Product Description

MAC OS X LEOPARD V10.5 RETAIL BOX IN

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #654 in Software
• Colour: Berry Blue
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MC094Z/A
• Released on: 2007-10-27
• Rating: Universal, suitable for all
• Platforms: Mac, Mac OS X
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l, .33 pounds

Features

• Mac OS X v10.5.6 Leopard

Customer Reviews

Evolution not Revolution but worth the upgrade
There's been lots of reviews about Leopard so I'll try to cover some aspects from a practical point of view.

First is stability; I decided to do a clean install; I've upgraded a couple of times before for Panther and Tiger (without problems) but have also migrated from Power PC to Intel so I felt a clean install would blow any potential glitches away. I'm glad I did as Leopard runs far more smoothly than Tiger ever did. I reckon it's about 25% quicker on average. I know it depends upon what you're running and your spec etc etc, but to give a simple example, my Macbook used to start up in about 20-25 seconds on Tiger; it took just 15sec the first time I restarted with Leopard.

Cover flow is not a useful as I thought it would be. Yes it looks fancy but I prefer to have overall visibility of my files within a folder and whilst it might look fine on a 24" iMac on my 15" Macbook I just find cover flow view a little too restricted to see quickly what files are present. Bottom line is I hardly use cover flow. Quick look on the other hand is excellent and I only open files when I want to work on them. Quick look is quick, easy and when combined with Spotlight is a potent search tool. I really notice the difference when using Windows at work.

Time machine is really really good but I'm not sure why it doesn't work with iTunes. To give you an idea of storage, I back up everything from my Macbook (about 60GB worth of files) and after a week Time machine has taken up nearly 80GB and it's going up and up. For 80GB of files I'd suggest a 320GB HD (a factor of 4) is a good rule of thumb if you're thinking of buying an external HD for time machine. That should give you at least a couple of months worth of back dating with room for comfort. Be advised though that Time machine doesn't work with drives connected wirelessly even through Airport extreme - a real shame, especially for laptops but one I'd expect to see remedied soon as Leopard was originally advertised to have this capability.

Spaces takes some getting used to. I tend to close or hide apps when finished with them and spaces can get a little confusing when working in multiple apps in different spaces. I'm using it more and more, and I'm sure with time it will be incorporated in to normal working routine. Stacks are good, but a slight shame they've removed the ability to right click a folder in the dock and access sub-folders.

I really like Safari 3 as it's much improved from the beta version. Having used it for a week it's really really fast, displays pages perfectly, and the web clip widget maker is great, although I don't see how to save a widget you've made yourself. A little frustrating as once you've closed it, you need to remake it. Maybe I'm missing something?

Front Row is a definite improvement, it's faster, slicker and miles more stable. The animation to access front row has gone, but I think this is a bonus - with dashboard and time machine it would be too many screens dropping away and being superimposed. I have a slight issue when connecting my laptop my my HD TV in that front row appear but doesn't pay video but it plays the sound. Might be specific to me but still a concern.

iChat is still limited. It works with google talk, AOL and dot Mac accounts - Apple in my opinion really need to expand this out for yahoo and msn etc for make it useful. I have a dot Mac account but I don't know anyone else who does so I can't chat with them. A shame really as it's a waste of a good app.

Help for spotlight is a really cool function. Just be advised that if you don't know the name of the command then it won't appear in your search. A little obvious really but typing 'justify' rather than 'align' might not yield the result you're looking for. But now I'm really nitpicking! The 3-rd party apps I've installed work well, a few (but only a few) are still incompatible but these are getting updated every week; and iLife 08 just purrs. The criticisms I've made are all minor and don't detract from the value of this well-built and thought through OS. It's well worth the upgrade, fast, slicker and more co-ordinated.

Don't get bogged down with the US/UK price comparison argument. Now one vetoes Levis jeans because they're cheaper in the USA. I'm happy with the price for the OS - it's a fair price for the UK, it's great value for money and is far far cheaper than windows. Definitely a good purchase.

Better off with Tiger
I upgraded to Leopard from Tiger out of curiosity, and I have to say it looks pretty.

But that's not everything you expect your OS to be, and indeed after a while I decided to go back to Tiger. Why?

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with it, it didn't crash or anything like that. I just found it very annoying that it slowed down my Mac significantly (opening new folders in finder was a pain, I had to wait for several seconds to have folder contents displayed), and did various other things that annoyed me. I'm using my Mac for quite a lot of development tasks, and after I found out that the upgrade had messed up my MySQL installation and changed some Apache things which I had to work around I felt this was rather a burden than an improvement. I got it all working again, but not in a way that left me feel confident about the overall setup.

The positive things: Tabs in the terminal application, new finder views (cover flow), and ... that's about it. Multiple work places were nice if you have a lot of windows open (and most of the time I had) but I didn't really use that feature a lot.

After that experience I can't really recommend the upgrade. Leopard's really more about cosmetic changes and some additional gadgets. If you're happy with Tiger, stick to it.

Hello Pretty!
It's early days I know but I thought maybe just a short first impressions review of Leopard might help people decide as to whether or not it's worth their while in updating to the new Apple operating system.

To go through all of the extra features included in Leopard would, to be honest, take a lot longer than this short review. If you want to see all the extra features together with a short description of each one then pop over to the Apple site.

Someone recently described Leopard as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I think that, in my opinion at least, is pretty spot on. For me there is no killer application, no "I must have that" additional feature. Rather it's a combination of smaller additions, updates and features that, when combined together, have produced Leopard. This is all very personal to me and I realise that for some people Leopard is bringing to them something completely new and something that they have been wanting for a while. As I said, this is just my own personal opinion.

Apple have, as usual, employed the services of a Japanese origami master when it comes to the packaging. For me, part of the fun when it comes to buying an Apple product is the packaging. There's none of the usual bubble wrap and cardboard egg carton packaging here I can tell you. Just a simple and neat gatefold sleeve with your installation disk on one side and installation manual on the other.
Talking of installation, the next topic to cover is...how easy is the installation? In my case I'll answer that in one word...very. I simply unplugged all my peripheral devices such as hard drives, printer etc, inserted the Leopard disk, pressed a couple of confirmation buttons, such as where on my Mac would I like to install Leopard and that was pretty much it. The actual installation time took 120 minutes from start to finish. I should point out that I did let the installation disk check my CD / DVD drive first, an option that can be skipped should you want to. I was also given the option of customising what features I wanted to install ( I choose all of them) which would cut down on the time spent waiting for the install to complete. But let's be honest, hopefully you'll only ever have to do it once and you can always disappear and make a cup of tea once the process has started.

So with Leopard staring at me from my screen what do I think? Well irrespective of what you might think of Apple they do get full marks for producing eye candy and with this being their hammer they have made a big effort at hitting all the nails. The first thing you can't help but notice is the amount of eye candy. The dock icons appear to be sitting on a semi translucent glass shelf with just a hint of reflection beneath them. The menu bar is also slightly translucent with the desktop theme appearing beneath it. One thing that did need attention in the previous OSX was a windows makeover and at last Apple have got round to making all of the application windows look and behave the same. Anyone familiar with the design of iTunes will feel instantly at home. Both the Finder and Mail application have an iTunes based layout to them.
Of course none of this is going to make you more productive or suddenly inspire you to write that novel that you always knew was inside you somewhere but at least you've got something nice to look at whilst you stare at your screen.

Something which I did have concerns over before the arrival of Leopard was it's compatibility with third party applications. I've had a quick count and by my reckoning I've got over twenty five applications not released by Apple and so far only one (MailTags) has not worked with Leopard. A quick look at the MailTags site showed that, as yet, they haven't produced a Leopard compatible version but no doubt it's in the pipeline. Of course the real test will come over time as I use more applications and ask more of Leopard but initial impressions are very good with regards to the use of third party applications.
Something else that I know other people had concerns over was whether or not the installation disk would be DRM protected i.e would you need to register your copy of Leopard with Apple. Well thankfully the answer is no which means that I can install Leopard on my laptop as well without the need to buy another copy. Don't tell the Windows users, it'll only upset them!

So the installation process was very easy, the operating system looks very nice and, on my Macs at least, appears to be very stable and it works with third party applications. Question is, is it worth buying? For what I would call the average Mac user ( and I don't mean to sound disrespectful when I say that) my best advice would be to take a look at the Apple website, see the features that Leopard has to offer and watch the videos. After that ask yourself if Leopard is offering you an application or feature that you have always wanted. If the answer is yes then sure, go out and buy it. Once you start to delve into it you're sure to find plenty more extra's that you like.
If on the other hand you're someone that I would call a pro-user then, essentially, you're not missing out on much more than eye candy and some "nice touches" and chances are you already have third party applications that deal with most of the major new features that Leopard has to offer.
Do I think it's worth getting now rather than later? Let's just say that I'm glad I pre-ordered it rather than standing in the rain outside the Apple Store Regents Street waiting for the doors to open.