Upgrading to Leopard: Look before you leap
As all loyal Macolytes know, Apple's latest revision of its operating system, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, goes on sale at 6 p.m. this evening. But for those yearning to upgrade this weekend, I offer these few words of caution:
Know your specs: Leopard should be a great upgrade for any Intel-based Mac. Likewise, any PowerPC G5-based Mac should do fine. Many G4 Macs qualify, but the CPU speed must be 867 MHz or higher. That means the dual 800 MHz Quicksilver, for instance, doesn’t make the cut. And no G3 Mac qualifies. (Concerns that older Macs that barely qualified might suffer a performance hit by upgrading to Leopard appear to have been negated.)
No more Classic: This is not an issue if you already have an Intel-based Mac; Classic doesn’t work on those anyway. But Leopard will nix Classic on PowerPC Macs that ran that the Mac OS 9 emulator under Tiger just fine. If you have a PowerPC Mac that otherwise qualifies for Leopard but you still use Classic for anything important, Leopard may not be for you. Unless your Mac can boot directly into OS 9 (and even that can be a pain), you’d be stuck.
No wireless Time Machine: One of Leopard’s most highly touted features, the automated backup system Apple calls Time Machine has an Achilles Heel. It can’t back up wirelessly to a networked hard drive. One must have a hard drive attached physically to the Mac via USB or FireWire (or I would assume, a spare drive bay in a Mac Pro). Time Machine can back up over a network to a server or another Mac running Leopard, but that isn't a practical solution for most home users. A lot of Mac users are upset over this, as Apple’s Time Machine features page on its Web site formerly said specifically that the feature would be able to back up wirelessly to hard drives connected to an Airport Extreme Base Station. Laptop owners will find this drawback particularly inconvenient. So far Apple has offered no explanation for dropping this once-promised capability.
The usual warnings: Although Leopard is the sixth version of Mac OS X, it has changed significantly and could break software – particularly utilities – that people depend on. Wise Mac users will wait for the early adopters to suffer through the early days of finding out which things break while the companies that make the software scramble to get out patches to fix the problems. Usually all such issues get straightened out within a few months of the release of a new version of OS X. Trust me, your patience will be rewarded.
I realize all this advice will fall on deaf ears among those can’t resist the pull of having the new OS on their Mac right now. Just remember: tempting as it is, upgrading an operating system always entails some degree of risk.
I will be sharing my thoughts on Leopard’s features as soon as I can get a copy on my Macs and spend some quality time playing with it.
Comments
I think that all I need is my monkey and my dog.
Give me Aimga Pong everyday.
Posted by: Zaster | October 26, 2007 6:05 PM
Luckily my preorder copy of Leopard wasn't delivered Friday. :)
Posted by: Neil Anderson | October 27, 2007 12:22 PM
Prescient. Judging by the hundreds of owners reporting disabled Apple computers in the apple.com support forums just one day into the Leopard release, it seems that many will wish they had read been busy reading the cautions of Mr. Zeiler's piece rather than embarking on a journey more dangerous than many would have imagined. Count me among them.
Posted by: Boston MA | October 28, 2007 3:26 AM
I loaded leopard on my 1.67 gig core dual mac mini, and followed the directions for installment. After the computer restarted, I got the apple logo, the sundial, then the screen turned blue. The mouse pointer worked, but nothing else. The disk won't come out, and nothing happens. I fear that installation of leopard resulted in the blue screen of death on a system that was working perfectly fine on Tiger
Posted by: jrollins | October 29, 2007 7:26 AM
My problem is that after I loaded leopard MS Word "unexpectedly quits" every time I try to print to my hp laserjet 3330.
Talk about frustrating!
Posted by: Jim Larkin | October 30, 2007 3:48 PM
Hey, I'm thinking of installing Leopard on my tiger, I have a midsummer 2007 quality macbook pro and I am wondering if this will be installed as an upgrade to my OS, or as an entirely new OS, or if it will require deleting old files, i.e. formatting or similar issues. It's probably dumb to ask but I have quite a few games that are configured for Tiger that I went to some lengths to get ahold of as they don't sell games for mac in my country. I'm worried I need to delete them or that they stop functioning on leopard. Please respond by mail if possible, thanks in advance.
Posted by: Kristoffer | April 27, 2008 8:43 PM