Microsoft ramps up the noise machine for Windows 7.
Hmmmm . . .
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