Leopard
I got my hands on Leopard Friday night after a wild demonstration at the local Apple store. The employees really make it an event when something like the iPhone or Leopard comes out. Everyone is cheering and excited. Obviously Apple knows how to market their products.
My first impression of Leopard was underwhelming. I performed an Archive & Install, which preserves your existing install and only updates the operating system files. I don’t know what it was, possibly Time Machine creating the initial backup and/or Spotlight updating it’s index, but the OS was dog slow. It was like running Windows Vista on less than 2 GB of memory; seriously. After an hour or so of trying to determine if the Archive & Install option was the cause, I decided to just perform a clean install. Once that was completed and I had copied my files back over, Leopard was lightening fast. I’d highly suggest to anyone that is moving from Tiger to Leopard to perform a clean install of the OS. Making a backup is as simple as copying your home directory to an external source.
As has been said by many previewing and reviewing Leopard, it’s not a revolutionary upgrade. A lot of idiots only look at Leopard skin deep. These people make the argument that the refresh the internals have received doesn’t matter because their audience is the consumer, yet in the very same article talk about Windows Vista and how it was “rearchitected from the ground up”. That said, from the front end point of view, there are only a dozen or so items you’ll notice that are new or have been improved heavily. The most popular being Time Machine. You can’t ignore the improvements that have happened behind the scenes to dramatically improve the speed and responsiveness of Leopard. I used Vista for 8+ hours a day for 8 months. I know what it’s like. To compare the two in terms of performance is a complete joke. For example, go and copy a few hundred files in Vista. Then come back and talk to me about being re-architected from the ground up. That’s a pathetic excuse for a regression in performance.
After 2.5 years of development, I honestly expected more out of Leopard from what I can “touch and feel”. Everyone has said how much of an improvement Tiger was over Panther. Leopard doesn’t seem to have that level of improvement over Tiger. I do think this release was meant to be a coat of polish on an already wonderful base. I’m hoping 10.6 brings the same advancement that Tiger brought, without the 2.5 year wait.
