Ask a Mac Nerd: What's the Deal with Leopard?
Mac released its new Leopard operating system on Friday, and low-tech Seattlest wonders what's up. So we asked Aron Beal, a Web applications developer and genuine Mac nerd, to tell us.
1) What's the deal with Leopard--is it a new thing, or just a normal upgrade, or what?
Leopard is a full fledged operating system release, similar to the one you might have made when upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP (or to Vista). It is meant to compete with Vista, and it unfortunately has ramped up requirements like Vista has; the minimum system required to run it has increased a fair bit. The old Mac G3 and some of the slower G4 lines in the PowerPC architecture are now obsolete as far as this OS is concerned, and you'll need more that what apple usually ships as stock for computer memory in order to be able to run it properly (Official tech specs here).
2) Are Mac nerds totally freaking out about Leopard iPhone-style, or is it not such a biggie?
The update itself is a big deal, no doubt about it. This version of OSX includes some pretty nice features for the end user, the most notable of which is Time Machine™. This is a backup mechanism that is purportedly incredibly easy to use; you need an additional hard drive to get it to work, but it's versioning that everyone can use, and it will make it all worthwhile the first time you delete something you shouldn't have. There's supposed to be lots of eye candy in the new version as well; high gloss reflections in iChat and whatnot. I'm personally more satisfied that Apple has finally included multiple desktop support by default; Linux has had this feature for awhile, and it was one I missed when I moved to a Mac workstation.
There's of course been a lot of complaining about many of the interface changes, but you can't please everybody. I do find it kind of amusing that the conclusive goal of apple user interface development turned out to be a lens flare.
There are also quite a few changes that are not nearly so obtrusive. We have a Windows network at work that my machine (running OSX 10.4) doesn't play well with at all, but which my buddy's machine, (running Leopard) is able to connect to, and mount network shares easily and quickly. For my money, that feature alone is enough to justify the purchase, but to each their own. :)
I won't go into long and laborious detail about all the new features; if folks are interested, they can check it out on apple's 300 page.
There's already some indication that the initial release has some bugs in it, unfortunately. As this is a software product and not a hardware one, this is less of a problem; just leave the default update settings alone, and Apple will notify you when they've got fixes worked out. It does mean you may wish to delay your purchase by a month or so, though.
3) I'm new to Macs--is an upgrade worth the trouble, or will it end up taking all day and probably cause my computer to break the way Windows upgrades do?
From initial reports, this upgrade *is* likely to take a long time, and you have to be patient with it. If you interrupt the upgrade process and hard cycle your machine (turn the power off and on again), I've heard that bad things can happen. Sorry to be anecdotal there, but I think the moral of the story is to just start the upgrade process and walk away. It's supposed to go pretty much without needing intervention.
There's a nice article over at Macfixit that lists some good preparatory steps to take.
