confessions of a fanboy…
As is always the case when Apple releases a new OS, I plunked down my $129 and pre-ordered Leopard, and it actually arrived at my house several hours before the release time on October 26th – one advantage of living in the boondocks and pre-ordering. While my buddies in Nashville had to wait until that evening for the official release at the store, I was installing Leopard early in the day.
For the record, I have NEVER had issues installing a new OS from Apple. You just pop the disk in and begin to click “ok” and you are pretty much in business. But leopard is different beast. (From now on I will not dignify this crappy release with a capital letter) When I got to the screen asking me where to install it, my MacBook Pro’s hard drive did not appear. So I was dead before I started. I spent a good hour or so on the Apple boards finding out that many people are having the same issues, and finally found an answer on the boards while I sat on hold with Applecare…glad I paid for that. So I finally get it loaded up, and I am good to go.
Or so I thought. Suddenly, my machine is very sluggish, and I seem to have tons of things freeze up requiring me to force quit. As a point of reference, when I installed Tiger, it was over 4 MONTHS before I ever had the system lock up and force me to restart the machine. FOUR MONTHS!
I could go on and on about the past week or two, but let’s just leave it with the fact that I am unhappy. So last night my mac-buddy emails to let me know that the first update is out for leopard. So I immediately download and install, and immediately neither my iPod or my iPhone will sync music correctly. I get an error message explaining that the sync failed, and the iPod or iPhone disk cannot write to or be written to.
ARRRRRRGGGGHH.
So here is the deal. Apple announced Leopard over a year ago, actually giving details about it. I don’t remember them ever doing that. They typically keep a lid on release dates and details of a new OS until just before it hits. Then leopard gets delayed big time, which is funny considering Apple frequently takes shots at how often Vista was delayed… And here’s the thing – I think they rushed it out too soon!!! It is NOT ready. Stay away for now. Trust me.
Lest the Apple faithful worry I have left the flock, I leave you with a few thoughts. My daughter and wife have both had leopard on their respective MacBooks without problems. And I will take a gimpy leopard over a crappy vista any day of the week.
Just to contrast poor J’s experience, I have been using Vista on various PCs 6 months prior to it’s release. As a software developer working on new junk with Microsoft’s new OS, I was forced into this. I was really pleasantly surprised. I have had very few problems with Vista, even in the earlier Betas, other than missing drivers for certain hardware. Things run smoothly for the most part, and my computers crash less, in all honesty. My games run a little slower because of the extra overhead, and Vista likes to have more ram, but that was a pretty cheap addition to my system. Anyway, did I hear a rumor you bought a PC? It’s really not that bad, is it? It does have more than one mouse button, after all !! *grin*
I vote this best pic of the week… J, you sound like me circa 1998 right before I switched to PC. 🙂
With me it was a speed issue – I flipped during the stale Mac period where they couldn’t hit the speeds and were playing Photoshop tricks to make everyone think they were still faster than PCs… It was like 2x the price for half the real-world speed. That was around the period their market share plummeted.
I had the same problems. The first week with 10.5 was horrible. I couldn’t get anything to work and the system crashed many times. I’d restart the computer at least once a day. In the past week, however, everything’s been running fine. No problems. As an upgrade, it’s not worth the money…not enough new features (that I use) to warrant the price.
too bad i didn’t read your rant BEFORE i had tangled with the leopard as well. also a good thing that i am the QUEEN of back ups. enough said, i don’t like to bring up those first few hours after installing leopard, my therapist says not to dwell on that anymore…
I’ve never had OS X upgrade issues and leopard loaded and ran fine for me on both my macs. my main machine runs XP in a parallels window on the second monitor so I have both OS’s running and don’t see any particular problems. Full disclosure: I keep a separate PC configured for gaming only.
PETA’s gonna fry yo ass son!
See, J, that’s what happens when you bring home a PC! Steve Jobs is out to get you!
To finish this thing up, I have done a complete ERASE and INSTALL of Leopard on my MacBook Pro. It seems to have fixed all of my problems. On a related note, I then installed Windows XP (via Parallels) onto the MacBook Pro, and the first time I launched it, it (XP) locked up when I tried to quit it….
So there you go.