I bought the family pack of Leopard this evening and only had to wait on line about 25 minutes. There were about 200 people ahead of me, but somehow they were able to move those people through the store very quickly. Interesting thing to note was that when I had made my way up through 75% of the line, I looked back and the back of the line was at the same point at which I started. This blog entry is called “First Impressions”, and with that in mind, I will keep this very short and say three things.
1. I had hoped that doing an upgrade on my Mac Pro from Tiger to Leopard would be sweet. When I was a Windows user, I had upgraded time and time again, through virtually all versions of Windows, and each time the system was extremely sluggish and very disappointing in performance. I therefore formed the opinion that no one with any kind of technical know-how should EVER do an upgrade of their operating system. It’s just too big of a deal. I was of the frame of mind that whenever you were going to install a new OS, you needed to reformat your drive and start from scratch.
Apple wasn’t able to sway me from that opinion. While my Mac Pro performs acceptably, it most certainly doesn’t perform like a quad-core 3.0 GHz system with 5 gigs of RAM. I will therefore be doing a reformat and reinstall on this box as soon as I have the time. Meanwhile, I will enjoy the GREAT features of Leopard, such as Spaces (discussed in item 3).
2. A fresh install of Leopard is quite literally amazing. My MacBook Pro (which I think is the first-generation 15″ unit with 2 gigs of RAM) performs (I swear) BETTER under Leopard than it did under Tiger. And that’s something I absolutely NEVER could have said about any Windows OS upgrade. My MacBook Pro is extremely responsive and I’m just loving the experience. This is a far cry from when I first tried out two other major releases this year: Vista and Office 2007. I spent so much time trying to figure out how to do things I already knew how to do that I became very sour on those products and just stopped using them.
3. Spaces is just freakin’ awesome. This concept of having multiple desktops that you can switch between is by no means new to either Mac OS or Windows, but in Mac OS the implementation is just SWEET. The performance is amazing, the user experience is nothing short of what you’d expect from Apple, and I’ve already found Spaces super-useful even though I’ve only had it installed for a couple of hours. I plan to get in to Time Machine when I get a new external hard drive. I’ll also blog about various other Leopard findings. But I feel it is important to make one final point.
I first installed Vista Beta 2 when I was a devout Microsoft Fan Boy and I was both disappointed and surprised at what the public was to come to expect as the next “major release” of Windows. Similarly, I installed Leopard as a devout Apple Fan Boy almost two years later and contrary to my Vista experience, Leopard feels like an extension of all the goodness, reliability, and strength that I already had at my disposal in Tiger – not a replacement of things merely for the purpose of change.
More to come!
I’m want to be surprised that the performance isn’t up to snuff on the Mac Pro after the upgrade, but I guess logically it make sense. I didn’t work too much on my MP before we left. I’ve been messing around on my MBP, and I think the performance it pretty peppy, although I haven’t done much on it to really put a strain on it.
Let me know how the MP reinstall works when you do it, I’ll probably end up doing the same.
I agree completely with your points on the initial impression of Vista. It was too different, I couldn’t get into a groove with it, and that’s why I went back to XP after a half hour. (That, and I got tired of it asking “Are you sure you want to do this?”, ‘Really, really, really sure?”) After the install was finished, at first I felt that it wasn’t different enough, that the new features were slick and I was excited about them, but that there should have been more of a change. But then it came to me that there was the whole point, that it didn’t change too much to make it a whole new learning experience. But it changed enough to give it a new and fresh look, added so nice new features, but still made the change comfortable.