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Leopard unveiled for Apple Macs
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 26th October 2007
Leopard boasts over 300 new features over Tiger and previous OS'
Leopard is the sixth major release of the Mac OS X operating system and is the successor to Tiger, the previous version. It will go on sale for around $129 or £85, though student and family pack versions will also be available.
Impressively, Apple is offering a cheap upgrade option for anyone who has bought a new Mac between October 1st or December 29th this year, allowing them to upgrade to Leopard for just $9.95, or around £5.
Apple reckons that Leopard contains over 300 new features and enhancements over previous versions of the OS, including 64-bit support on all applications, which should run on all Tiger-supporting Macs.
One of the most disappointing new features however is...The Time Machine!, which turns out to actually just be an automated back-up tool which regularly runs to prevent you losing files. Early reports that this function would require flux capacitor hardware were unveiled to be utter rubbish.
Most obvious among the changes is the new desktop however, which uses a new menu bar on the bottom of the screen and 'stacks'. Stacks do what they say on the tin and allow users to create piles of icons and documents, keeping everything tidy. The system automatically collects your downloads in one stack by default though, so you may want to fiddle with that option if you're downloading stuff you want to keep...uh, private.
Will you be picking up a new version and, if so what license? Do you use a Mac regularly, or are you a PC user through and through? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (47)Stats: 0.047 seconds
That would be "OSes" apostrophes aren't used for plurals ;), Good article though. :)
I to found the Time Machine rather disappointing... but my #1 feature is "RSS in Mail" FINALLY.
Now I'm not going to pretend that the 300+ features are all worth mentioning, but the top ten alone are worth $15 each which covers the cost of the OS and then a bit. And you can buy the family pack if you've got multiple users and pay only $40/user.
Whaaa? :? OS X 'updates' are major revisions and the last time a major revision was released (10.4 Tiger) was over two years ago, and 10.3 was two years before that!
In the time between XP and Vista, upgrading through 10.1 to 10.5 will have cost you less than buying (retail copies of) XP Pro and then Vista Ultimate, FYI :D
my macbook updates itself for free. wasn't tiger released 2 years ago, thats a lil more than 6 months. so what are you talking about? so yes the prices are different.
i think the student discount should be more than 15 dollars, but thats just me.
Being as Tiger (10.4) was released almost 2.5 years ago to the day, I fail to see what you're asking...It's been patched and fixed regularly for the whole period via a system quite similar to Windows Update (minus the breaking itself thing)?
Depending on where you are, check if your school has its own Apple Education Store - it will often cheaper than using the 'Global' Apple Education Store. Schools can actually set their own pricing for certain Apple products and Apple software is one of those :)
only way I'll ever use leopard is if I really feel the urge to buy a copy to run as OSX86 (perfectly doable using VMs as long as you have a licensed copy)
Leopard, not really worth asking me, of course I wont get it, Vista already does it all already.
the school im at has no apple store, although were i live there is one, and my parents work at the university there so i might be able to get it cheaper back home, ill be back for thanksgiving.
I'll still stick to my PC and OSX86 :p
Speaking of which - gonna try to port the kernel/kext's from 9A257 onto the final - should be fun! xD
/Fr4nk
http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/uptodate/
how does Leopard manage to run 32bit in 64bit kernel?
i thought, from the 64bit article, that 32bit requires some sort of emulation. but on Wikipedia, they said no need for emulation software.
my friend said they are run in universal mode, which i said is another word for "32bit emulation". but he just refuse to believe me instead of the Apple marketing websites.
The price of Windows XP (2001): approx. $200
The price of Windows Vista Ult. (2007): approx. $200
We are of course talking OEM licenses as this is only a fair assumption.
Of course it should also only be a fair assumption that XP came with your PC just like you got OSX 10.0 with your mac. So that's $200 in total on the PC.
Let's even say you bought Vista Ultimate Retail... That would be around $500? Giving you a total of: $500 (Org OS, Service packs, new OS, etc. included)
Lets say you were upgrading according to Apples release scheme:
I presume the price has been the same each year. At the moment it's $129.
We are fair and assume that you got X 10.0 with your hardware so that's $129 saved there.
Then there has been five more iterations of "Big Cats". Each running at $129
Hmmm... 5 times 129... can it be? Could it be that it is more than "Vista Ultimate Super Deluxe 2000+ Extra Special Double Glacing"?
Lets even pretend that the Mac guy has been studying for the full 6 years (he must be darn close to a candidate degree soon we hope) that would amount to: 5x129= 645 x0.85 = $548.25
So stop the fanboying. It doesn't look good on anyone.
And yes I do really like my MBP and I think OS X does some things better than Windows :)
A 64bit cpu is fully capable of proccesing 32bit,16bit and 8bit instructions and if used as a genral purpose pc will spend almost all its time doing as such. As for the kernal I know nothing about them but just because a cpu is 64bit dosen't mean it loses the capabilty to proccess shorter instructions.
But in leopard all the libraries, Cocoa and such are fully 64-bit. It'd be kind of confusing for a 32-bit application to rely on 64-bit libraries?
Got some friends telling me like every day how unbelievably godlike OSX is but I still don't feel the need to get an IMO (and please no flaming, it's just MY OPINION) overpriced piece of hardware to run an OS I don't really see to be that much better than Windows.
Hm. You're lucky we have a mac user in charge of the ban-hammer. ;)
Macs were just too expensive when the business was getting setup, so PC waas the way to go. We actually have some original Dell PCs floating around. Since we have always used PCs there was no motive to change even as we got bigger. When I compare the prices of PC worksations to the equivalent powermac, I still can't justify the price premium. Especially when we get such cheap windows licences thanks to our ties to MS.
I prefer the mac experience to the windows one, and don't mind the slight premium to have that. At the end of the day if I'm pleased with my mac, and someone else is pleased with there dell/hp/asus machine then everyone's a winner, right?
I also think the problem is in terms of OS dev we have reached a platau of sorts, back in the early days there was a lot of innovation to be had and the desktops started to get prettier more functional. But now regardless of which OS you use, you have a start button, a task bar and a desktop. As a population I think we have got to lazy to learn a new interface and a new way of using our PCs. People now just want to switch it on and it to work they dont want to have to learn a how new way of operating a PC.
Kimbie
I don't have a start button :?
What? OS X has always had a start button! :?
All these people saying they made it more pretty like Vista clearly haven't even contemplated trying it. Don't get me wrong - Vista has its upsides and I still think it handles network shares a lot better (as far back as I can remember this has been the case... even Win98 or so handled network shares better than Leopard) which is a pet peeve of mine, and let's not forget gaming. But stuff like quick look, in-icon document previews, and all that good stuff is just SO much better than any previous implementation on any platform.
I must say that my wireless connection seems a touch less stable than before upgrading, however I've been pushing a LOT more data through it in the last week or so and recently replaced my router, so that may not be the fault of the new software. And TBH, Vista was exactly the same way for me when I'd upgraded my PC.
for the sake of argument, thery're pretty much both as good as each other in terms of daily use, but max OSs provide me a helluva lot less hassle and grief. mac for daily use, windows for games :D make peace, not silly platform wars (sorry, far too tired to come up with a suitably funny ending line...)
And I totally agree with your end point. I'm on an XP machine right now after about 3 hours of Counter-Strike. Dunno what I'd do without it.
it's free and smoking fast and stable with the latest build....what's more you can tinker to your hearts content.
Vista/XP for gaming and linux for destop suits me just fine.