Comments on: Vista and Leopard: Both victims of bad parenting.

By: Andrew Temnoff

Andrew Temnoff — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:13:16 +0000

i’ve been a mac user for many years and have always loved using them until leopard came along. is it the new platform or the new operating system?
one work to sum up leopard “sick” this cat needs to go to the vet, there are way too many problems with it.
i’ve never been so disappointed in an apple product before.
the part that i find very interesting is, didn’t that geek claim that macs didn’t crash in those lame Apple ads? or do they still run that ad…ha!

By: Dee

Dee — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:13:03 +0000

It’s a bit disconcerting that we have become conditioned to say “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a new product to be perfect.”

Why not?

Danny is right when he said “…we as consumers are now having to put up with buying far too many flawed products because companies are rushing to get products out to market and leaving us (the poor saps stuck with the defective product) to road test it properly,…”

Could you imagine the auto industry putting out such products? (snark: “Are you sure you want to deploy the frontal-collision air-bag?”)

How about the hardware PC market? Same consumers- different expectations? Why? Because its [insert platform specific OS monopoly] saying “Embrace the horror- it’s all you’re getting!”

The solution is simple to define, near impossible to implement- we, as consumers need to ‘just say no to untested first releases.’ Maybe the business units from [insert platform specific OS monopoly] will get the message from the consumer better than from their own developers.

By: Danny

Danny — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:30:32 +0000

@ Josh: Obviously, you were the colleague I referred to in the first paragraph. Thank you for your input. Of course, being that you have a minature super computer (MacPro 2.66 Quad-Core Intel), I doubt you would notice anything short of a total OS crash.

By: Josh Walsh

Josh Walsh — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:29:39 +0000

I’ve heard this argument too. I can only speak from my personal experience with Leopard.

* I haven’t noticed any system slow downs or crashes.
* I haven’t noticed many bugs, certainly not like I do on my Vista box
* I’ve noticed better network integration.
* The new spotlight is awesome. I’ve done away with quicksilver completely.
* Time Machine is really useful too.

Now, I think Apple’s thrown some bad design in here. They’ve taken things that worked great before and made them worse by following graphic trends. Unfortunately current graphic trends often are unusable.

Here’s a few examples:

* The menu bar is translucent. That’s terrible. It’s hard to read, especially on dark backgrounds.

* The dock is 3D just to be 3D. There’s no functional reasoning behind it. In fact, the added 3D effects, reflections and highlights are distracting.

* The new folder icons drive me nuts. By “embossing” the logo onto the icons I have to squint to determine what type of folder it is. The Tiger icons were much better.

Overall, I think Leopard is a step in the right direction. Historically, Apple has been faster at patching problems than their counterpart. It’s not perfect yet, but I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a new product to be perfect.