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Posted on 12/23/2007 10:34:00 PM PST by Swordmaker
If you haven’t upgraded yet - don’t!
I bought my first Apple computer in 1978 - the original Apple ][ - and the obvious quality of the products has kept me coming back for more. Good thing the Leopard upgrade wasn’t my first experience of Apple quality.
10.5.1 isn’t it, either.
I had great hopes that the first dot release of 10.5 would fix most of the problems. Sadly, that is not the case.
Most Leopard installs are trouble-free. But if you rely on your Mac to make a living, you have to ask yourself if it is worth the risk to upgrade for nifty but non-essential features. I haven’t upgraded my backup Mac and I won’t until Leopard is stable.
Tales of woe
I use my Mac for writing, research, Skype, web site creation, video production and much more. Since installing Leopard, I’ve had to re-install OS X 3 times, Final Cut Studio 3 times (it is on 8 DVDs, so it takes a while) and boot up into the Unix command line twice to re-create the user database.
In addition there are numerous other inconveniences, such as Keychain problems, out of date third party apps, broken application services and more. They slow me down.
But the biggest problem is not knowing if the system will start up reliably. I don’t need that problem from my Mac. With OS 10.4 I didn’t.
The Storage Bits take
AFAIK, the vast majority of people don’t have problems with Leopard. But if you are a power user who needs a reliable Mac, the problems are common enough to wait for Apple to resolve them.
I suspect that Steve’s commitment to ship Leopard in October led to some corner-cutting in development. Once released developers also have to deal with the bugs customers report.
A few more months of development bake time would have brought Leopard up to Apple’s normal high standards. Steve, next time let the developers, not the calendar, tell you when the release is ready.
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A good upgrade with rough edges. As a user and shareholder, I think he made the right tradeoff.
The author doesn’t say if he is running PowerPC or Intel. Does anyone know if the 10.5 bugs are better or worse on old vs. new architectures? I’m trying to decide which of my Macs I should upgrade first.
I’ve had trouble free upgrades on 4 PPC machines and 3 Intel machines.
It sounds more to me like the author should investigate other possible causes for his problems, like hardware problems that may not have been apparent in 10.4.
I can only tell you my experience. I upgraded my PowerPC G5 tower and got zapped by the APE reboot failure bug (Unsanity Software's Application Enhancer caused a conflict if the APE file was an earlier version that resulted in a hang on reboot). I had to re-install using "Archive and Install" instead of the update install that failed. This issue can be avoided by updating the APE before you do the upgrade install.
However, the update install on my Intel MacBook Pro went forward without a hitch.
Whichever one you do, be sure to hit the "Software Update" under the Black Apple when you are done... you need to install both the OSX.5.1 update and the 2007-009.1 Security update. That will fix most problems.
I don't understand why Apple didn't make this the default option, instead of "Upgrade". It would have prevented a lot of user problems, not to mention bad publicity. The only downside to this seems to be the need for more disk space but it went off without a hitch on my IMac.
No, releasing Leopard in the Spring as planned would have been corner-cutting.
I have a G4 iMac and a new MacBook Pro, and installed Leopard trouble-free on both. The key to success is to do a clean install, not an upgrade: 1. Clone your machine to an external disk;
2. Install Leopard with the Erase and Install option;
3. Use Migration Assistant to bring over just your user settings from the clone image to the new installation;
4. Manually copy over your data and applications. You might have to reinstall some apps from the original discs to get the licensing to work right.
That was the easiest backup and restore I have ever, ever done in my life.
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