The Tame Leopard
The Tame Leopard
Having waited for at least the first update from Apple to arrive, I finally bought Leopard (OS/X 10.5) and have now installed it onto my iMac. Now as anyone who may have passed this way over the last two and half years will know - I am a big fan of Macs and OS/X and would never be able to go back to Windows. But I am also a vocal critic of Apple and the things they get wrong. And the biggest thing they get wrong as far as I am concerned is the arrogant certainty with which they always tell you - ‘things just work’. They invariably don’t of course.
It’s the little things that would fluster the non-Mac literate and get them searching the Apple support website - except of course that they wouldn’t be able to because Leopard totally failed to find my Apple Airport WiFi Base Station and even when it finally did it failed to notice that there was actually a fast and juicy internet connection throbbing through it. To find that meant setting up the base station again except, of course, that the Airport Utility couldn’t find it for a long while. I lost count of the reboots.
The other problem is that when you finally do get connected up and can visit the Apple support pages for a little help with this and that, actually finding anything useful is a bit like finding a decent turkey in the local supermarkets late on Christmas Eve. Sure, you can find hints and a forum full of others going on and on about how things ‘just don’t work’ but when you do find what you need you’re back up against that wall. ‘Just do this, this and that and everything will be fine’. But it never bloody well is fine. The Apple attempt to make everything simple to setup and use and their zealous belief that they have done just that is the one thing that drives me to despair. If you need software help with anything Apple the last people to look to are Apple themselves.
Other than that - Leopard is….. pretty. But I really wanted to take advantage of Time Machine hence the upgrade.
Now here’s something else that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere - although unlike real Mac fan-boys I don’t actually read every word published so it probably has been. My first upgrade was from Jaguar to Panther. Jaguar, I recall, had a few games that weren’t that bad. Panther came bundled with a pre-licensed copy of the wonderful ‘Art Directors Toolkit’. Tiger came bundled with some more simple games and a pre-licensed copy of ‘Comic Life’. Leopard comes bundled with… er… nothing. Not even promotional 30 day tryouts of Pages! This is not a complaint as such, just an observation that surprised me.