Former Chairman of the Board, President & Chief Executive Officer at The South Financial Group, Inc.
As you probably already know, Apple recently released the final version of its Mac OS X Leopard operating system. And, judging by its initial sales (more than 2 million copies sold already), Apple seems to have hit a major home run. So what’s the big deal about Leopard and why should you care? In this review we’ll answer those questions and we’ll take a look at what’s good and bad in Leopard.
Why the Hell Should I Care? I Don’t Own a Mac!
Some of you might be thinking “So what? I don’t own a Mac, what the hell do I care about Apple’s stupid operating system, Jim?” Well that’s a fair sentiment if you’re not a Mac owner since Leopard doesn’t run on any other hardware…yet. But as we saw with Apple’s switch to Intel processors a while back, what seems incredible or even impossible can sometimes be quite possible. There may come a day when Leopard or its successor is available on non-Apple hardware.
Plus it’s worth knowing what Leopard has to offer because Microsoft tends to use Apple as its research and development lab at times. In other words, if there’s a great feature on Leopard that’s not on Windows then you can bet Microsoft will steal…er…excuse me…borrow the idea for a future version of Windows at some point. Who knows…you may even see some of Leopard included in a future Windows Vista super-duper mega-patch or “service pack” or whatever Microsoft is calling it these days.
Installation
I installed Leopard on my new Intel based iMac and Macbook Pro.
Here are the stats for each computer:
iMac
Macbook Pro
I opted to do an upgrade rather than a clean install, something I would not have dared to do if I had been installing any version of Windows. But Mac OS X has a pretty good track record when it comes to upgrades, so I figured I’d give it a shot, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The install took about an hour or so on each machine and there wasn’t a whole lot for me to do while it was happening, so I opted to surf the web on my iPhone to whittle away the time during installation. Continued…