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  • Is Leopard a Failure?

    December 17th, 2007

    After long months of anticipation, Leopard went on sale in late October, and I’m sure many of you succumbed to the lust for eye-candy and the promise of over 300 nifty new features and placed your orders early on. I know I did.

    Others waited for hours for the big bash at an Apple Store, as if some famous entertainer was going to be present. All this for a personal computer operating system? Well, in 1995, Microsoft got a similar reception to the introduction of Windows 95. How times have changed!

    But has Leopard truly realized its potential? Did Apple deliver on its promises, or deliver a buggy product that a few tech pundits are even comparing to the dismal Windows Vista rollout?

    The problem here is that there’s a huge disconnect between reality and some of those published claims. At the heart of this is the fact that, like all new operating system releases, Leopard was plagued with some annoying bugs when it left the starting gate. True to form, Apple probably released the product a little early in order to meet the deadline of shipping by the end of October.

    But most of the serious problems were fixed within weeks with a fast 10.5.1 update, yet the perception some so-called journalists want to convey is that those fixes never existed, or just weren’t very important.

    Among the complaints that were supposedly so serious: Failing Wi-Fi connections, application crashes and, of course, that infamous bug where you could lose a file while moving it to another drive or partition using the seldom-used Command-drag process.

    But, as I said, that’s a moot point, although I grant some of you are still having problems that, one hopes, will soon be solved by Apple or a third-party developer in the very near future.

    What is a fact is that Leopard had a terrific reception out of the starting gate, garnering some two million sales the very first weekend. I don’t presume to have the figures since then, but I think it would be fair to say that there are probably going to be another million or two Leopard users by the end of the quarter, even if most of those sales involve copies preloaded onto new Macs. My impressions of Leopard’s ongoing success are apparently confirmed by a MacNN report about the results of a recent NDP retail study.

    With such a fast influx of new Leopard users, you have to expect some ongoing teething pains, but to suggest that Leopard is somehow a failure strains logic. Lest you forget, previous versions of Mac OS X also had their share of troubles in the initial releases. Tiger, for example, had problems with VPN and cross-platform networking, and it took quite a while to sort things out. However, I don’t recall a spate of public pronouncements proclaiming Tiger as some sort of abject failure. In fact, Tiger is considered a great product, and it’ll take a lot for Leopard to attain that status.

    So why the difference?

    Well, the Apple of 2007 is quite different from the Apple of 2005, when Tiger came out. Although Apple was doing quite well with iPod sales and all, and had garnered great reviews for Macs, sales for the latter had yet to really soar.

    Today, Macs are ascendant, and growing fast. There are estimates that some 30% of Americans planning to buy new computers in the next three months intend to select a Mac. This is one extraordinary development with a product line that, only a few years back, had sales of but a few percent even in the U.S., Apple’s largest single market.

    With the iPhone and iPod also growing rapidly, Apple can’t do a single thing without attracting attention just about anywhere in the developed world. That is a double-edged sword, because it means that the vultures will be looking hard for bad news to create headlines, even if they have to ignore a few facts.

    Now if you have had bad experiences with Leopard, I suppose you might be inclined to believe it has been a failure on an individual level. But when I see it on Top 20 lists among the misses for 2007, I just believe that’s going way too far.



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    35 Responses to “Is Leopard a Failure?”

    1. roz says:

      DGD – Sounds like an issue with your optical drive.

      ==

      On one hand I feel like the problems with Leopard are overblown because I really have not had that much trouble and on the whole I think its an awesome upgrade. But I also hate indifference to people who really seem to be struggling.

      Look it seems like Leopard is not a conservative release at all. The OS is evolving in a lot of ways it seems, some of which we may not totally understand. Its not just eye candy. There are a ton of great features here. Take that Wifi menu, its so much more handy now. Little options here and there that make the OS better. And less visual junk. I love the new finder window. Screen sharing and Back to My Mac is a revolution for my family – night and day.

      I hope they can nail down the wifi issue for people – that sounds like it sucks. It might just be a very narrow issue between 10.5, some wifi chipsets and even a particular set of routers. Who knows.

    2. Chris Mead says:

      Wow! Same problem – my wifi drops out also. I have an IMAC G5, 2.1 GHZ PowerPC.

      Not automatic processes are failing like Quicken updates (buggy software itself) and BOINC.

      Web pages are slow to load or just fail.

      Now what?

    3. Mr. Rich says:

      Wow…. I’m a IT techie, soon will be picking up my first mac ( 20″ iMAC), and honestly, I’m surprised by the # of ” the entire OS bites because one piece of hardware isn’t working right” comments… seems to me ( no OSX background here) to be a simple case of a bad driver… can’t you just reinstall the airport driver? I’d never look at reinstalling the entire OS on a windows machine for something this simple.. And BTW, every new OS I’ve ever dealt with, has had issues with hardware drivers of some sort.. it’s a part of life!! Doesn’t mean that the OS is a failure…

      Same thing goes for Vista, wait till SP1 comes down the pike, and I bet things will be different.. XP was cr@p until SP2 came out.. now everyone is touting how stable and great XP is.. just give things time…

    4. marcantonio says:

      Leopard breaks too much backwards compatibility for us (we’re talking real engineering apps here, not emailer or Word v5.1). For the first time in my 20 year love affair with the Mac I’ll be skipping an OS release. Ouch!

      What engineering app are you talking about, if I may ask? I’m interested.

      I switched to Leopard on my mbp and I definitely love it. However as I am considering the introduction of the osx platform in a currently windows-only company, I’d like to be aware of all important non-mainstream applications that Leopard does not support.

    5. big al says:

      I installed 10.5 on ma’s new iMac, as Apple still shipped 10.4.10 on systems built before 11-2x-07.

      Not to imply Leopard is a failure, just more evidence it wasn’t thoroughly tested – I was greeted with an install hang. Ma connects to internet through USB modem, and typed in wrong login password. When Leopard tried to dial in for registration, it hung after unsuccessfully dialing into her ISP (that is my theory anyways, unless Apple tried to dial into they’re own modem, which I doubt).

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