Mossberg: Leopard is better, faster than Vista
updated 09:30 am EDT, Thu October 25, 2007
Early Leopard reviews up
Two major publications have already published reviews of Apple's Mac OS X Leopard, due for public sale on Friday. Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal describes the operating system as an evolutionary release, but says that it is still "better and faster" than Windows Vista, with useful new features. Among these are the Time Machine backup system, Quick Look file previews, and the ability to browse with Cover Flow in Finder. Mossberg further notes that upon upgrading his iMac to Leopard, all his programs continued to function properly, including VMWare's Fusion application, used to merge Windows and Mac OS.
General speed is reported to be equal to Mac OS X Tiger, and in terms of start-up substantially faster than Windows Vista, launching in 38 seconds from a MacBook Pro versus Vista's time of two minutes from a Sony VAIO notebook. Complaints about Leopard are few; notable is a limitation of Time Machine, in that network backups can only be accomplished by copying to a hard disk attached to a Leopard Mac. The translucent Menu Bar can be difficult to read with dark wallpaper, and fonts on some websites may be illegible, a problem Apple is already aware of.
British newspaper the Telegraph also takes a favorable view of Leopard, praising elments such as Stacked Dock icons, and the ability of Mail to the detect key data, which can be then used to quickly add Address Book or iCal information. Time Machine is highlighted as the most important upgrade, simply because it automates the backup and restoration process, something many users many not be adept at. The paper in fact has no criticisms of the new OS, except that because it is not a dramatic upgrade, there is no reason to buy it immediately.
doesn't merge
10/25, 09:41am reply
Vmware Fusion does *not* merge Mac OS X with Windows. It can run many x86 OSes in a virtual machine on top of Mac OS X including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows.
bhuot
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Nov 2003
semantics....
10/25, 09:51am reply
For all intents and purposes, from users' perspective, VMWare Fusion does exactly what the article says - "merges" Windows functionality with Mac. While you can run it in a separate window, it also allows you to, well, for the lack of a better word, merge Windows programmes with Mac, so that they appear to be running inside Mac OS.
Obviously, we all know that the virtual machine runs "on top" of Mac OS (or, inside a sandbox).
vasic
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Joined: May 2005
Leopard v Vista
10/25, 10:44am reply
boy what a huge mistake Vista was... sure seems to me that all of Microsoft's efforts to promote Vista only served to reinforce the superiority of OS X.
All your program continue to run just fine under Leopard? Compare and contrast with Vista...
Be afraid, Microsoft... be very afraid.
climacs
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Joined: Sep 2001
faster?
10/25, 10:48am reply
Walt identifies the speed with which the machine boots but makes little reference to operational speed. In truth, now that OSX is fully 64-bit, I would expect an increase in speed on qualifying machines. Leopard running at the same apparent pace as Tiger, for me, is a disappointment, and significantly not what Apple has been promising in the context of 64 bit performance on machines going back to the G5's. They peddled Tiger as 64bit-ish as far as terminal based applications were concerned but they bolted a 32-bit UI on the front end...duh! Looks like I'll never unlock the full potential of my expensive tower. Finally, it seems that core animation is a CPU rather than GPU intensive implementation, another crippling development for those not running the very latest hardware. Hmmm....a pattern emerging, well Apple is a hardware company!!!
Feathers
Forum Regular
Joined: Oct 1999
Overrated
10/25, 10:57am reply
64 bit capabilities are highly overrated. This is because other factors like the front and back side cache still represents a bottleneck. That is why most big companies like Adobe are taking their time to develop 64 bit capable software. There just isn't much reasons to do so at this point.
Terrin
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Joined: Jan 2006
Biggest selling point
10/25, 12:18pm reply
which really needs to be drummed up is compatibility with existing programs! That means you can upgrade with minimal interruption to productivity!
legacyb4
Mac Elite
Joined: May 2001
Little Snitch
10/25, 12:28pm reply
The current version does not work with Leopard. Granted there is a beta version but you will still need to upgrade. I bet there are more programs out there that don't work with Leopard. This has happened with every version of OSX that has been released and I doubt it will change.
discotronic
Mac Elite
Joined: Oct 2003
snitch yourself
10/25, 12:43pm reply
Guess if Little Snitch deosnt work with Leopard, you wont be using too many other programs with it either --!
Doofuses.
robttwo
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Joined: Nov 2005
yo mama
10/25, 01:06pm reply
is a little snitch!
Zkatz007
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Joined: May 1999
re: feathers
10/25, 01:38pm reply
You stated: In truth, now that OSX is fully 64-bit, I would expect an increase in speed on qualifying machines.
Why would you expect this? It's not just the machine, but also how the application is optimized. I don't think a 32-bit application will see any benefit and may even run slower. A 64-bit application can access and move more data. I haven't studied this much, but I would expect application that deal with large data sets to benefit (large video and graphic applications, mathematical analysis etc.)
The fact that Apple has added many new features and there does not appear to be a performance hit is what's important to me. In fact, compare OS X updates to Windows updates. Each OS X update has performed better on my old machines. Windows rarely fares as well.
simdude
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Joined: Jun 2004