Mac OS X "Leopard" to Hit Stores Oct. 26

Yahoo! Tech ^ | 10/16/2007 | Ben Patterson

[abt87]

Bumped from its slated June launch date thanks to the frantic scramble to finish the iPhone, the latest version of Mac OS X is finally ready for its close-up. Apple announced today that "Leopard" will bound into stores next Friday, complete with a revamped desktop, a new backup feature, and more ways to inspect your file folders.

The Apple Store is already taking preorders for Mac OS X v10.5, which will go on sale at 6 p.m. on October 26. Expect to shell out $130 for a single-user license, or $200 for a five-user family pack. Also keep in mind that the system requirements for Leopard are pretty hefty this time around: those with Intel systems should be OK, but PowerPC users will need at least an 867MHz G4 processor with 512MB of RAM. Sorry, G3 users—looks like Mac OS 10.4 is the end of the line for you.

Many of the changes in Leopard look more like tweaks than full-scale innovations. The Dock, for instance, is now glossy and foreshortened, and it has a new feature: Stacks, which are Dock items that spring up with files and folders when clicked. The Finder, meanwhile, adds a revamped folder sidebar that organizes system items into Devices, Shared, and Places; even better, you'll be able to browse your files using Cover Flow from iTunes. Nice, but not exactly mind-blowing.

[Mr. Blonde]

How much of a hassle will upgrading from 10.4 be? I’m guessing not much, but so close to the event I need some reassurance.

[Uri’el-2012]

I’ve got three Macs in constant use and one Windows XP box, and I hate using the PC when I have to.

Even programs that are cross-platform compatible, like Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, FileMaker Pro and Dreamweaver, are far easier to use on the Mac, due to OSX’s ease of use and its font utilization.

Ed

12 posted on 10/16/2007 1:50:16 PM MDT by Sir_Ed

I have transitioned all my XP boxes to VMware Fusion on each of my 2 intel macs.

I was underwhelmed by Parallels and the Wine products.

Fusion by VMware is absolutely seamless with cut and paste between the virtual machines.

I still use both of my G4 PPCs with Tiger.

I started the switch to macs in summer of 2003
When I recognized they began to run BSD Unix and not MacOS.

My background is z/OS and Unix both system V and BSD.

G3 blue & white w/ OS 9
G4 iMac 17" 1 Ghz w/ Tiger
G4 17" Powerbook 1Ghz w/ Tiger
Intel iMac 20" w/ Tiger
Intel Mac Pro 2X dual chip (i.e.) 4 engine at 2.66 Ghz each;
5G of real memory and a half of a terabyte of disk w/Tiger.

Two of the macs are used by my wife.

Apple has kept the user friendly interface
but now run it on bulletproof BSD Unix

[garyhope]

“touched” a Mac was your original phrase.

I didn’t just “play with one at a store”. I have many friends who use and own Macs (I even used an original Apple Lisa back in the 80’s, and by the way the old Commodore Amigas were better than the Macs of that era) and I’ve used Macs many, many times and didn’t just “play” with them and still find them to be just computers good or bad and in many cases slower than many PC’s.

Macs and some Apple products are in many cases beautiful and elegant (more so than most PC’s) pieces of good industiral design but in real world use are not any better or in many cases as good as or as fast as good PC’s for some applications. Plus there are many specific software products (like lots of financial trading platforms) that are not ported over to the Apple platform and are necessary to the business world.

Macs are good for graphics design and music (but not the only ones) but for many other uses, not so.

Despite all this, I am still considering buying either a Mac laptop or mini with the Intel C2D CPU to use when I visit Mac based friends and to take advantage of a computer with a CPU and computer that uses both OS’s and can handle my financial programs. Plus the MacBook’s are small, affordable and light. Better than my old 8 pound PC laptop which is heavy, slow and has limited RAM.

[antiRepublicrat]

Besides, who wants to put more money in the pocket of ultra-liberal weasel Steve Jobs?

Upgrading five copies of XP to Vista Ultimate would cost $1,295 -- some that money going to the liberal UN-funding Bill Gates. So buy OS X and give almost 1,100 less to liberals!

[Uri’el-2012]

I'm looking forward to running a 64 bit Unix operating system
with Leopard on my Mac Pro with two dual Xeon 2.66 Ghz engines.

OBTW the PPC engines ran 2 or 3 instructions each CPU cycle,
so a 1 G hz PPC seems to run like a 3 G hz intel processor

[Uri’el-2012]

How much of a hassle will upgrading from 10.4 be? I’m guessing not much, but so close to the event I need some reassurance.

I have always waited 2 - 3 months and all the bugs are worked out.

[antiRepublicrat]

And until they got Intel CPU’s were slower than most PC’s.

Actually there were years of leap-frogging between them. When released, the G4 was the first consumer system that was covered by our export laws, in the same category as supercomputers and military gear, because it went over 1 GFLOPS. But a few years later it was way behind the average PC in performance, then the fast G5 came out, but IBM dropped the ball and couldn't continue to increase its performance, so it too was passed by x86 processors.

[Sir_Ed]

I’d love to run Windows like that, but my Macs are all Power PC’s. One G5 quad, one G5 and one G4.

I also have a Quadra 800 that cost me beaucoup bucks at a Comdex a long, long time ago, where Apple had a booth showing off its products to conventioneers and I was HOOKED!

Ed

[Swordmaker]

How much of a hassle will upgrading from 10.4 be? I’m guessing not much, but so close to the event I need some reassurance.

My experience with previous upgrades has been that they have gone flawlessly... and usually took about 20 minutes.

[Uri’el-2012]

I’d love to run Windows like that, but my Macs are all Power PC’s. One G5 quad, one G5 and one G4.

I also have a Quadra 800 that cost me beaucoup bucks at a Comdex a long, long time ago, where Apple had a booth showing off its products to conventioneers and I was HOOKED!

Ed

68 posted on 10/16/2007 11:01:50 PM MDT by Sir_Ed

I have Virtual PC running on my Powerbook.
It is OK as it works but nothing to write home about.

If you own a quad G5, you will just love the MacPro 4 engine or the 8 engine.

Jobs is a genius for moving to intel as you have the best of all worlds

[Swordmaker]

Despite all this, I am still considering buying either a Mac laptop or mini with the Intel C2D CPU to use when I visit Mac based friends and to take advantage of a computer with a CPU and computer that uses both OS’s and can handle my financial programs. Plus the MacBook’s are small, affordable and light. Better than my old 8 pound PC laptop which is heavy, slow and has limited RAM.

Fair enough.

I agree about the Amiga... I still have my Amiga 3000 in the garage. The Amiga could run Apple MacOS in a multitasked emulation faster than a Mac with the equivalent processor. It used to drive my Mac using friends crazy.

For those "specific software products," the Macs can run all of them under BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare as fast or faster as most PCs. I grant that requires a Windows license and partition, but it addresses the issue.

Plus the MacBook’s are small, affordable and light. Better than my old 8 pound PC laptop which is heavy, slow and has limited RAM.

You might want to wait a few months. First the MacBooks are due for a product line refresh that may include replacing the traditional back lights with low energy consumption LEDs as well as a speed bump in the processors. Also, rumor has it that Apple s working on a sub-notebook that will drop the internal optical drive and shed significant weight.

[cowboyway]

Apple users lean left....bwahahahaha.. check out my page. I used IBM for about 15 years and finally last November after hard drive disaster went to MacBook Pro.

Same here. Oh, and by the way, Rush leans a little right and he's a Mac fanboy, too.

[sergeantdave]

Apple should be more concerned about its quality control with its hardware than adding a few more bells and whistles to its OS.

I don’t appreciate shelling out $1,500 for a new computer because the decrepid logic board can’t withstand less than two years of normal use.

[garyhope]

“You might want to wait a few months. First the MacBooks are due for a product line refresh that may include replacing the traditional back lights with low energy consumption LEDs as well as a speed bump in the processors. Also, rumor has it that Apple s working on a sub-notebook that will drop the internal optical drive and shed significant weight.”

I know, my main “Macaholic” friend has already told me this. I can’t go to his house without getting a pitch to “move up” to a Mac, etc. He’s relentless.

I got tired of lugging an 8 pound laptop around on the plane and through airports, even in a backpack.

I don’t understand the difference between BootCamp, Paralles and VM Fusion. Do you have to have BootCamp to use or run Paralles or Fusion on your Mac?

If I bought a MacBook or MacMini and loaded a copy of Windows and my 2 Windows based trading programs on it, I guess I could just connect to either my Mac and PC friends networks when visiting them. A dual use machine sounds like a good idea.

I’ve also thought of just buying an external hard drive, partitioning it for both Mac and Windows OS’s and loading the programs on that and carrying that with me instead of a computer. I don’t know if this is possible. The objective is to save money and weight.

[GeraldP]

Check out this OS War poll over at Engadget.com

~43% voted for Leopard, yet Mac market share is obviously nowhere near that (somewhere upwards of 6% at last guesstimate). So, what does that mean.... I say it means "Buy more Apple stock!"

[Wyatt's Torch]

Now all I need os for Apple to update the 18 months old specs of the Mac Pro and I’m ready to pull the trigger....

[af_vet_rr]

I wonder what the marketshare for OS X is among conservatives. Apple (and by Apple, I mean Steve Jobs) has leftist leanings, but the company has been pretty apolitical in its modern (post-iMac) era. Well, at least apolitical enough to avoid boycotts and backlash. Plus, they stood up to those Greenpeace wackos when they got unduly smeared.

Apple is also supporting people who homeschool, giving them the same discounts they give to students and faculty of public schools....

[UlmoLordOfWaters]

Hear, hear.

I can't live without Expose. I often have four different browsers, VPC, Dreamweaver open at once (I absolutely LOVE my 30" display ;-).

I'm ordering an external drive for the Time Machine feature—can't wait!

I'm looking forward to the improved parental controls for my personal PB, too.

[Swordmaker]

I don’t understand the difference between BootCamp, Paralles and VM Fusion. Do you have to have BootCamp to use or run Paralles or Fusion on your Mac?

No, you don't have to have BootCamp to run Parallels or Fusion on a Mac... but it is a good idea. BootCamp is currently a free Beta and will be included with Leopard. BootCamp allows you to live partition an existing HFS+ formatted hard drive into the Mac and a Windows partition where you can install Windows. It also adds the necessary Windows drivers to a newly created Windows install disk. Parallels and Fusion can both access the BootCamp created Windows partition.

With BootCamp you can select whether to boot into Windows or Mac OSX at startup. When running a Mac as a Windows PC under Bootcamp the Windows installation is as fast or faster than a Windows only machine with the same processor. It IS a Windows box. However, to switch between OSes, you have to reboot and start-up from the BootCamp created Windows partition.

Parallels and Fusion operate Windows within a sandboxed window under OSX and switching is transparent. Files and or clippings can be dragged and dropped between OSes. There is about a 5% lower speed to Windows when operated in this manner compared to BootCamp's approach. It will still be faster than most low-end Windows boxes. Both Parallels and Fusion allow other OSes plus Windows to be run simultaneously under virtualization on OSX.

[Uri’el-2012]

....... I don’t understand the difference between BootCamp, Parallels and VM Fusion. Do you have to have BootCamp to use or run Parallels or Fusion on your Mac?

If I bought a MacBook or MacMini and loaded a copy of Windows and my 2 Windows based trading programs on it, I guess I could just connect to either my Mac and PC friends networks when visiting them. A dual use machine sounds like a good idea.

I’ve also thought of just buying an external hard drive, partitioning it for both Mac and Windows OS’s and loading the programs on that and carrying that with me instead of a computer. I don’t know if this is possible. The objective is to save money and weight.

74 posted on 10/17/2007 5:40:18 AM MDT by garyhope

Bootcamp allows you to dual boot the mac; you need to reboot to switch op/sys.
It's Free from Apple. requires MS license

Parallels allows you to run a MS op/sys ~$40; no need to reboot;
Gussied up open source WINE code; requires MS license

VMware Fusion allows you to run your MS op/sys environment as an application
~$40 full cut-and-paste; no reboot; requires MS license;
seamless including networking it is a virtual MS machine inside your mac under OS X