Submitted by “Apple recently released its second update to OS X ‘Leopard’, and the latest version of its shiny operating system is now numbered 10.5.2. When I reviewed Leopard two days after its initial release I called it the best operating system ever made for the vast majority of users. I think that’s even more true now that 10.5.2 fixes some of the first-release glitches that annoyed me in 10.5 and in Apple’s first, quick, bug-fix update 10.5.1.”
Crappy marketing stuff disguised in form of informative article. The “biggest change” in Leopard is a design flaw correction that shoud never saw the daylight, even in 10.5.0.
Oh, that’s big.
Which design flaw?
(Mac OS X, just like every other complex piece of software, has many of them, but I’m curious as to which specific one you’re referring to that was so critically important that 10.5.0 should never have been released with it in in place).
“Visually, the biggest change in Leopard is that the Stacks features finally works the way it should”
Second paragraph.
In which case, I wholeheartedly agree.
The downside to 10.5.2: widespread WiFi issues.
Eh? In my experience, 10.5.1 was awful with regards to WiFi stability. The router would be connected to the net just fine. My Santa Rosa Macbook would lose connectivity, yet wired connection was fine. My N800 and work Laptop (Dell D830) would get a stable connection upstairs, whereas Macbook barely kept a connection in the same room. Since the update to 10.5.2, it’s stable as a rock again.
Lots of people (myself included) have had the exact opposite experience: rock solid up until 10.5.2, and then sudden and obvious instability.
Reports are (48 hours after its release) pretty widespread.
In other words, Apple hasn’t got WiFi right post-10.4.9 (things started to go screwy for lots of people as of about 10.4.10 and into Leopard).
How old is your hardware? My Macbook came with 10.5 pre installed (and I assume, supports 10.5+ and is unlikely to ever run 10.4) I don’t remember having many issues with 10.5, but I updated fairly rapidly. 10.5.1 gave me endless issues. The wireless signal would drop for no reason, I would love connectivity every 10 – 15 minutes and sometimes I could only get a connection at all if I disconnected and reconnected to the router or restarted it. This is with a Belkin G router (FSD7230 series). With 10.5.2, my connection has been continuous, so far, for hours. The only issue I’ve had so far is that my router crashed earlier, but then no WiFi was available at all.
First-generation MacBook, came with 10.4.4 (I think?).
It’s been fine, both at home [Airport Extreme and Airport Express], and at work [random brand WAP], for months and months. Updated to 10.5.2 night before last, but haven’t been really using my machine as I’ve been ill—had some occasional drops at home last night, but took it into the office today and it’s been up and down like a yoyo. TUAW ran a story on it all, which I initially dismissed because I’d not noticed anything at that point. I spoke too soon :\
Well, a lot of Santa Rosa Macbook owners found 10.5.1 to be a turkey for WiFi, and I was one of them. Now, it’s rock solid so far. I’ve been connected for 4+ hours, no more dropouts, no more weird connectivity loss, no more loss of signal strength. I guess my joy is your sorrow. I’m happy so far.
You should copy that statement in your notes.
You will be able to use it for the next release of OSX, Windows, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, $NAMEIT
Maybe that’s why I read less from big sources and more from OSNews… 😉
Wish that I had a good salary so that I could afford a Mac.. having used Vista for 6 months I loathe it and love OSX… wish they weren’t so damned expensive or I could retro install it on my current hardware!
Edited 2008-02-15 20:35 UTC
That was a real bargin!?
Paying for something I loath, would always be too expensive for me.
Consider buying a Mac Mini from eBay for $400-600 with Leopard installed. Hardly expensive.
I bought an early Intel Mac Mini and scrapped my old PC to the parts pile.
I have a monitor, trackball, and keyboard so all I needed was the Mini.
From this Intel Mini I can drive Linux and XP when I need to via VMWare Fusion.
No more expensive than some mid-range PCs.
I don’t wish to misunderstand your intentions, but an entry level mac is not more “expensive” than an exactly equal specc’d Vista laptop: Which leads me to think that you are running Vista on a laptop lower-spec than a base model MacBook, for which I feel sorry for you; Vista is unbearable on anything less than 1~2GB/C2D.
edit. osnews  unicode
Edited 2008-02-15 22:12 UTC
I’ve heard it at the darkest fringes of society, but there are Certain Individuals that are Disobedient to His Steveness, king of Apples, and install Mac OS friggin’ X on their non-Apple Inc. approved generic x86 Intel or AMD hardware! :-p
Then again, you might want a “real” Apple pc.
In which case, and as you said resources lacking a bit, what stops you from acquiring a nice second hand Apple pc or laptop? There are plenty of Apple resellers offering used stuff with warranty, and there are plenty mac enthusiasts with way too much money to spend, who will sell their perfectly functioning Apple hardware, just for the sake of some extra speed and fresh Bling, to buy a new one.
I recommend a nice iBook G4 (PowerPC), you can get those used for four hundred € or a bit more, and although they’re not the fastest, they are still the best laptops Apple has come up with so far, unsurpassed in stability; well built, and the keyboard is a lot better than the present Macbook ones. They also, thank Almighty, lack the mirrors a.k.a. the glossy reflecting screens which are, with some exceptions, IMNSHO a plague in the laptop industry.
😛
Downsides:
They turn yellow with use
Poor graphics (ATI 9200 or ATI 9550)
RAM soldered to the motherboard (buy one of the latest that came with 512 MB to achieve a max. of 1.5 GB RAM)
The keyboard loses its letter prints with use
Slooooooooooooow hard drives
More upsides:
Better WiFi reception than a Powerbook
More sturdy design than a Powerbook
12″ form factor available which makes the iBook way cooler than the Mac Book IMHO
Good, means you’re actually using it.
I don’t park it in the sunlight though.
True, good thing is though that when I use Fedora on it, it is supported by the open radeon driver.
Soldering RAM to main board should be verboten. But the upgrade to 1.5 Gig was not as hard as I feared.
By that time you ought to know where they’re at.
Not slower than the Macbook Air’s. 😛
Just my experiences with an iBook:
They turn yellow with use – Mine is well used and didn’t
Poor graphics (ATI 9200 or ATI 9550) – Yes, but they’re fine for everyday work
RAM soldered to the motherboard – Yes but you can add more
The keyboard loses its letter prints with use – Didnt happen to me
Slooooooooooooow hard drives – Hunh? They are 4200 RPM but they are not the bottleneck. 20 MB/s is fine for everyday work. The bottleneck is the processor (PPC G4).
(Macin)Toshiba Satellite A105-S4254 with Dell Truemobile Wifi kicking it good with efi and stock osx 10.4.11 and posting right from it
I just updated 10.5.2 from 10.5.1, and my imac actually seems to be running sluggish now. Anyone else with the same problem?
….the best operating system ever made for the vast majority of users….
See. it cannot possibly be this. The elephant in the room is that it is a crippled OS. It is crippled by being tied to one very limited set of rather high priced hardware. This is a ‘feature’ that no other OS has, and its not so much a feature as a defect – for most users.
This means that it is definitely not the best OS for any but a tiny minority of users. Which is the way Apple likes it, and that’s perfectly fine. Just stop pretending it is something that it is not.
Cry me a river.
My Mac was the best investment I’ve made in a long time. I saved money for 2 years to afford it. I simply love it and the OS. It was worth every penny. Your argument is about as relevant to me as it would be if you asked me why I bought a Ferrari instead of a Ford. It’s not about how good or bad you thing features and such are, it’s about the user experience. I find Mac OS X the most pleasurable OS to use since the Be OS. Personal taste etc.
I’d rather be in the minority, but sincerely happy and content about my OS and hardware than bitter and twisted and feel the need to bitch about specific vendors hardware and software.
I’m not a Apple fanboy – I happily use Windows. I just prefer my Macbook and Mac OS X. You *can* like Windows and Mac OS X too. There’s not a secret switch that forces everyone to choose.
Windows XP runs so nicely on a Mac. I’ve realised why I love Windows XP so much because I switched to the Mac, before I was getting too buried by stress to see that.
Yeah, the problem is when that Ferrari (Mac) turns out to be something more close to what the Chinese car makers are puting out
A close friend of mine bought a c2d macbook recently, he was happy with it until his keyboard started vibrating (not to mention a bad pixel, but that can happen anywhere). He returned it to the local apple store where they promissed him he’ll get a new one, tested against that “feature”… well, long story short – he has no laptop at the moment since the next one they gave him also had a vibrating keyboard.
Of course it’s just an example, could be bad luck, but I always smile when people start to talk about how oh-so-high quality apple hardware is.
I like OSX, but I’ll take an Asus/IBM/Dell laptop any day over an Apple one. You can run OSX on them too btw
Well, IBM don’t make notebooks anymore and Dell have possibly the worst build quality in the universe (I have used Dell Laptops quite a lot, Inspiron 7000, 7500, Latitude C610, D610, D640, D830, various others including one of the Celeron based budget Inspiron line) and they all have issues. Be it drivers or be it build quality. I had a 7500 that literally went back to Dell 3 times with an LCD issue where 50% of the LCD would cut out. Dell denied there was an issue. This was a work machine. My then MD phoned Dell and threatened to close the account we had – that soon got a whole new machine sent out. But it shouldn’t have been that way. My C610 literally fell apart one day – the hinge sheared off. Other than that, I had countless conversations concerning how poor Dell build quality, reliability and after sales support are.
Never owned a dell, but a few people I know/work with have 2-3+ year old laptops and never complain about anything so I got the impression they were quite solid for the price.
Personally, I own an 1.5 year old Asus Z92KM barebone, aside from the paint comming off where you place your wrists to type, it works flawlessly (i use it everyday for work, 8 hours, 5 days/week).
What I want to point out is that Apple would have you believe that their hardware is somehow better compared to others (hell, even I used to think it was actualy that way…) when in fact it can have same amount of issues that plague all other brands (shame on everyone here but I guess that’s just how it works).
Dell build quality depends on line. Some are better than others. Some are failry solid, some are brittle plastic toys. The problem with Dell is that you can’t really guess what the build quality is going to be like till you are holding the machine in your hands.
If they have such a bad build quality, why do you keep using them in such unusual quantities? Unless you are forced to… do you maintain them for a business?
Read his post. His company has an account with them and that’s usually the case with large organizations that take out support contracts with manufacturers like Dell. The place I work in has one such contract and no amount of whining from us IT people is going to get management to change it. PHB syndrome I guess …
My C610 was an eBay bargain 3 or 4 years ago. Other than that, Dell is the sweetheart amoungst many UK employers. Whether they suck or not, I think all of my employers over the last 10 – 15 years have used Dell. They know how to sell in a way that suits IT budgets.
I would never buy a Dell again, personally. My C610 was a cool machhine – worked well enough, until is basically fell appart. It was cheaper to buy a new second hand C610 than it was to repair it.
I run Mac OS X on a Dell, alongside several Macs.
Frankly, it sucks on non-Apple hardware.
I’m sure there’re plenty of things I could fiddle with to make it work better, but to spend all of my time doing that would somewhat defeat a good chunk of the point of running Mac OS X on the thing in the first place. Still, it’s got a faster CPU (but is otherwise far underspecced) as compared to my MacBook, so is good for VisualHub and Handbrake.
I think I read somewhere that Macbooks _are_ Asus machines… that is, Asus makes the to Apple’s specifications as the ODM.
“I’d rather be in the minority, but sincerely happy and content about my OS and hardware than bitter and twisted and feel the need to bitch about specific vendors hardware and software.”
Well said!
People should buy whatever they want. I am not (here at least) criticizing either Apple or Macs. Not saying a Mac is wrong for you. Not saying Apple should make the OS available on any other hardware. Its their business decision and I’m fine with them doing or not doing it.
Just making a very simple and logical point. It cannot possibly be the best operating system ever made for the vast majority of users as long as to get it they have to buy a particular sort of hardware to run it, when that hardware is certainly not the best hardware ever made for the vast majority of users.
There is nothing wrong with Apple being what they are, and the products being what they are. There is a lot wrong with pretending that the products are different from what they are. They are not best “for the vast majority of users” and people should stop saying they are.
What they are is best for a small minority of users. There is nothing wrong with being that.
I’ll never win an “Apple fan of the year” award (and I have no great love for the majority of Mac fandom), but I actually tend to agree with that statement – based three years of doing tech support for home/small-business users of Windows (and four years of doing “intro to computers” training before that).
The problem with Windows, as I see it, is that using it effectively/securely requires knowledge beyond what can reasonably be expected of a casual computer users. Most people who aren’t geeks and/or aren’t constantly immersed in the computer world aren’t interested in acting as a system administrator for their desktop/laptop, they just want to make use of it to get a few things done.
IMO, the cost/value of a Mac is much more subjective than is often suggested. The knowledge level of the user, what the intend to user the computer for, etc, needs to be taken in to account.
What it really boils down to, in many cases, is a trade of money for convenience. And in the case of many Windows users I’ve done support for, the only saving is in the initial sticker price – because they end up calling me over every few months at $60/hour. That quickly adds up to the difference between a low-end Dell / HP and a Mac mini.
Apple shamelessly steals design ideas from the Germans.
And then every Apple fanboy always says how innovative Apple products are.
http://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-…
Nonono, you are getting it wrong. It’s not the designs, but the product names: http://ormset.no/wordpress/?p=152
😉
Great artists steal.
The whole Internet operates on borrowing ideas from other people’s designs and code and applying new personality to it; and you know what – it works. “To move forward, you have to push from where the other guy left off”. “Standing on the shoulders of giants”… life operates this way, and not everybody gets it right because their heart is not in the right place (design is art, not profit).
The issue isn’t the theft, itself, since nearly everything is derivative in some way; rather, it’s the unflagging denial by fanboys that Apple steals…
Apple denies it first, the fanbois follow it up
It’s a know fact that people when designing look for ideas in other things, like objects, shapes and other products. I find it funny Apple’s screen design was compared to speaker, since alot of design are based off things we may have seen in the past or old designs with a modern shape.
I don’t see many other manufactures coming up with ideas like Apple, in fact they are falling over themselves to copy and imitate them.
If you think Braun didn’t steal any ideas from other designers you’d be sorely mistaken.
Ideas can’t be stolen, just copied. “Stealing” of ideas is just propaganda by intellectual property advocates.
Braun and Apple, lol… That was funny… Similarities, yes, copy, don’t think so (well, in most of the examples, maybe some)…
I’m sure all designers copy from a wide range of influences, but Dieter might be one of many…
Geez! I’m not an Apple fan. But this ongoing chatter about allowing good ideas to circulate being, somehow, a bad thing, is just brain-dead stupid.
This industry is about as innovative as any. And it’s still about 1% revolution and 99% evolution.
Rejecting ideas because they were first developed by a competitor is the surest recipe for failue. It doesn’t do you any good. It doesn’t do the people of the earth any good. It probably does your competitor some good, though. Because you can bet that they are ready to reimplement, and enhance, any original ideas *you* might have.
Why fight bad patents if compaies just voluntarily refrain from using good ideas that happen to have been developed by other companies first?
Totally agree. Quite often, copying gives a subsequent competitor an advantage, since they don’t have to invest time and money in determining what works and what doesn’t; or, alternatively, they can improve upon a useful idea and make it better.
i bet it just BURNS you up seeing apple’s market share growing like it is! HAHAHAHAHHHAHAAA!
Arg was a reply to ‘tyrione’ (drop this threaded forum, never works well on the web) !
Braun might have gotten ideas from others as well.
The big difference here is that Apple and its horde of extremist fanboys, keeps complaining everyone else is stealing Apple ideas.
I have never heard anyone complaining about Braun getting ideas from other companies work.
And I have never heard a Braun Executive, lying to their customer about their product, like Jobs did with the worlds (not) thinnest laptop.
But then again you cant reason with the fanboys, they eat everything jobs throws them, and belives everything. Scary but true.
Edited 2008-02-15 23:49 UTC
Well to be fair there are alot of companies that do that, just the same way you make it sound like your the best person for the job in a interview. Is it any different to pain relief ads that say their tablet goes straight to the pain, when factually it simply don’t work like that.
And I have never heard a Braun Executive, lying to their customer about their product, like Jobs did with the worlds (not) thinnest laptop.
You’ve already asserted here : http://www.osnews.com/thread?297738 that Jobs had lied about “the thinnest laptop in the world”.
I asked you then about those thinner laptops, and their constructors not jumping on that occasion to call Apple on its lies and have some promotion about their products, and the complicit press not saying anything. You probably never saw my question, you certainly would have answered.
I’m asking it again (Google didn’t help me, unfortunately) : who made the thinner laptop ?
My Mail STILL doesn’t work properly.
Ever since Leopard it has been flakey. I’ve tried deleting the prefs, starting from scratch w/data…
Back to GyazMail.
The rest of it has worked well for me tho’.
From the text:
“I’ve dealt with this by using a solid-color screen background, which makes the menu bar more readable than it would be with a busy graphic image showing through.”
Makes me wonder how anyone using a Mac with Leopard could ever be unaware of the numerous hacks for this (both terminal based an even gui based) …
-Wonder what he’d do to get rid of the 3D Dock? Perhaps develop a pair of 2D glasses to work oppositely to the 3D cinema glasses from the 50’s and 60’s?
“…is definitely not a good match with enormous files that are constantly changing—and the most common such files are Entourage message stores and virtual machines created for use with Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. You should use the Time Machine options menu to exclude these from the utility and back them up manually. Before complaining too loudly about the fact that your Entourage message store doesn’t work well with the feature, keep in mind that OS X is based on Unix, and Unix uses separate files for everything—including each of your individual mail messages. Microsoft, by contrast, prefers its own Microsoft-brewed database model for storing messages, so it’s Entourage that’s out of place on the Unix-based Mac, not the Mac that’s refusing to cooperate with Entourage.”
I guess the worst part of this is the fact that Apple would have to have some way of reading into the MS DB format (I don’t know which format it is, though) to extract messages and do diffs on them from backup to backup …
However, had this been MySQL or the likes, it would probably be entirely possible to manage this.
And to the author one might say that he ought to remember that a database table is in itself a single file so nothing new under the sun from that perspective, it’s just not a flat file in the way that your /etc/passwd file is …
And to cite Monty Python:
“The whole bloody pit knows that!”
10.5.1 had a few WiFi issues for me which appear to have vanished.
10.5.1 also ran very slowly for me, 10.5.2 seems to have fixed this as well.
The previous versions of 10.5 did all work, while there were some issues they were not non-functional or dangerous, so I don’t agree it was a bad product as such, they have have left it another month or so and tested it a bit more but unfortunately Apple’s QA process seems to have deteriorated somewhat as of late. e.g. The iPod Classic 1.1 had some (now fixed) bugs which should have been found in testing.
I know many Windows users who are not Gates extremists either. They know Windows very well and use it as a tool in their work and private lives.
They don’t insult me or my hardware. I’m generally the one who repairs their machines when they break them. Most of them are impressed with the Intel-based Mac models since they can run three of the primary operating systems.
The best operating system is the one an individual gets the most use out of. I’m not a gamer but someone who manages servers. I can’t spend a lot of time repairing my own system or dreading a system freeze while in Windows.
The 10.5.2 upgrade cleared up a few issues I had with WiFi and the system speed is about the same as it was before.
I’m a Linux guy, and prefer more garden variety PC hardware for price/performance/convenience/selection. But MacOS X, being a Unix, is kindred and I respect it. I’m glad Apple is there to fulfill a significant need.
That said, the minority of the Mac user community who are, shall we say, overenthusiastic in their advocacy of the platform, invite criticism from the rest of the world by claiming that Apple hardware is better than what we use.
One must always be careful not to make a nuisance of one’s self when advocating any cause. Because it is much easier to make enemies than to recruit converts. And one can easily end up doing more harm to their cause than good.
I know this well, because I face this problem in my own community, regarding Linux advocacy.
I couldn’t give a Flying F@$& for windows users. I’ve been assaulted by brainless windows monkeys for the better part of 20 years and told on a near daily basis everything I couldn’t do on my Macs… Only to never, ever not be able to do something I needed to.
The fact that windows users get their underwear so tied up into knots over Mac users and Apple’s advertising simply confounds me, it’s as if they’ve suddenly discovered they’re not wearing clothes and are upset at the Mac users for it.
Screw them.
It was a mildly interesting article until this stunning statement cropped up right near the end:
“The Mac has the advantage over Windows in just about every software category except word processing and spreadsheets.”
Er, no, can I mention one of the major uses of a home PC, namely games? Windows completely *destroys* Mac OS X w.r.t. the games market.
It does go to show, though, that one OS isn’t suitable for everything. Windows is great for games, Mac OS X is fine for audio/video/design work and Linux is great for everything else (particularly programming and basic Web surfing/e-mail). It’s why I dual boot between Linux (for everything non-gaming) and Vista (for games only).
Don’t confuse language like “advantage” with “marketshare” or “product landscape.”
Everyone in the technical fields knows Microsoft has the Engineering Apps product landscape advantage.
OS X has the “advantage” in that as the fastest growing platform it also being a true UNIX certified system with advanced APIs easily leveraged by these Engineering Apps [ANSYS, Pro/E, CATIA, etc] makes their code base across all non-windows platforms much more accessible and portable.