Danny Gorog25 October 2007, 6:24 AM
The early reviews are in, and basically, Leopard dumps all over Windows.
With Leopard hitting stores shelves tomorrow at 6pm the early reviews are in about the new 'cat on the block'. Already, three heavyweight IT journos have published their reviews of Leopard and all are positive. (We tried our best to get Apple Australia to give us a copy to review before it went on sale, but as always, Apple "the rock" PR didn't budge.)
Influential writer Walt Mossberg got the ball rolling in his column and accompanying video titled "
Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista". He says that after upgrading his personal iMac to Leopard everything "just worked" and that Leopard puts Apple in front of Windows Vista (which he clearly doesn't like). He even devotes two paragraphs to testing the start-up time between a Leopard and Vista installation and concludes
:
It took the Vista machine nearly two minutes to perform a cold start and be ready to run, including connecting to my wireless network. The Leopard laptop was up, running and connected to the network in 38 seconds. In a test of restarting the two laptops after they had been running an email program, a Web browser and a word processor, the Sony with Vista took three minutes and 29 seconds, while the Apple running Leopard took one minute and five seconds. He liked many of the new features but says in conclusion that Leopard isn't a 'must have' upgrade but adds value to existing machines.
David Pogue from the New York Times also
likes Leopard but shares similar criticisms with Walt, namely that the translucent menu bar is just too hard to see. (No doubt someone will have the translucency level hacked in a jiffy, though.) He particularly likes Spaces, Apple's implementation of virtual desktops and the Time Machine automated backup.
He, like Walt, also draws some nice comparisons to Vista and says "Microsoft had it a little easier with Vista, because everybody knew what Windows needed: better security. Maybe Mac OS X is harder to hack, or maybe the virus writers consider the Mac’s 8 percent market share too piddling to bother with. But in its six years, Mac OS X hasn’t experienced a single virus outbreak or spyware infestation."
Lastly Ed Baig from USA Today loves the upgrade and gives most of the new features a big thumbs up. He's in agreement with both Mossberg and Pogue and says 'Long before Leopard pounced onto the scene, I rated OS X superior to Windows for most consumers. With Leopard, Apple's operating system widens its lead aesthetically and technologically.'
So there you have it. Leopard is off to a pretty good start already, and with an estimated installed base of 21 million active machines, Leopard is going to be the biggest software release in Apple's history. While it's not going to overtake Vista for market share, it will certainly beat it for mind share and hopefully convince more consumers that personal computing doesn't need to be dull, tedious and a constant uphill battle.