Mac OS X has mostly improved between with each new iteration. I started off my Mac OS X experience with the 10.0 (‘Cheetah’) version supplied with my shiny new iBook in 2001. Shortly afterwards Apple released the 10.1 (‘Puma’) updater that greatly improved speed and utility. This happy trend went on through 10.2 (‘Jaguar’) and 10.3 (‘Panther’) — each new version of the operating system not only offering better performance and more stability, but also genuinely useful features.
Given the G3 and G4 vintages of the Macs I had to hand, I wasn’t much tempted by 10.4 (‘Tiger’) when it first came out, but enjoyed this new version of the operating system well enough once I upgraded to an Intel Mac. But I wasn’t terribly impressed by it either, despite Apple’s claim that Tiger sported over 200 new features. I found Spotlight was slow, Smart Folders difficult to use, Automator almost completely useless, and Dashboard pretty much a gimmick.
So when Leopard was released I scrutinised the list of features very carefully. If Tiger’s 200 features didn’t impress me, would Leopard’s 300 new features do any better? Superficially at least, I didn’t see anything that impressed me much, so I held off springing for the $129 and decided to stick with Tiger. Tiger worked perfectly well for what I wanted from my Macintosh.
But then, a few weeks ago, one of the British Mac magazines I write for sent instructions to all their contributors that from now on any screenshots used in our articles would have to feature OS X 10.5.
In other words: upgrade or die.
Anyway, the $129 was spent, and my MacBook Pro duly upgraded. The process itself went fine, and an hour or so later I was finally able to get to grips with the new version of the Mac OS.
Boy, was I in for a surprise.
For a start, it looks hideous. The default background with the starry sky/weird nebula thing is hideously garish. The transparent menu bar along the top of the screen is even worse, and in many cases menu items are very difficult to read. No wonder many people (including myself) have promptly used a Terminal hack to exterminate this feature ASAP.
The Dock has become less easy to use than before. Its reflectivity seems to serve no other purpose than to show off the fact the Dock is reflective. The bright spots under active application icons are infinitely less user friendly than the plain black triangles they replace. The fan/grid display for folders placed in the Dock may look cool, but they’re not nearly as quick to navigate as the plain vanilla menus the appeared in earlier versions of the Dock.
Then there’s the uniform appearance. I get that the Mac should have a consistent look and feel, but sometimes it’s useful to have variations. Surely I’m not the only one who has a hard time telling which overlapping window is which. Up to Mac OS X ‘Tiger’, Mail windows looked completely different to Finder windows; now they’re all but identical.
Spaces? Well it’s fine enough in its way, but I’ve been using You Control Desktops before, and frankly it’s still far, FAR better than Apple’s version of the virtual desktop paradigm.
Quick Look? Like the Dashboard, this is a bit more a gimmick than a useful tool. Sure, sometimes its nice to see what a mystery file contains before opening it, but mostly Quick Look opens up common file formats (such as Word documents and JPEGs) that would be visible in fast, easy to launch applications such as TextEdit and Preview. It’s hopeless for those files belong to programs that really do take forever and a day to launch, like Freeway, Garage Band, or iMovie.
Admittedly, Leopard does come with a selection of big things entirely absent from earlier versions of the Mac OS. But they aren’t applications that matter to me. Boot Camp? I don’t run Windows, so don’t care. Time Machine? Nice in theory, but clunky compared with the Windows Vista equivalent and an incredible disk space hog. Besides, there are plenty of backup applications out there that allow easier and more configurable backups to be made on all sorts of different media, from CDs to iPods; Apple’s own Backup application for a start.
Of course there may be other improvements ‘under the hood’ that a front-end oriented user like me won’t notice. I can appreciate improvements in security and graphics processing for example. But it isn’t obvious at all that Leopard is either safer or faster than Tiger.
It’s not really Leopard’s fault that some of my most useful applications don’t work after the upgrade. So while I’m cross I can no longer use Photoshop 7, that was bound to happen sooner or later with a Carbonised program almost six years old. But still, it’s annoying.
Bottom line — after spending $129 I have a Mac without any compelling new features and no dramatic improvements in performance. A Mac that looks worse than it did before I upgraded, a Mac that needs to be hacked to get back some of the user-friendliness of the earlier versions of the operating system. A Mac that won’t run some of my favourite applications.
Maybe I’m being churlish, and missing out on some of the best things about OS X 10.5. If you think I am, convince me! What am missing?
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