Submitted by Today, Apple has released the much anticipated Mac OS X 10.5.2. The hefty combo update weighs in at almost 350MB, but it can also be downloaded via Software Update. The updates includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, as well as imrpoved Back to My Mac support, new view for Dock based folders, and much more.
Mac OS X 10.5.2 Has Finally Landed
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
Follow me on Mastodon @[email protected]
I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while. Brings some nice enhancements like the return of the list mode to stacks and disabling transparency in the menu bar at the top of the screen (though I’m fine with the transparency). I glad this is out and hope this fixed most of the common bugs. It’s been through a lot of Q&A it seams.
I know I will get modded down for this comment, but perhaps Leopard wasn’t ready when it was released? I still have yet to upgrade to the OS because of reports found on the web. Maybe this weekend I’ll upgrade.
It was, it’s just people didn’t like some of the new stuff, from what I’ve seen they addressed that now.
Apple took away their 2d dock(needed a hack to get it back), all hell broke lose just on that.
It’s nice for someone to make it sound so simple!
Yet, I have myself encountered an issue where a patch (Login & Keychain Update 1.0) for a known bug that caused users to be unable to log in to their Mac after an upgrade install was released before the 10.5.1 update, but actually wasn’t included in the 10.5.1 update, leaving me going through all of Apple’s support pages to find a solution that didn’t work, which caused me to reinstall everything, when I found out that this issue occurred after several log ins and a complete update to 10.5.1 + a security update …
Along with these three little fellows:
* 306508 Mac OS X 10.5: Can’t log in to account that has no password
* 306965 Mac OS X 10.5, iMac (Mid 2007): Stuck in a “loop” at the login window after upgrading to Leopard
* 306876 Mac OS X 10.5: Administrator user changes to standard
These are things that actually caused problems for users, the more superficial stuff was easily resolved through Terminal commands and hints on the ‘net …
if a brand new technology product gets released and you decide to use it in the first 6 months – 1 year, you should consider yourself an early adopter. That means that you should expect odd bugs until the product gets the kinks worked out. The bigger the release, the more of the issues need to get fixed, and leopard was a really big release.
Big on eyecandy yeah.
Meanwhile logging on to a windows domain is still slow as … whereas it was lightning fast in Tiger.
Its definitely ready for general consumption; I only upgraded because it was a free upgrade through the uptodate programme which Apple runs. Not only is there 10.5.2 but also a graphics update. Not to put a too fine a point on it; it simply rocks
This is what I would say is the equivalent in the Windows world of SP2 to Windows XP (or more recently, SP1 to Windows Vista).
You’re right and Leopard still isn’t ready. This latest upgrade puts my machine at half speed from what it was prior to the update. That makes it a lot slower than it was on 10.4.10. I remember that we’re supposed to get things working properly first and then, speed them up but this is ridiculous.
Perhaps, next time, they’ll get it right. It seems with every release, we have to wait until the x.x.3 or x.x.4 uodate before everything works properly. Sad, that.
Everybody should know what a dot-Oh release is. Even big companies with huge development budget can’t beta test a piece of software that much that there won’t be any problems for 10 million users.
IMO it’s no big deal when a dot-Oh release has problems as long as they get fixed in a timely fashion.
It’s not like Vista where it took Microsoft over a year to develop the first Service Pack and now they are even telling their users that, while SP1 is ready, they won’t get it until March!
Leopard is a only 3.5 months and just received the second big update.
Do you believe it is OK for a software company to knowingly release an unfinished and defective product, take people’s money, and fix the product in their own sweet time?
If so, do you accept this kind of behavior from any other industry?
Edited 2008-02-12 08:45 UTC
It’s a god damn dot-Oh release for god’s sake and it works for most people without problems. There are users with problems, yes. But compared to the overall userbase, it’s the minority. That’s what I meant when I wrote that some of the 10 million users may have problems that were not obvious in the beta test. Do you really think that Leopard could become the fastest adopted Mac OS X release if it was a buggy pile of crap with its initial release?
How about the auto industry (ever seen a recall)?
How about laptops with exploding batteries?
How about recalls on infant carseats?
How about toys with lead paint?
How about bridges that collapse?
Just about everything has issues of one sort or another. If you’re demanding absolute perfection, you’re never going to get it. I’m not saying it’s right but you’re assuming that there’s something willfully malicious in what Apple did. My guess is that it ran fine on all of their test hardware and the only step left was to release it to everybody and wait for all of the bugs they didn’t find to get reported.
If it was malicious, they’d probably charge you for the bug fixes.
Good you bring up bridges. They used to be simple, a plank between 2 points, but now they are hugely complex structures and they need to be corrected from time to time to factor in complex interdependencies that arise ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Bridge_(London) )
As systems get more and more complex they need to be corrected more and more often and sometimes they break down for no clear reason. It’s true for other complex systems too : like the human mind, society, superstructures, … All can break down if corrections are not applied in time.
What bugs me most though is that almost immediately after release, Apple made 10.5.1 available on retail discs. Makes me wonder about Leopard. Nothing against Apple, but this whole “Make fun of Windows for delays so we better not slip” is getting annoying.
Has any noticed this?
I rebooted/shutdown several times. Installed the leopard graphics update as well. Stopped unneeded services. It ‘feels’ slower than before.
1st gen macbook pro with 32-bit 2ghz cpu and 2 gigz of rams.
Nope feels quicker to me, im on a macbook core duo .. Possibly its running spotlight for you ? I dont run that at all … The Graphics updates make the whole system feel snappier ..
Well before I posted my comment I made sure no services are running. There is no indexing at all. the CPU is actually ~95% idle.
I used to get faster response after such updates but this one was noticeably slower than before. I click on a ‘Stack’ I wait then it appears. Before the update it just pops right then.
Can´t say that for my System, iMac C2D 2.16, 1.5GB ram. Feels obviously snappier, especially the graphics stuff like spaces is smoother. Overall, the system does seem to access the disk less. But that might just be an illusion. Weird, they did not fix the (granted, harmless) bug in Activity Monitor that tells you you have something like 44GB of virtual memory. Also strange, on a side note: Now that it´s gone, I miss the stronger transparency of dropdown menus. Seems I´m not the only one, according to a quick forum check, and that goes to show how fast looks grow on most people when they are getting used to them…
Maybe it’s not the amount of actual virtual memory, but how much memory has been allocated.
Edited 2008-02-12 12:30 UTC
I agree. It definitely isn’t as snappy as it was before I updated. Leopard itself was less snappy than tiger when I upgraded so thats two generations of lost responsiveness. The real kicker is that they still haven’t updated the crappy nvidia drivers in the Santa Rosa MBP, nor do they look like they are planning to. The UI is extremely sluggish for the most part and this is on a 8 month old Santa Rosa MBP with the fastest processor, while I just setup a brand new Mac Mini and that ran smooth as silk. with no loss in framerate in the ui, this is due to the crappy apple drivers because under windows the video card runs very well.
Hmm. I guess there was a separate graphics update that I didn’t do after I installed 10.5.2. I’ll try it when I get home and see if that removes the sluggish UI and bad opengl drivers.
It doesn’t appear from the notes that Apple added a “block all incoming” option for the firewall. Additionally, I don’t see notes that Apple added the ability to enable incoming traffic by port, like every other firewall in the world.
No firewall fix means I’m not interested in Leopard. Can anyone confirm my suspicions? Were these issues addressed?
Nope there is no fix, its still an application based firewall, no option to block all by default only allow certain applications … 10.5.1 update changed things a little from the .0 release and tightened things a bit but its still not perfect …
First of all, I’m no Mac OS X user (yet – I will have to reassemble my “new” iMac G4 first), but doesn’t Mac OS X include the ipfw firewall known from FreeBSD? This firewall should enable you to address the requested feature, i. e. enabling / disabling services by port number. Things like
add allow tcp from any to any ftp in recv xl0
or
add deny udp from any to any 515 in recv xl0
add reset tcp from any to any 515 in recv xl0
should be easy then. I think that’s what you’re asking about. If it’s not the case, please tell me. I don’t want to look stupid. 🙂
Apple’s application firewall seems to be not that bad, but many users are questioning for a better frontend to control its operations.
Tiger uses ipfw and has a perfect (in my opinion) gui to manage it. Leopard uses something different. In my opinion, Leopard’s firewall is a giant leap backward. I am not a fan of “application based” firewalls. However, if Apple wanted to add this behavior; they should not have removed the standard port-based behavior.
Also, every host needs a “block all incoming” function. Tiger had it, Leopard doesn’t. Google “Leopard firewall” and you will find tests of the Leopard firewall which found it wanting.
It also is disappointing that software companies feel they can release unfinished products with impunity and patch them later. A skeptical person might have reason to believe Apple was attempting to boost 4th quarter income last year by pushing Leopard out the door before it was finished. Now those of us who purchased it must wait months for them to fix and finish.
Leopard taught me some valuable lessons about how Apple does business. No more “release day” purchases for me.
Edited 2008-02-12 06:54 UTC
What are you talking about? ipfw is part of Leopard, it just doesn’t have a shiny interface in the System Preferences.
/sbin/ipfw
Here, straight from the horse’s mouth (ie Apple): Earlier ipfw technology is still accessible from the command line (in Terminal) and the Application Firewall does not overrule rules set with ipfw; if ipfw blocks an incoming packet, the Application Firewall will not process it.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306938
If you’re perturbed because there is no shiny interface, what an excellent opportunity to learn about the command line. If you have vowed to never use a command line again in your life, get something like Flying Buttress to add a shiny interface back into your heart.
Both the application fw and ipfw is available in Leopard. The application fw is the only one with a GUI.
Wow, that was painless.
The install took about five minutes and everything works peachy.
It only makes me wonder what Vista SP1 is going to be like to install? XPSP2 is unreliable on anything but a clean system, and can take anything between an hour to three hours.
To all those ‘complaining’ about a ‘too early’ release. I did have Leopard from day 1, if any OS was being be measured against 10.5.0, Leopard should be the only client OS around.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less broken. It was a lot better than 10.4.0 was, but that was horrendously broken.
I just hope that they figure out what’s wrong with the performance and fix it properly and quickly. What was taking 36 minutes (10.5.1) is now taking 69 minutes (10.5.2) and probably took only 20 minutes on 10.4.10.
BS
You don’t like what I said, so you think it’s BS. Since your high-minded rebuttal is so vague, I’ll put some meat into this.
I was running the Sunspider benchmarks on a recent Safari nightly on a busy 10.5.1 system. I got 19369.0 ms total, which was quite fast. After updating to 10.5.2 and the Graphics Update, I ran the same nightly build on a system with no other user applications running and got 24992.0 ms.
Busy 19369.0 ms, not busy 24992.0 ms. There is something definitely wrong. No BS.
So basicly you are complaining about benchmarks on beta versions of Safari!
I can tell you that for me Safari 3.0.4 runs excellent with 10.5.2.
Edited 2008-02-13 09:00 UTC
No, it’s about everything. Safari 3.0.4 is really slow compared to the beta. You should be able to do the math.
Update went nice, everything works smoothly, additions are good too. Anyway I didn’t notice any speed difference in GMA X3100 OpenGL performance using Xbench. I was expecting updated driver, I know this is a new chip in MacBooks, but still it performs as GMA 950 while it should be way faster.
Anyway for those saying why Apple released defective product and then releasing updates quickly … where did you get that from? I’m on Leopard since 10.5.0 and it works perfect all the time. Now let’s see how Vista works … on same hw it’s 2 times slower with proper drivers, SP1 is nowhere near now … it’s annoying and buggy … I guess you’re just under wrong article with your comments
I just upgraded a new MacBook 2.2ghz core2duo with 2g ram and an old PowerMac g4 933mhz with 512ram, and both feel snappier and more responsive. And that is without the core craphics update. However more importantly, Apple fixed some bugs and the damn stacks feature. No problems networking and serving pages and files. Good update.
Menus look a lot nicer with their increased opacity. That was one of my pet peeves. Perhaps in the next release they will be even more opaque, and even more readable? Who knows. One thing I do know is that Apple isn’t interested in letting me decide for myself.
I almost feel like I should apologize for always posting negative comments about OS X, but I suppose I get worked up about things like this because OS X is so sound architecturally, and I do kind of like it, but there are many small things (“one liners”) that, if this was a more open system, would be easy to fix. I think what Apple is doing is that they want a Mac user to be able to sit down at any Mac anywhere and just work, and know where everything is – like you can operate any car if only you’ve learned the basics once. The problem, of course, is that people are different, and want to be able to customize their work environment.
Enough ranting, this update seems like a step in the right direction and I will continue to explore it right now.