I’ve got a pre-order coming, and I’ll install it the moment it arrives. However, I’m gonna install it on an external Firewire drive and experiment some before I do a clean install on the primary drive.
Regarding laptop design: I’ve noticed a general downward trend in Apple’s high-end laptop design in recent years. I’m not talking so much about the quality of the machines themselves, or the features available, more just the exterior design consideration and aesthetics. The original Titanium PowerBook line was, in my opinion, the finest notebook computer ever designed, past or present. It was an absolute work of art from every angle! The keyboard was probably my favourite ever, full size or laptop. The whole thing just screamed quality. The only flaw was that the keys touched the screen when the case was closed. I guess some might say another flaw was its relative fragility (thin skin, double-hinge screen joint), but I likened it to a butterfly. Beautiful, just don’t stomp on it. 
I’m not terribly impressed with the current MacBook Pro design. It’s a wonderful laptop, make no mistake, and much nicer than pretty much anything else out there right now—but when compared to one of those original old PowerBooks? Not even close!
Of course, being aesthetics and such other subjectives, this is all my opinion. I’ll always consider the original Titaniums to be the ultimate confluence of form and function.
Amusingly, the opposite could be said for the low-end laptops. The original iBooks were nicely designed, but I like the new MacBooks even better.
I’ve experienced the complete opposite from Apple thus far. Every OS release has substantially improved speed on existing hardware. I’ve heard similar reports from people using dev builds of Leopard. But yes, all of that is nothing until it is actually installed.
Yep, Leopard is substantially faster on my MBPro than Tiger is. Tiger seems like a snail by comparison these days…
Best,
Keith
My experience too…
It’s quite remarkable, given that normally newer translates to slower on older equipment.
My first Mac was an Imac which ran at 800mhz and I still have it so I was slightly disembowelled to read that the minimum for the upgrade is 867mhz.
Roaming around the web I saw that people with developer releases had successfully installed on machine slower than 867mhz. So if Leopard does not install I will start searching.
If anybody knows of this crack please post as I don’t like to see a good machine die.
It could be I misread that its G3’s slower than 867mhz and not G4’s but we will find out on Friday.
Paul
Apple state the minimum general requirements as:
A Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or better) processor
512MB memory
DVD drive for installation
9GB of free disk space
Some features require a compatible Internet service provider, fees may apply.
Some features require Apple’s .Mac service, fees apply.
I’ve seen some guides on the net showing how to install on an iBook G3, but I can’t seem to find them now. If I remember correct there is some patch that can be applied to an installation that removes leopard’s cpu-check.
How is Leopard performing, now it’s had a few days to bed in?
How in particular is it performing with common tools of the writing trade? I noticed on the TinderBox forum that Amber has reported the application seems slower on her MacBook (though to be fair Mark Bernstein says it should be as fast or faster). The DevonThink developers have warned users against installing 10.5 for the time being.
Leaving aside overdone PC schadenfreude, are there any issues of significance? What have the early adopters found?
So far, it’s doing splendidly. I’ve noticed a few differences - primarily in small things, like I now have to type the first letter/number for auto-fill, which is annoying but not really a biggie. I’m loving Time Machine and the other two great additions: CoverFlow and QuickLook, though I have to admit I sometimes forget they are there and do things the old-fashioned way until I remember. 
I have avoided DTPO because I read early-on not to run it with Leopard (yet). Since I index most of my research, I can use Spotlight to find things (and Spotlight is much more robust, too!) so I’m not missing it nearly as much as I expected to. Enlightening, eh?
I am ticked that FileMaker isn’t updated - there’s really no excuse for that, imo.
The most important thing - Scrivener - runs beautifully. 
I’m also enjoying the small treats that I find tucked away. Little enhancements or additions that aren’t big flashy additions, yet make the whole experience much more enjoyable. Very nice. 
Stacks is just one of those things that I was sure I would find useless, but am actually finding to be extremely useful for certain applications. Particularly, downloading an image or something, switching to another application, and dropping the downloaded image straight into it. Previously this would have required a bit more hassle. Potentially rummaging into the Desktop or some other collection area, finding the file (wondering what name it got downloaded as), and so forth. Not with Stacks. Latest download is right at the bottom, drag and drop and the Stack disappears without any fuss. I’ve set up Hazel to go through the Downloads Stack and cull everything over three hours old, so I literally never worry about downloads anymore. They appear, I siphon them where they need to go, and forget completely about it.
So the basic idea seemed obvious (and replicable using older techniques) to the point of stupidity, but actually using it, and noting the subtle thought that Apple put into its design is very nice.
Spaces is also well thought out. There are some things that will take getting used to. Getting whisked about to different desktops based on the last window accessed in an application is something I do not care for. For example if I have a browser window open in two different spaces, one for work and one for play, let’s say, and I’m working, when I Cmd-Tab to Firefox, I’d rather it selected the closest available window, rather than the last window I might have accessed in the “play” area. Other than that quibble, I do like how you do not have to worry about where windows are. If I need to switch to Adium, I don’t have to remember where I left it, I can just Cmd-Tab and then when I am done responding, Cmd-Tab will whisk me right back to where I left off.
Nice.
Time Machine, while not a replacement for sets of off-site back-ups, is extremely nice for peace of mind. I can completely blow up my system and have it re-installed precisely to where I was before in the same amount of time it takes to install the system from scratch. That is beautiful. And for user errors like accidentally saving over a file instead of making a new copy and blowing away hours of work? I love it. I don’t do that kind of thing often, but knowing that when I do, I shan’t worry about the consequences is nice.
Lots of little subtle things just make the whole Mac experience much more pleasing to use. My mother is finally making the switch now that she has seen it.
My only aesthetic complaint so far is the Dock. It is a little visually intense in the bottom position. Icons don’t stand out as well, and those blue glowing dots are not as obvious as they could be. I think the Dock looks really nice on the sides of the screen, however. The transparent menu doesn’t bother me. I think it looks kind of nice, actually, as do the new menus with the blur effect.
The transparent menu as you see it now is a massive improvement over the one in earlier developer seeds. A lot of developers bemoaned it, although I quite liked it. They did have a point that it was quite difficult to see the text on it when you used certain desktop images, though. So Apple upped the opacity a little and now it is perfect, I think. I much prefer it, in fact…
I thought exactly the same about the blue dots, but I got used to them after a while. And I quite like the new dock over all.
Best,
Keith
Haven’t tried it myself, but just got a note from one of my daughters. Her university is advising against immediate upgrade to Leopard:
Phil
Interesting, PJS. Haven’t heard of that one. You’d think it’d be all over the blogs. I don’t read all that many but usually enough to catch issues when they pop up. (Naturally, I could have missed it…)
Might be a large-scale wifi installation thing since my local home wifi works just like it always did. (Better, actually, since sharing in now a breeze to enable, even with PCs.)
Hope they get whatever the issue is resolved soon. (I wonder if it’s another Cisco issue like that one a school blamed on the iPhone earlier this year.)
Funny, and I was going to comment that I found the wireless support in Leopard to be much more stable than it was in Tiger. Access point acquisition seems to happen much faster, and I have yet to see the annoying situation crop up where it finds the access point, but refuses to get the correct DNS information from the gateway.
Regarding the menu, I like it better than the old Mac menu too. It doesn’t stand out so much; sinks into the interface and feels less demanding of attention. This is especially nice when the majority of the applications you are working in are “dark,” such as Lightroom, or TextMate with a dark colour theme.
I came to Macs about a year ago and started with Tiger of course. leopard blows it out of the water in terms of looks, functionality, and speed on my MacBook.
The wifi thing is odd, and Apple hasn’t officially responded yet. It doesn’t appear to be widespread, but certainly enough users have experienced it to kick up a stink at the Apple forums. Here’s a slightly OTT report on it from CW NZ:
Apparently there’s an unpublished setting you can do to force the style of the side Docks onto the bottom Dock. It’s pointed out about halfway down this page in the Dock portion of Ars Technica’s Leopard review:
arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/4
If that helps. I’m still looking forward to buying and installing Leopard, meself.
Got it.
r
Seems good but my scanner will not work because there are no drivers yet.I
On the whole, i do like it.
Howard
@ PJS: the university of your daughter is right, awfully right.
As soon as I had my copy of Leopard, I migrated to the new system both on my desktop and on my laptop. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do, but my enthousiasm betrayed me.
It became a nightmare. All kinds of things which had worked perfectly under Tiger, worked very badly, or even didn’t work at all, under Leopard. Just to give one concrete example: in Mail, I couldn’t send messages anymore. In Thunderbird, the outgoing mail worked as it should, so it clearly was a Mail problem. On various forums I read about other people who had exactly the same problem. Of course I tried all kinds of common resources and tricks, including DiskWarrior, the Apple Care help desk, etc. etc. But this very frustrating problem persisted, and so did some other very annoying things.
In the end, the wisest thing to do seemed to deinstall Leopard at least on my desktop, which I use all day, and to go back to Tiger. And so I did.
My personal experience has taught me Leopard is still full of bugs, which, as many bugs use to do, only under certain circumstances reveal themselves. And yes, I read all the enthousiastic comments of people who didn’t encounter any problems at all. What can I say? Perhaps only that I was less fortunate than they were.
No problems at all in my case. All external devices work just as before, all apps are running, no strange behaviour at all. I didn’t do a clean install, I just installed it over Tiger. All the years I was careful not to install any tools that are known for messing up the system on the lower level - guess that helped.
It’s been a week now and I’ve gotten really used to it. Especially Spaces proves really useful.