10/25/2007, 9:30am, EDT
Thursday, October 25th
Mossberg: Leopard is better, faster than Vista
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.
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Obviously, we all know that the virtual machine runs "on top" of Mac OS (or, inside a sandbox).
All your program continue to run just fine under Leopard? Compare and contrast with Vista...
Be afraid, Microsoft... be very afraid.
Doofuses.
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.