Submitted by “This is something I never thought I’d hear myself say – or maybe I should say, see myself type – about an Apple operating system: Mac OSX Leopard was released before it was ready. This operating system needed more testing on more systems with more hardware, and especially, more software configurations. The days of Apple computers operating with just the Mac OS and Adobe Photoshop installed, and practically nothing else to speak of, are long gone, and Apple knows this as well as anyone. This operating system was not properly beta tested, and Apple’s customers are paying for it, with lost productivity and inoperative computers.”
A good read. I have to say for the first time in a long time I am really disappointed with the quality of an apple product. Tiger has been a fantasticly stable and usable os for me and I was originally going to upgrade to Leopard after the first point release. It now seems that it will likely be several point releases before I will trust Leopard with my important data.
Tiger is still a great os and my advice would be to keep it for a while.
You probably don’t remember when Tiger Was New… Or any of the previous new versions… I remember upgrading to Tiger and having far more problems then with previous version Dashboard was killed my system it just filled all the RAM, Spotlight made the system run poky. Some programs crashed etc… The issue is a lot of Mac Users got Mac OS when it was mid cycle 10.4.5 or so. Also Tiger has been around so much longer up to 10.4.11 (Perhaps even a 12) So even if you have suffered from Tiger in its early phases the Pain has left your memory and just remember what worked well. But because of the exponential growth of Apple means most people never used an early version of OS X so they assume that it was always at the same quality.
I haven’t had any Major Issue with OS X Leopard after the second install. (It didn’t take upgrades to well)
I know exactly what you are talking about. Tiger was, for me anyway on my several systems, WAY buggier then Leopard. So far I have yet to run into the glitches that I ran into on Tiger.
Bottom line is that there are always going to be a few exceptions to the rules when it comes to problems. The blue screen for instance can be caused by a haxie, which Apple never support and the very design of these “applications” do not adhere to standard programming conventions used on the Mac. They often are the cause of broken systems at upgrade time.
There is no way to predict every variable in producing an OS. I have no doubt that by time 10.5.3 roles out most of these problems will be dust.
For the majority of users I don’t think there will be issues. They have sold millions of copies and we are hearing of only a small handfull of those millions that are having these serious issues. There has to be something about there configuration that could be non-standard or some app/extension causing a conflict.
Just my 2 cents having been through upgrades since OS 7.5. And believe me compared to some of those upgrades, like 8.0, and others, this is a cake walk!
Yes it’s interesting.
When I installed Leopard my thoughts were not “this is bug-free” my thoughts were “this is less buggy than Tiger.0 was”
And so it is I believe.
At this stage Leopard.1 seems more stable than Tiger.1 was.
How can you be disappointed with something you haven’t used yet?
I’ve read some negative stuff about Leopard, but honestly, I haven’t experienced anything but happiness with Leopard.
I purchased a family pack license on release day, went home and installed it everywhere, and other than Adobe Photoshop’s retarded insistence on a case-insensitive file system (which is Adobe’s mind-numbing stupidity and not Apple’s), I haven’t had a single issue or complaint.
Leopard has been extremely stable for me and a pleasure to use; on all my machines.
… that their image is as important as their products. I view Apple as a company concerned with the consumer (or at least not oblivious to the consumer). It is in their best interest to act in a way that is congruent with that image.
I’m still sticking with Tiger until they fix the Installer which fails randomly on various systems from G4 to Core2Duo.
Everyone wants to blame the RAM and then when it’s clear that high quality RAM still fails on these systems they don’t have an answer.
Answer: They did a piss poor SQA release cycle and GM never should have been stamped. I don’t mind saying this because having been behind the curtain, so-to-speak, I know there are two camps: those that see a show-stopper for a show-stopper and those that consider it not worthy of the title show-stopper because its results are widespread enough.
Case in point:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5726236
As of yet, no official response or solution from Apple.
it seems the QA team did a very bad job. there are a lot of quirks i would not expect from apple products. like, open 2 windows, give one focus, switch to an application on a different desktop (using spaces). now if you switch back using alt tab it sometimes does not switch to the window which had focus. this i might expect from linux or windows, but not from apple.
I keep reading these articles and just wondering that the heck people are talking about. I installed Leopard about a week after it was released on a core duo mac mini and it has been working just fine. Almost every piece of software I use, with the exception of a few haxies, work just fine as well.
I agree.
I’ve had very very little problems with Leopard, and I really give it a good workout day after day.
And I installed it as soon as it was released.
I’ve had far more problems with Vista (My Home machine) than I have Leopard (Laptop I use for work).
They all have their quirks.
Some people in this world just like to whine about anything and everything.
Put emphasis on the word *I* and you can see why your statement is more or less irrelevant.
They say that Leopard is buggy on SOME hardware. YOUR is working OK so be thankful for you are happy.
Also you might just not use the bugged functionality, your settings might be set so you avoided bugs etc.
Saying “it works here so what’s the problem” is actually pretty ignorant don’t you think?
Edited 2007-11-25 12:19
Oh please.
I’ll expand, I’ve installed Leopard on Macbook Pros, iMacs (Old and New), iBooks, Macbooks, you name it, and it’s been fine on all of them.
With a lot of different people using them in different ways.
So you’ve assumed because I’m not having problems, and a lot of other people aren’t, that’s irrelevant and Leopard is bugged.
Ever think about it the other way? He’s the unlucky one and the other large majority of people aren’t having any problems at all.
Of course, that wouldn’t make for good news would it? =)
As someone said, the problems that guy was whining about was either A.) Fixed already, or B.) Wasn’t even related to Leopard.
No OS is perfect, and there will be quirks, but currently , Apple are fixing those a SHIT load quicker than Microsoft are on Vista.
Edited 2007-11-25 12:26
Installation problems for an OS that is only developed for a specific subset of hardware is a “quirk”? Please. Installation is a very basic thing they need to get right.
And exactly what installation problems was there?
I noticed that on 1 of my machines, the hard disk took a while to pick up.
Now people thought this was a bug in Leopard, when in reality, opening up the terminal and looking at what was happening underneath, there was an fsck running on the disk.
Now that’s to check that the disk is good for installation, which is fine, why install on a dud disk.
And because everyone has more stuff on computers, different status’s etc, it took longer for some people.
Should there have been something saying it was doing a check, yes, probably would of been nice to see a “Checking Disk for errors” but there wasn’t, then again, it wasn’t that big of a problem for all the other installs I did.
Are you serious? Look around the internet man, look around this thread.
I had my own installation issues as well. When I tried to boot up the Leopard install disc, my screen went wonky and I couldn’t do anything. Trying the tiger install disc did not produce this issue. After a few days, it magically fixed itself.
//Apple are fixing those a SHIT load quicker than Microsoft are on Vista. //
And do you supposed that might be due to the fact that there are THOUSANDS OF ADDITIONAL HARDWARE OPTIONS for Windows users, than there are for Mac users? Thus making bugfixes MUCH MORE DIFFICULT to fix for Microsoft that they are for a closed-system like Apple?
No. You probably never considered that. Most Mac fanbois don’t.
“Saying “it works here so what’s the problem” is actually pretty ignorant don’t you think? ”
This however is also true the other way around, isn’t it? I haven’t seen any statistics presented in the article that the author’s problems are somehow a mass phenomenon..
I’ve personally instlled Leopard on a new alu iMac, an older white (intel) iMac and a G4 mini, 2 of which were clean installs and 1 was an upgrade. I’ve had a grand total of 0 problems. I think that covers a good size chunk of the hardware on which Leopard is supported.
Personally, I think the guy’s trolling for hits. The “article” contains no information whatsoever.
Edited 2007-11-26 18:24 UTC
I’ve installed Leopard on several systems, and I haven’t seen any problems.
In situations like this, the squeeky wheel makes a lot of noise. I’d bet there are MANY, MANY more people who are using Leopard without problems, than there are people who are having problems.
And I’d bet the problems are mostly from upgrading existing copies of Tiger rather than blowing the system away and installing onto a freshly formatted system.
I agree. I have installed across dozens of systems since 10.5.1 came out and have had zero problems. And this is across multiple systems, from G4, G5, Intel Core, and Core 2 duo. This also includes various software packages too. I guess Apple and (Microsoft too) can not plan for every possible contingency and have people expect perfection.
Same here. Not a single system failure or glitch.
It appears the exception is being presented as the rule, again.
The author of this article is one of em, IMHO. Only 2 points he makes are valid: Firewall problems and the file moving bug that could destroy the file. Both seem to be fixed already. (and maybe the Seagate hard drive thing, I’m not really into this)
The rest is listing general “problems” from the web combined with superficial knowledge. E.g. all previous versions of OS X had the firewall turned off by default, so this is not a thing new to Leopard. The graphics artifacts and freezes he talks about were an iMac specific problem, again, not related to Leopard in any way (and finally fixed, btw). And then this silly talk about “Blue Screen” vs. “Blue Screen of Death” (the cause, an app that was pretty closely related to the OS, shouldn’t suprise anybody) and the complaining about Apple’s advertising, c’mon!
I don’t know, to me he is totally mislead by the talk on the net. IMO, this is the smoothest upgrade of all OS X transitions, so far. Apple has left most APIs/frameworks of Tiger untouched, so almost every software just runs and doesn’t need an upgrade. We saw a lot more essential updates to software in the past, when apple released a new version of OS X.
And please, look into the Ubuntu forums or the millions of windows forums. They are full of threads about upgrading issues! On the apple side, almost every issue there was has been fixed within a month. There is no such thing as a flawless OS, especially not in the general purpose OS area.
Edited 2007-11-25 12:17
-What is happening to the major companies ?
We had Vista released and forced on us, knowing it is a BAD OS… Now Leopard is being said in “beta” stage !!!
I’ll happily stick to Fedora, Mandriva and Debian, then !!!
But for regular folks, OSX tiger should be a good choice, or even winxp…
“forced”??? get a life!
“forced”??? get a life!
Vista – about 25% of the users have serious problems and most of them have compatibility problems.
Leopard – About 5% report serious problems and 20% report minor compatibility problems.
Big difference.
KDE shows some little crash avery 5 minutes (thought usually you cant tell what crashed) and its apps are as buggy as hell. GNOME is better in overall stability but some of its apps (ie. gPhoto/gThumb) are essentially unusably buggy.
Everything has problems but some have more than others.
“Vista – about 25% of the users have serious problems and most of them have compatibility problems.
Leopard – About 5% report serious problems and 20% report minor compatibility problems.
Big difference.
From where are you getting these numbers? (I was tempted to say, “From what orifice are you pulling these numbers?”, oh, I just did. :p)
I’m sure that Leopard works fine on the vast majority of systems; you’re always going to hear about problems more than about “no problems here”, because the problems are more likely to be reported. But Apple fans should remember that when bashing non-Apple products based on reported problems.
That being said, I have to post these links, because they’re pretty funny:
This is a post by Rob Hyndman, telling of the nightmare that his Leopard upgrade has been, calling it the “without a doubt this upgrade is the worst OS upgrade experience I’ve ever had.”
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/11/14/ive-been-attacked-by-a-leopard…
Now, the problems he describes are interesting, but what’s really interesting is that the Jobs worshippers came out in full force to rip him to shreds. Then, a couple days layter, Rob Hyndman calls out the Jobs worhippers for their irrational behavior:
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/11/15/your-leopard-is-eating-my-self…
Another blogger, Scoble (whom I can’t stand, since he’s the typical “know-it-all” tech blogger) posted a few entries on how Leopard trashed his system, and taking Apple to task for their “brand promise” and smugness. But eventually he says he’s staying with Macs because he’s locked himself into Apple software (vendor lock-in, anyone?). (note that Scoble worked at Microsoft a couple years ago, but since then became a big Apple consumer, buying multiple Macs, multiple iPhones, multiple iPods, AppleTV, Apple’s high-end video software, etc; he has fully embraced the Apple lifestyle):
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/caught-in-apple-restart-hell/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/17/the-brand-promise-of-apple/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/17/twitter-reactions-to-apples-os-upd…
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/20/why-im-buying-another-mac/
Edited 2007-11-25 19:53
I wonder that, too. In my experience it’s north of 30% of the people I know having problems with Vista, and perhaps 5% of the people I know reporting ANY problems on Leopard. Granted, none had an Intel iMac, let alone one with that particular ATI card.
Well, since I do a lot of end user support as well (in addition to telling the machines on the lab to behave — while sporting a menacing gaze), I don’t really think I’m suffering from the echo chamber effect… Given that even my own laptop decided not to connect to the wifi network anymore (which is so weird, since everything works great at home, and both are set up with WPA2)… I just can’t vouch for Vista’s smoothness.
Whoa, someone had upgrade problems. News at 11.
Please: “Jobs worshippers”?! Poor Sculley, JLG, Amelio; as if there was ZERO brand loyalty back when they ran the company.
There’s more to Apple then the showman. You should know — AFAICT you use their products.
I can’t control the behaviour of other people, but I can tell you, without a shadow of doubt, that I don’t advocate Apple products out of snottiness; they get my job done, faster, and with a fairly low share of menacing gazes.
(That said, I still don’t have a single grey hair, even after experiencing Win95 (RTM, OSR2), WinNT4, Win98, Win98SE, Win2k (RTM to SP4), WinXP (RTM, SP1, SP2), Win2k3 (RTM, R2, SP2); so either my pain threshold is really high, or the fact that I’ve made money fixing those computers offset having to experience the weirdest issues first hand, at home, as well)
(P.s.: I *liked* DOS and Windows 3.x. I was a wizard at configuring EMS and XMS. I loved being able to load plenty of TSRs and still have over 612+kb of low memory available. And no, I didn’t resort to memmaker or QEMM, despite actually liking Quarterdeck’s stuff. And of course I ran the one and only Stacker, not the MS ripoffs. And Praise the Lord for DOS4GW and CWSDPMI!)
Forgive me to going completely off-topic here, but this just triggered something I wanted to say for a long time now.
Scoble is a moron. Or, in the fantastic words of the Macalope,
HE’s the one feeling entitled to whatever Apple never promised to anyone (there’s a thing called marketing, you know? Or should I start to cuss Microsoft for not delivering me a computing experience akin to living on green pastures by a gentle, round hill, framed by a blue sky background? Or taking me to a lake at dawn to admire the Aurora Borealis(!!)?…), and really, claiming vendor lock-in to Apple is completely ridiculous. If his newfound mission in life after quitting MS is video editing, and he’s so dissatisfied with Apple, he should just sell ALL of his Apple gear for good money and buy an Avid station.
The truth is that most of those bloggers that call themselves journalist have NEVER upgraded a single piece of OS on their own, except when it comes to Linux. I find it extremely suspicious that most reviews praising Vista were made based on review machines that came with it preinstalled, and most reviews dissing Leopard, whatever Linux flavour, and Vista itself, are those where the reviewer actually had the trouble to actually go through the actual upgrade process.
This absolute lack of depth is what makes me hiss and shiver at the idea that those bloggers are getting the same rights (and salaries!) as real journalists. Really, payment by the word, and being obliged to write 1500 per article has always been one of the worst ideas ever, and now that every news piece must have an online counterpart (most times written by God-knows-who), it really shows.
Contrast to Stephen Fry’s week(end)ly online column at the Guardian Unlimited. Those are pieces of love, and what a great prose!
Edit: Got distracted and forgot to type two whole words in the middle of a sentence. w00t…
Edit 2: Nostalgia got the best of me, and I just had to add the remarks regarding DOS, Win3.x and the great tools we had back then that ACTUALLY empowered the user. *sigh*
Edited 2007-11-25 20:34
I find it extremely suspicious that most reviews praising Vista were made based on review machines that came with it preinstalled, and most reviews dissing Leopard, whatever Linux flavour, and Vista itself, are those where the reviewer actually had the trouble to actually go through the actual upgrade process.
I wouldn’t advocate that anyone EVER upgrade their operating system on existing hardware. The cost is too high: App compat, perf differences, data loss, corruption, driver conflicts, and time cannot justify the effort. And, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of people lack the technical depth to upgrade an operating system, anyway, and only get a new OS with a new computer, these so-called “articles” by bloggers complaining about upgrades are a waste of server space.
“I wouldn’t advocate that anyone EVER upgrade their operating system on existing hardware.”
*Phew* So this is how far we’ve come with Micorosoft. Of course it’s not advicable to upgrad WINDOWS because chance that the new OS needs twice as much horsepower as the old one and that icompatiblities and missing drivers make your life miserable are high. However, there are profession OSes that don’t suffer kindergarden problems.
*Phew* So this is how far we’ve come with Micorosoft.
No, this applies to practically EVERY operating system in existence.
Of course it’s not advicable to upgrad WINDOWS because chance that the new OS needs twice as much horsepower as the old one and that icompatiblities and missing drivers make your life miserable are high.
It’s rare. Microsoft attributes sales of upgrades at less than 1% of all licenses sold. So, frankly, even offering upgrades for customers with existing hardware is pretty much pointless, based on sales statistics alone.
However, there are profession OSes that don’t suffer kindergarden problems.
Wrong. Every OS has its share of upgrade problems. Google “OS upgrade failure”. Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. Nobody has a monopoly on quality — or lack of quality.
Oh yeah, Baratunde Thurston posted a comment to one of Scoble’s blog entries, and pointed readers to his “I Hate the Smugness of Apple” video. It’s pretty amusing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbLeFNjYeTs
Scoble also posted this video to his blog:
Apple flacks caught on tape acting like control freaks
http://valleywag.com/tech/great-moments-in-public-relations/apple-f…
Looks like an Apple backlash may be at the embryonic stage.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1016.html
The comic tells it all.
… and in other news 95% of statistics posted without a source are purely ficticious and intended only to prove the author’s point.
“Vista – about 25% of the users have serious problems and most of them have compatibility problems.
Leopard – About 5% report serious problems and 20% report minor compatibility problems.
Big difference.”
Nice statistics, wouldn’t mind seeing something to back it up, because I believe your numbers on Vista problems may be inflated
Possibly the vista numbers are a tad inflated. My source was just an informal survey with among my friends – no big research.
We had Vista released and forced on us, knowing it is a BAD OS…
That’s funny. I don’t remember any goons from Microsoft knocking on my door and forcing me to upgrade to Vista. Maybe I was out when they stopped by….
While I agree with the author about Apple products need more testing, I’m surprised to see many people blaming Leopard only. I think most of the users who are angry about Leopard problems are new Mac users who have bought their first Mac with Mac OS X 10.4.4(I mean Intel macs) and have not seen many of the “first version” bugs that lead to data loss and other problems.
They have not seen data loss caused by using iTunes 2.0 installer:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/OSX/itunes2_erased_drives.html
They have not seen data loss on some Firewire HDs after installing Mac OS X 10.3.0:
http://www.macintouch.com/panfirewire.html
So they are surprised to see Mac OS X 10.5.0 has many problems.(If I remember correctly the Finder data loss bug was at least in Tiger too.)
We can see many problems with current and old Apple hardwares and softwares caused by limited testing and it is obvious that Apple seriously needs to improve its testing.
BTW, I’m very happy with Leopard on my iMac G5.
Edit: sorry for typo in subject, it seems that I need more testing too
)
Edited 2007-11-25 12:41
Don’t you just love those reviewers who think they give more cred to their crap by saying things like “I never thought I’d hear myself say” or “see myself type” etc. When you see two such statements in a row you know there’ll be trouble.
Well, bad bad Apple. They should’ve spent another 10 years on Leopard just to make sure it’s perfect. Because we all know how 10.4.0 was perfect … or do we tend to forget? Anyway…
forget??…. forget what?
Oh I remember 10.4.0 and the problems that my labs had, I used to have to unplug the Ethernet before booting to my G5s to start. I begged and pleaded with Apple but they just said “What problem?” guess they forget too
1) When 10.4 came out, it was far from perfect. Given the relatively smaller community, the level of noise was alot lower.
2) I’ve had no problems with Leopard so far – but I guess I’m the odd one out.
3) I’m sure there are Leopard issues, and what annoys me is the fact that these bugs were known before the release but instead they chose to stick to the release date than pushing it back another month (or two) in favour of nailing down some glaringly obvious bugs.
The issues people have here aren’t with obscure/weird bugs but ones that sit out like a sore thumb that should have been fixed during the beta testing.
I have had NO ISSUES with Leopard installed on 5 machines ranging from a G4 DA with 1.8Ghz G4 to an Intel Mini and a G5 iMac and G4 Mini and iBook. Not ONE ISSUE. I did 3 upgrades and 2 Archive and Installs.
Edited 2007-11-25 19:33
Nor did I have any issues – but the fact remains there were problems, even for people who bought a computer, loaded nothing on the machine, and still found they had problems.
Yes, I am sure there are some nitwitts out there who go out of their way to make their computing experience more difficult than it needs to be, installing tweaker and hackware. With that being said, it doesn’t negate from the fact that there are those who have experienced problems – even with all precautions taken.
with a closed os with closed hardware, there really is no excuse for this kind of sloppy job (pun intended).
the swine that apple released makes vista looks like a pearl.
You are definitely smoking something bad.
yep. better than what steve job and his concubines were smoking when they break leopard …
Except for there are millions of people who are not developers testing the product. If you had any software development experience you will know once the general public gets a hold of your software you will find a lot of bugs. he more complex the more bugs. Even with just very simple things… For example I wrote a program and I thought I got all the bugs out and I have tested it for weeks. Then when a user who isn’t a developer got on it caused it to break in a second because they just clicked to get focused vs. using the Tab Key. Being Software Developers we tend to think the same way so when we test something we will use tab keys to navigate and use the keyboard more… The code was easy to fix, but I just never thought about testing it neither did the rest of the team.
Oh my god, an excuse for an company who sees itself as primus inter pares, as ‘god-like’ developers? Please get real, Apple spreads these legends and so people are justifying Apple according to these nonsense sayings. You’re paying for this plus on quality, quality which makes people ‘think different’ =)
Closed OS, well I would teach you a thing or two about OS X but reading the rest of your comments I’m not going to even bother. Your comments say a lot, Vista really was a mess.
Edited 2007-11-25 16:33
Look at you trying hard to appear clever.
The better part of the article is about two problems, one that is supposedly fixed in 10.5.1 but evidently the author doesn’t believe it is, although he offers no evidence that it wasn’t.
The file management problem is easily avoided by COPYING a file from one location to another instead of MOVING. From the desktop, the mv command is not even available when you right-click a file, only Copy is available. Seems the only way you get into trouble is by using the Terminal instead of doing things graphically. I would think it’s mostly advanced users that are familiar with Unix commands who use the terminal to move files around in this manner.
In any case, mv-ing a file across drives or partitions is MUCH more risky than cp-ing in ANY instance. Simple basic file-management procedures take care of it. NEVER mv a file across partitions or drives! Do a cp, check the integrity of the moved file, and then rm the original file if the copy is OK. Problem solved! And the world keeps turning.
The other matter, the so-called “blue screen of death” is mainly a “hang screen” that occurs because of the APE problem. The reboot “hangs” and the screen that results happens to be blue. My iMac has a blue screen as part of normal bootup. This is different from Windows BSOD which has all sorts of gobbledygook text on it. I will grant that an indication from Apple that if a blue screen displays for more than 20 minutes that there might be a problem would be good of them to do.
This author suffers from the same problem as other “X-Company is failing” authors. They assume and posit that if there are posts in support forums about problems, then by logic those problems are affecting ALL users and that it indicates that X’s products are going down the tubes quality-wise, and that X is trying to suppress criticism, so X must be evil, and they and everyone else should never support X’s products again. Whew!
There are always problems with new OS’s, and we are all beta testers in the end. Given time, bugs are found out and fixed. The vast majority of 10.5 users are probably “ignorant” and are having no problems. I seem to be one of them. So be it!
in any case, mv-ing a file across drives or partitions is MUCH more risky than cp-ing in ANY instance. Simple basic file-management procedures take care of it. NEVER mv a file across partitions or drives! Do a cp, check the integrity of the moved file, and then rm the original file if the copy is OK. Problem solved! And the world keeps turning.
Why? it should not be. If someone wants to MOVE a file then that is what the computer should do. If someone wants to COPY a file, then that is what the computer should to. When I give the command to move a file then the OS should make the requisite integrity checks, and if something is found be wrong then abort the procedure. That is what the computer is for. I mean seriously do I have to check it arithmetic too?
Imagine if someone (Ballmer/Gates) was using the same justification to excuse a bug in a Microsoft product. MS critics would be having a veritable conniption. I can’t see how bugs in moving a file could ever be excused.
“The file management problem is easily avoided by…”
Users’ duty to avoid or vendors’ duty to fix?
“From the desktop, the mv command is not even available when you right-click a file, only Copy is available. Seems the only way you get into trouble is by using the Terminal instead of doing things graphically.”
Drag and Drop
“There are always problems with new OS’s, and we are all beta testers in the end. Given time, bugs are found out and fixed. ”
Completely agree, all new OSs.
“The vast majority of 10.5 users are probably “ignorant” and are having no problems. I seem to be one of them. So be it!”
Or maybe “tolerant” and there could be a limit to that. For all the good that OSX brings, I can consider a few flaws negligible.
“mv” works fine in Leopard, and always has. The bug affected Finder which moves files when you hold the Option key while dragging and dropping them: if it failed part-way through the move due to the destination becoming unavailable, the source file would be deleted anyway (i.e., it didn’t seem to detect that the error had occurred).
It was a stupid bug, and it’s been fixed. The fact it could be “avoided” by not doing it isn’t really worth the trouble of anybody saying. It’s like saying you can avoid getting caught by your car breaking down by riding a bicycle instead.
“Tiger is still a great os and my advice would be to keep it for a while.”
I can remember that Tiger had problems of similar scale in the .0/.1/.2 era.
I sometimes wonder what users of .0/.1 releases expect. That everything is rock solid and tested to the bone? Sorry, this is naive! No software would ever be released if it must be tested for every situation (except maybe for very small systems in the embedded area).
I work in software development and I can guarantee you that no software can ever be tested till it is rock solid and can handle every situation to the users satisfaction. It’s neither economically feasible nor technical possible since the amount of different configurations and situations “in the wild” are always larger than you can test especially if the software in question is an operating system and a bunch of apps which must handle 3rd party drivers, different HW-/SW configuration and stay backward compatible as much as possible.
Of course testing software is important and there are prominent software titles where testing was sloppy or inexistent (e. g. I remember Word 6 crashing almost once an hour). But at the end of the day, it’s a question of balance between implementing and testing features. Would Leopard users be more satisfied with 0 new features but a (even) more solid system than Tiger? I guess no.
There is always the moment when finding and fixing the next bug is more expensive and will produce the “wrong bugs” (i. e. bugs that are not really important or will hardly occur in “real life”) than simply release the software and wait for user response. Some companies release a public beta just for that reason while other releases bug fix updates in short cycles after the public release.
If you don’t like to play the guinea pig don’t buy .0 / .1 /. 2, .. releases of a software – depending if the software company did a public beta and depending on how often they usually do updates. This should be public knowledge by now even for “Tom’s Hardware”. So I don’t see a reason for this article except that the site “Tom’s Hardware” seems to be in desperate need for some web-clicks..
Two of my managers at work went out and installed Leopard on their laptops as soon as it was released. Mind you, they use these laptops every day for work, and didn’t think twice about introducing a new operating system into our production environment.
Suddenly, though, whenever they mount afp volumes from an OS X server, the permissions are ignored. Never mind that they are part of the office group, and that the office group has read/write permissions on the files and directories.. They’re just no longer able to write to those files any more. Even better, though, is the fact that it now takes 20 seconds to pull a 1 meg file to their laptops (on a 100 Mbit/s LAN) through AFP/Finder.
Well, I’m certainly not impressed with Leopard. I’m even less impressed with my managers 🙂
Seriously, if that’s the best he can do with Leopard’s shortcomings, then Leopard is as solid as a rock.
Here’s a more detailed responce:
http://www.bananaranha.com/2007/11/25/a-questionable-article-from-a…
Another problem not mentioned in the article: some Mac keyboards will not respond at random times, especially on MacBooks and MacBook Pros:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1232311&tstart=0
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1217703&tstart=30
Apple’s response according to a forum poster:
“Apple is certainly aware of the problem and is working on a fix. They have a temporary fix for this including:
1. Using the trackpad or and external mouse to save any open documents and re-start
2. Close the lid, wait for the computer to sleep and re-open the lid
3. If available use an external keyboard.”
Another poster on Macrumors reports the following email response from Apple:
Alex,
Steve forwarded your email to me.
Our engineers have been investigating this issue, and they believe that they have found the problem. As soon as we thoroughly test the changes, we intend to release a software update (ASAP).
Thank you for your patience.
Mike Bell
So this does appear to be a software problem, and judging from the posts in the forums most likely from Leopard.
I consider this article as shameless FUD, it also annoys me that at least one fake Mac user eagerly ‘agrees’ with this trash.
People: all issues he mentioned have been addressed in software updates
(In a firmware (videocard) update and in 10.5.1).
When you compare Apple software quality to MS, MS will never reach the alpha stage, it is not even possible because of totally wrong design choices. (Poor ‘separation’ user and system space.)
Thanks foijs for your link:
( http://www.bananaranha.com/2007/11/25/a-questionable-article-from-a… )
Really exposes the whole scheme behind the article.
Edited 2007-11-25 14:36
I consider this article as shameless FUD, it also annoys me that at least one fake Mac user eagerly ‘agrees’ with this trash.
Dude, you’re a perfect Apple drone. Now, all that you need is an Apple tattoo, a VW microbus, some Chapstick so that Stevie doesn’t get chafed, and a bag of hemp to complete the ensemble.
When you compare Apple software quality to MS, MS will never reach the alpha stage, it is not even possible because of totally wrong design choices. (Poor ‘separation’ user and system space.)
I always love the “…buh our quality is better than X…” argument, no matter how bad the problems are. I’m sure that makes the bug-afflicted feel sooooooo much better.
“Dude, you’re a perfect Apple drone. Now, all that you need is an Apple tattoo, a VW microbus, some Chapstick so that Stevie doesn’t get chafed, and a bag of hemp to complete the ensemble.”
In some sense this is true, but I tell you a bit of my background: For my profession I do Windows (XP) support!
In privat I switched to OSX around 4 years ago, was supposed to be some kind of therapy, worked out wrong, at work I only got more frustrated with an OS that is flawed at every level.
Indeed at home the Apple stickers are all over the place. Knowing the difference I do feel many times obliged to ‘fight’ any acceptance of substandard quality.
And if people are willing to spread payed misinformation (I suppose 20,000$ is peanuts for MS), Apple has deserved my loyalty.
Edited 2007-11-27 11:20
In some sense this is true, but I tell you a bit of my background: For my profession. I do Windows (XP) support!
Clearly, if you have that many problems administering XP boxes, you might want to think about getting some education, upgrading to Vista, or changing careers. It really isn’t that difficult. The problem is that most admins don’t really take the time to setup an OS properly.
Indeed at home the Apple stickers are all over the place. Knowing the difference I do feel many times obliged to ‘fight’ any acceptance of substandard quality.
You might want to open your eyes to the fact that Apple has its own quality problems. Right now, you’ve got your head stuck in the sand, not wanting to believe it, calling anything that criticizes it “FUD”.
Do they even test on their OWN hardware? I mean, Apple has like TEN different HW configurations, and yet they manage to screw up (keyboard hanging on MPBs, hard freezes on iMacs).
MS OSes have to run on millions of different configs, and for the most part, they do just finely.
I am not a anti-apple troll. I have a nice iMac with Leopard upgraded from Tiger. But the OS is definitely not as clean as we are used to from Apple.
“MS OSes have to run on millions of different configs, and for the most part, they do just finely.”
Does not give you much credibility as a ‘Mac’ user.
Question, did YOU have any issues with 10.5.0.?
And after 10.5.1 ??
//”MS OSes have to run on millions of different configs, and for the most part, they do just finely.”
Does not give you much credibility as a ‘Mac’ user. //
Come again? He states a fact about the complex nature of Windows OS upgrades and myriad hardware configurations, and that immediately discredits him?
Gotta love the Mac kool-aid.
I’ve been in the OpenSource world — Linux and FreeBSD — for four years now, but recently I’ve been tempted by the beautiful new Macs that are showing up in my friends’ houses and offices. I’ve also been influenced by the effective marketing campaign for Leopard.
After reading this, though, I’m very reticent and am thinking it’s probably best to remain in the OpenSource world. What I can’t stand isn’t so much the technical snafus that Leopard apparently has, but rather the apparent defensiveness and lack of transparency exhibited by Apple. Locking threads that contain critical or negative posts; turning off caching for live chats with tech support people; etc. This kind of thing is not healthy, and it’s bad for everybody concerned.
Edited 2007-11-25 14:35 UTC
The press and the public kept crying about how late Leopard was. When you’re a company like Apple, with so many irons in the fire, you sometimes have to move resources from one project to another. So Apple heard the cries of Leopard and was determined to release it by the end of October as promised. This is what happens when such projects are pinned to an unrealistic release date.
If there wasn’t such public outcry for meeting deadlines, Apple would have tested more. Instead, they bowed to public criticism and worked hard to put out a decent product by the deadline. Now everyone is crying again… They just can’t win.
Sure seems like there is a lot of crap being released in the OS world these days –
Leopard has had big problems, including, *gasp*, blue screens of death, and an inexcusible bug of data loss when transferring data from one drive to antother.
Vista has been nothing short of stunningly aweful – slow, buggy, many apps, and much hardware not working, and riddled with DRM.
Fedora 8 is aweful. I can’t even start up X on some hardware (including mine), and it’s slow, buggy, and bloated.
Mandriva looks great, but enables numlock, regardless of whether the machine is a laptop or not.
Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, in my experience, has been a rather buggy release when compared to Feisty Fawn (I wont’ go into all of Gutsy’s bugs that I’ve experienced – don’t have the time right now).
openSUSE is rather solid (and nice looking), but makes some rather dumb design decisions – like the slab menu and enabling Beagle (huge resource hog) by default.
And to anybody that is a fanboy of one of the above mentioned OS’s that says “Well, I didn’t experience those problems, therefore they’re irrelevent” (like a Mac fanboy has already done here in this thread), shut the f%$# up.
Fact is, if some people have experienced those problems, and the number who have is unusually large, you have a serious QA problem.
What is also appalling about this case (Leopard’s bugs), is Apple’s reaction to complaints on discussion forums. The act of locking threads that have people complaining about bugs is irreprehensible, and is blatent censorship, and is a pathetic attempt to cover up known issues. Shame on you Apple. Just stand up honorably and take the well deserved criticism like real men, and pull you heads out of your behinds enlough to realize that many of your loyal customers are pissed, and admit the problems and fix them rapidly. Closing threads only makes you look like whimpy @ssholes.
Okay, off my soapbox. 😉
It not as though Fedora isn’t a cutting edge test release for red hat. Ubuntu said Gutsy will be buggy so they can cram more development in to get ready for hardy heron the more stable release. So I think those two might be forgiven. The other four OS’s on your list were supposed to be releases of production quality.
Edited 2007-11-25 15:21
I was very disappointed with Fedora 8. Its unstable, slow, the theme sucks and everything seems broken, Wine doesn’t work on the stock kernel for me, etc…
Seems like its been a bad few months for new OSs.
> 2nd paragraph: “Perhaps the most troublesome of the problems has been a data loss issue caused by Finder…..”
Which existed since Panther iirc, and now because Apple/OSX gets more attention in press, those things are chewed everywhere. But it had a good follow: 10.5.1 fixed this old bug finally.
> 3rd paragraph: “Personally, I wouldn’t want to bet my important data on that statement.”
The author though doesn’t accept that they fixed it, he has paranoias instead.
> 4th paragraph: “In an unrelated issue, data recovery firm Retrodata has found a disturbing hard drive failure rate in some Apple Macbooks.”
Has nothing to do with Leopard itself, and only affects a small number of Macbook owners. Also they can easily replace the drive from Apple.
> 5th paragraph: “Thanks to Leopard, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death is now a part of the Mac operating system.”
If he would inform himself, he would know that those some occuring blue screens appeared only on machines where applications were installed that are struggling deep into the system like APE which arent supported at all, neither recommened at all to use, because they’re just hacks into the system.
> 7th paragraph: “There are graphics artifacts followed by freezes” && “A search for Freeze or Lock or Hangs in Apple’s Leopard discussion groups returns the maximum allowable 500 hits.”
He’s right in that this problem existed (its fixed in 10.5.1+firmware-update of graphics-card btw). But he didnt mention that it got fixed. The search result from a forum as representing how much iMacs were affected? LOL, … this article really is funny. Let me give you the opposite statement to you: Only 15% of iMacs were affected by freezes, the low-cost model with ATI2400 not at all.
> 8th paragraph: “There are also two bugs in the usually trouble-free Mac firewall. The first caused the firewall to be installed turned off by default, which some Mac users didn’t find out about until they ran into problems.”
Its sad that its off by default, acknowloging this, .. but what problems please? Pseudo-existing viruses/trojans in your head? Cmon…
“The second refused to allow some third party applications to access the Internet, including, of all things, World of Warcraft.”
Which is also fixed in 10.5.1 and was only a problem because applications weren’t yet compatible to Leopards new firewall.
> 9th paragraph
Some more morons like the author of this article posted dramatic negative hysteric threads about how bad bad bad OSX Leopard is and what problems they got after installing Leopard on an totally hacked system with APE and others, with no backup in mind of course and afterwards complaining, hooray.
> “I have no doubt that it will someday. But today, it does not.”
Ok, from start on – 10.5.0 – there were some flaws for some users. But he didnt even tried to mention 10.5.1 really and that it has fixed most of the problematic issues. I wont say Leopard is perfect, it certainly isnt. But this article just showed NO real value for anyone, as every user who gets Leopard now, gets 10.5.1 immediately too through the Update.
I agree with some of the other posters, installed Leopard the day it was released, i have not had a problem with it (i never encountered the file move bug, as i never had a disconnection with coping files).
The other comment i would like to make is for the people who say that because i have not had a problem with it doesn’t mean others don’t. I agree other people may have a problem, however instead of all of the comments being filled with people who have had problems, it’s also good to have it filled with people who have not had a problem.
Just thinking a bit about this, and maybe it is actually an advantage to have millions of possible hardware configurations.
If you have a controlled set of hardware, you can quite possibly test all the possible configurations – lets say there are 20 or 30 of them in total. So you test them with each dot release, and they seem fine.
But, you cannot do any very thorough testing. So basically your users end up doing it. You then fix them as they come up. Finally by X.x.4, everything is pretty fine.
Contrast this with the problem MS or Linux faces. They cannot even begin to test the most common configs. There are just so many, and so many rapidly changing, main boards and graphics cards and so on.
So, they do not even try. They concentrate far more on clear and safe lines of demarcation. The result is that despite what Mac advocates say, hardware just works, and driver problems no longer cause crashes. Macs also do not have problems, as long as you have allowed enough time for thorough user testing, but for a different reason.
Its the difference between a system which is robust to varied hardware configurations, and one that is not robust and so is tested and patched into stability over a restricted range.
It is not necessarily a better way to do it. Controlling hardware and software can be a very mixed blessing in terms of its effect on working practices.
Its not that QA was asleep on the job. It was that they are trying to test quality in, instead of design it in.
Is this right?
10.5 installed fine on all the macbook Pro’s at the office.
Installed fine on the macbook at home.
Installed fine on an G4 Powebook.
Refused to install at all on a G5 PowerMac. I kept getting an error during installation. I had to connect the G5 to the Powerbook and install the OS via the Powerbook using Firewire mode. Which worked fine.
Since then everything has been great. Well worth the upgrade. all that said, I don’t remember this many issues surfacing on the web with past os X upgrades. But, that could also be because its getting more coverage these days. (??)
It’s all about Apple Inc.
I think Leopard is okay, but some thinges are just unacceptable. (Like menus does not dissapear in exposé anymore and so no).
But I think since it’s “Apple Inc.” instead of “Apple Computer Inc.”, they just overloaded themselfs =(
but no show stoppers.
What amazes me is all the people here who commented that they installed a .0 release in a production environment.
I didn’t know that such things happened, and certainly didn’t know they could happen without someone getting fired.
Perhaps I am naive (or ignorant), could someone point out the must have feature that would lead to replacing a solid and tried OS with a new release in a production environment?
It is not, that it is a ‘.0’ release the issue..
The issue is installing a *new* version on production environements, without adequate testing first.
You should be as cautious for whatever .x versions as for .0 release..
Leopard users hoped that a free maintenance update (OSX 10.5.1), released on Thursday, November 15, would fix the issue, but Apple’s statement accompanying the update is too vague to give a definitive answer. With regard to data loss, it states that “… a potential data loss issue when moving files across partitions …” has been fixed, but moving files across hard drives is not addressed. Personally, I wouldn’t want to bet my important data on that statement.
I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand about that statement. Another hard drive is another partition unless you are using something like LVM.
Then you have this statement thrown in there which has nothing to do with Leopard:
In an unrelated issue, data recovery firm Retrodata has found a disturbing hard drive failure rate in some Apple Macbooks. Quoting from the Retrodata Web site: “We at Retrodata believe that any sizeable manufacturer would by this stage be aware of such a problem and issue a product recall notice, or an offer to have the drive exchanged for a suitable alternative at their own expense.” If you own an Apple Macbook with a Seagate hard drive, I strongly suggest you check out the details available at Retrodata.
The only other issues mentioned are a blue screen, hard locks, artifacting, and firewall misconfigurations. It does sound a little flakey but not more so than the typical Windows release. I would contend that Leopard is probably more bug free than Vista was on release. The difference is that I’m sure these bugs will be cleaned up relatively quickly.
The author of the article is a tool. He complains about issues that were already fixed and about issues completely unrelated to Leopard.
He complains that threads were closed on Apple’s forums? Threads that don’t discuss an actual issue should be closed. They are there for support, not for complaining. There are other outlets users can use for that. Like terrible blogs for example.
I have had far less trouble with leopard than I had with tiger initially. All of my apps work and I have yet to see a crash on any of my machines. Stuff that I use is not noticeably broken. My keyboard works fine on my macbook pro. My Mac pro wasn’t disabled by leopard (that just sounds stupid) and my lowly ibook g4 is running leopard like a champ.
Went to the Apple store and bought it, and did a straightforward “Upgrade” installation on my MacBook and my wife’s iBook G4; colleagues at work also installed it on their MacBooks, Intel Minis and MacBook Pros a few days later.
None of us have had any problems of any real note. A couple of niggles—the Finder data loss bug (Note to earlier commenter, this had nothing to do with the “mv” command, it was entirely a Finder bug—discover what the “option” key does in Mac OS), and some networking oddities.
I’m happy with it. A far more stable release than I remember 10.4.0 being, certainly.
Leopard is great and couldn’t have come soon enough imho. All the bugs mentioned were quite obscure and have already been fixed a long time ago. Has the author been affected by any of these bugs, such as the loss of data bug (that only occurs while moving your files WHILE unplugging your drive WHILE using the Terminal command line WHILE using a dated version of Leopard)? No? I thought so.
Anyways, I sympathize with those who have had REAL problems and I’m sorry you don’t like Leopard; Boooo for Apple. To all the others: please disappear and stop writing these annoying rants and go use Vista or twm or whatever OS you love so much. Sheesh!
… I haven’t had any issues upgrading to Leopard and I’ve done a combination of clean installations as well as upgrades from Tiger. Haven’t run into a single glitch.
FTA:
In Leopard, when Finder moves a file from one drive to another, it deletes the file from the originating hard drive, without first checking to see if the file arrived safely on the destination hard drive. If anything goes wrong during the file transfer, such as a momentary power glitch on the destination hard drive, the file would then be destroyed on both hard drives.
Me:
He doesn’t mention that this is not the default activity. Dragging a file from one drive to another will not trigger this bug, because when you do that it COPIES the file. You have to hold down a specific button while dragging to do a move, and why anyone would even try this between two drives is beyond me. I agree this should be fixed, but I think not taking the extra 2 or 3 seconds to do a copy then manual delete, which is default behaviour in OS X, is asking for problems. Oh, and this problem has been around since PANTHER, so how he doesn’t knock Tiger for this is beyond me.
FTA:
In an unrelated issue, data recovery firm Retrodata has found a disturbing hard drive failure rate in some Apple Macbooks. Quoting from the Retrodata Web site: “We at Retrodata believe that any sizeable manufacturer would by this stage be aware of such a problem and issue a product recall notice, or an offer to have the drive exchanged for a suitable alternative at their own expense.” If you own an Apple Macbook with a Seagate hard drive, I strongly suggest you check out the details available at Retrodata.
Me:
When he says “unrelated issue”, what immediately comes to mind is “another Leopard bug unrelated to the Finder issue”. Instead, you get a problem which is hardware related, is limited to a specific model (macbook), and will occur under Windows, Tiger, Leopard or any other OS you get running on it. Could someone explain why this paragraph is even in the article? Filler perhaps?
FTA:
Thanks to Leopard, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death is now a part of the Mac operating system. When I first tell this to Mac users that haven’t yet upgraded to Leopard, I usually hear something like “Yeah, I get Blue Screens of Death when I use Windows on my Mac”. No, that’s not quite what I mean – Blue Screens of Death are occurring not only in Windows, but in Leopard as well.
Me:
This is related to a specific piece of software, APE, which makes several low level changes to OS X itself. About the only company that should be faulted here is Logitech, which installed APE on peoples’ systems without telling them. Anyone else installing something like APE should know better. In-fact, Apple even talked about disabling APE in Leopard by disallowing the use of Application Enhancers, which inject code into running processes. The uproar from Mac Users put an end to that.
Sure, Leopard is buggy, but when you run out and buy a piece of software right when it is released, that’s what you get. Same happened with Vista and I still remember the horrors of upgrading many Linux distros. I did a fresh install of Leopard as I am adverse to upgrading an OS from any vendor, and have had 0 problems with it other than Logmein not working, and I can hardly fault Apple because a single program I use doesn’t work on their month-old operating system.
Wait, are you actually shifting blame to the user for daring to execute the “move” function that OSX does indeed provide? Saying that the user should instead do a copy-then-delete flies in the face of “It just works”. If I move a file from one volume to another, I expect it to work, and if something goes wrong, I expect the original file to be left intact. And if this has indeed been a known issue since Panther, which was released 4 years ago, then why hasn’t Apple fixed it? This is fundamental functionality we’re talking about here.
You know what? Read an article about the file-move bug, but replace the words Apple/Leopard with Microsoft/Vista, and see if you still feel compelled to shift (at least some of) the blame to the user. I thihk we all know that if Vista exhibited a data-loss bug like that, Microsoft would be ripped to pieces all over the internet.
BTW, I’ve read that TimeMachine is also buggy. I read it in one of the posts regarding the file-move bug, where the user tried to use TimeMachine to get back the lost file, only to find that backups TimeMachine created were corrupt. And there are other reports of TimeMachine being broken as well. Yes, these are a small minority, but they’re there nonetheless.
The real problem is that Apple did not do a wide-spread public beta before they released this thing to the masses. Perhpas they believed their own press clippings, that they are uber-programmers that don’t need to deal with such mundane things as public betas. But Apple needs to get a clue. Their userbase share in the US has risen from ~4 to ~6 percent in the last two years, many of the new users having been converted by Apple’s, “It Just Works” (and “Windows is junk”) ad campaign. These new users don’t worship Jobs like the long time Mac users do, and will be less tolerant of screw-ups. Apple may find it has a bunch of disillusioned users on its hands if those new users find that Macs are no better than Windows, just “different”.
No I’m not. The author was saying that this was a reason to not upgrade, which isn’t true because the bug is present in tiger. And I don’t blame microsoft for Vista’s upgrade woes, I blame them for poor design and making the system harder than xp, even when it is working properly!
First of all no one in their right mind would move a file to an external drive, almost every operating system I know (yes Vista too) would have a problem with moving a file to an external source if the source fails. In the least you would get data corruption. Why do you think that copying is the default functionality for almost every user oriented OS out there. You think its coincidence? Its there to protect the user from himself, and if Windows is any indication the user needs to be saved from himself constantly.
Yes there would be an uproar and “I told you so” spread around if this were an issue with Vista. OSX may have even had the bug since panther, but Apple didn’t have enough users to complain about it then, it wasn’t an issue because frankly you shouldn’t be moving files that way anyway. That is not to say that Apple shouldn’t have fixed this a long time ago.
I agree with you that apple should have done some serious beta testing, where most of these issue could be addressed before release. The thing is that any OSX .x.0 release is the public beta. With every OSX release the first release is always the buggiest with the most problems, and apple addresses the issues with patches and revisions. Anyone who is having issues with Leopard at this point and complaining about bugs, have only themselves to blame, this is an established course of action for apple since the very first OSX release and I don’t really see it changing anytime soon.
I’m a Linux user for the most part (I do have an MBP, and no it doesn’t have Linux installed on it, only Leopard) so the bugginess isn’t an issue for me, its just something that I have to report and hope they fix at some point, but I think this article and all those neo-converts need to chill. These issues will be resolved eventually and as users they should have waited or done more research before they bought into the hype. Any business that upgraded, its your own fault for also buying into the hype. Where I work the only ones who’ve upgraded to Leopard were developers and myself (since I have to support it) We haven’t even rolled out vista to any of our users even when we purchase new machines for these users. We remove Vista and put in the tried and true XP. We have computer savvy users testing Vista for us and telling them to let us know if there are any issues. Any company who didn’t follow this procedure, lost big time and deserve all the headaches they get. Anything as important as an OS should not be rolled out, instead they should be test on non-production machines to make sure that everything works as it should. You can’t really blame Apple for this as I have yet to see ANY OS that doesn’t have its issues at release. Vista most definitely included, but I’d be wrong to say that Vista doesn’t work fairly well now that most of the issue (at lest in terms of our needs) have been resolved.
As a side note. I upgraded (yes upgraded) my MBP. It went off without any issues whatsoever. I haven’t had a crash, I haven’t had any issues whatsoever and I run fairly intensive applications (music apps: Logic, Komplete and a few other VSTs, and AUs). The only issues and I’m not even sure if its an issue is that the UI seems fairly sluggish to me compared to Tiger (I have the latest MBP so that might be an issue with the crappy video card included). Leopard on an Mac Mini ran smoother for some reason, again I think its the nvidia card included in the MBPs. Before I upgraded I backed up all my information, I made sure I had the install cd’s for every app I needed. Since the MBP was fairly new I didn’t have to worry too much about incompatible apps or anything like that since I don’t really install many apps other than music applications (and handbrake :p). I had no issues with the upgrade at all, There was no crash, no bluescreen. no freezes, nothing. The machine booted into what I initially thought of as the ugliest OSX I’ve ever seen (I got used to it now and don’t think its all that bad) and every app worked fine. I went to each apps respective site to make sure there weren’t any updates I had to do for Leopard. Its been working well ever since.
Sorry but you’re wrong. Every recent OS will check if the file actually arrived before deleting the source file. So if you unplug the drive while moving the original file will still be there because it is not deleted. In fact if you had bothered to read up on the problem, you might have found out that commandline mv provided with OS X does not have this problem. As to all the people defending apple by saying this bug was already present in 10.3, wtf a serious bug like this not being fixed over 3 major versions!! That fact alone should prevent users to trust apple with important data.
Ye, we neo-converts do need to chill, and reflect. I am glad I started with an old G4 culled from a defunct design workshop for relative peanuts, since I am not massively ‘out of pocket’ now my views of Apple, its operations, attitudes, and operating system above all, etc, are less rosy through experience.
I have had fun upgrading it, I admire the hardware – what I have is an eight-year old workhorse that can still (with a bit of help) run a modern OS and which does not look like it’s going to fall over soon on the level of the kit itself.
Yes, we should not get emotionally attached but we do – almost everything in life is an attachment (not wanting attachments is also an attachment, at least that’s what the Buddhists finally twigged) and we do things for any number of reasons apart from rational ones that maximise our benefit with ease 100% of the time. We invest time, money and effort, which if they didn’t result in our wanting things to be a certain way, or have a certain flavour, style or substance would make us robots.
I have noticed that with the last few updates, things have been going wrong – the dock is playing up massively, windows jump around – the sort of daft inexplicable thing I left Windows for. Yes, every OS has its quirks: some of the problems we are happy to ignore, others we see as providing the opportunity to be a fixer, etc. But behind all this as another poster put it is just another big billion Dollar company that can look after itself, and only wants to make money.
So, my last upgrade for this machine is a graphics card that will allow me to have some eye-candy at least under PPC Linux, and maybe one day I’ll have the ability to be part of something constructive for the common good that isn’t just an element of big wheels grinding (and yes, I am pretty emotionally attached to my idealism).
End of confessional..:-)
Leopard may or may not be having problems… some growing pains are to be expected with any new OS (thought data loss is pretty much the highest priority must-fix bug in my world).
What disgusts me about this whole episode, though, is the fact that Apple support forum moderators lock, delete, and otherwise disable the dissemenation of information about their products that isn’t positive. I’ve seen this behavior for a while with regards to hardware problems on their laptops, where they ask techs to “under no circumstances” tell people they have hardware that’s under recall unless that person comes in with the specific problems. Apple seems to have utter contempt for their customers along with their developers.
With statements like this:
[With regard to data loss, it states that “… a potential data loss issue when moving files across partitions …” has been fixed, but moving files across hard drives is not addressed.]
… It’s clear the author shouldn’t be writing about operating systems.
I only had very minor issues on one of the three Macs I upgraded (had to unplug a firewire drive from my iMac).
I only know of a friend of a friend who had a major issue (he was an APE user).
I think this article is blowing things out of proportion with the author’s inability to stay on point.
Yes, there are a bunch of issues like bad Seagate drives, and freezing iMacs, but what do they have to do with Leopard? Was the author too lazy to start up a new article to bitch about hardware and driver issues?
IIRC the Seagate issue was raised before Leopard was released; Seagate have actually released a list of hard disks affected by the fault. The exact fault is that the heads of the drive fall off.
IIRC, I think those who are affected are those who bought their computers towards the end of last year, beginning of this. I bought mine just recently and it appears that the model in my one isn’t affected.
Leopard at 10.5.0 is more stable than Tiger was at 10.4.0. The data loss bug has been there since 10.3.0.
The two serious problems are that the enhanced firewall is full of holes and stealth mode still allows responses. Shields up! reports 3. The other serious problem is third party application compatibility. Probably 70 % of my third party software is somewhat broken to can’t be used at all.
Still, it’s better than what people are seeing with Vista and Apple can fix what’s wrong since they are implementation problems and not design problems.
And how much of that third party software using undocumented system hacks? all very well giving a number, but useless until you actually point out the exact software you’re having issues with.
You tech folk can dissect this to death, it may make no difference where it will really matter – image.
it’s not so long ago that Apple was shamefacing PC users, encouraging computing Neanderthals to move to a new platform, a new *superior* platform. This was and is Apple’s ante that has been constantly upped.
People are now finding and perceiving that the whiz also comes with some unfortunate bangs. Let’s look at this logically from the mac supporter perspective – that Apple or OS X is superior in at least intent compared to rivals appears to be a sine qua non of that experience. That Mac supporters are now so rapidly falling back to the line that, hell, all OSes have their quirks, instantly undermines the tacit and explicit statements of superiority Apple has been making regarding the platform.
Now, Macuser, is Apple touting an OS with a difference in degree or kind? When having it both ways has been given up, I believe then we’ll be able to have a more rounded debate as to Apple’s and OS X’s value.
From one mightily disillusioned switcher.
Someone else commented about weird bugs related to spaces… I’ve had similar issues, sometimes clicking a running program in the dock won’t switch workspace and a few other bugs and quirks.. Like X11 windows and subwindows, and some dialog boxes not liking being moved between workspaces.
That said, it’s better than the other virtual workspace managers for osx, and better than any i saw on windows, but not as good as most of the virtual workspace implementations in X11.. I can only imagine it’s because most OSX programs aren’t written with virtual workspaces in mind. Now that it’s a standard feature (as it has been on X11 for years) i imagine more thought will go into apps.
Other than that leopard has been pretty solid for me on 3 machines (including a 450mhz g4 on which i had to modify the leopard installer)
Under the hood there have been HUGE changes in Leopard. From a developers point of view Apple has, for the most part, done a fantastic job with Leopard. There are so many things that have been improved I don’t even know where to start (Although this article is a good one…http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/1)
Some things I love…ssh-agent automatically starts when needed, X11 automatically starts when needed, updates to Java (such as 64bit support, replacement of quartz renderer with Sun’s renderer). DTrace!! Objective-C 2.0!! Core Animation!!
Leopard hasn’t even been out a month and Apple has been on top of bug fixes. We’ve yet to see Vista SP1.
Now if Apple would only talk to us about Java 6…
Calling it a BSOD or not really depends on what you define BSOD as.
A BSOD on windows is usually a hard stop displaying an error message
The issue on Mac merely appears to be the os failing to load the login window. The desktop is still active and the cursor is there. This is not an error message.
I can see both sides of the argument.
No, the equivalent of a BSOD in OS X is a kernel panic.
Sheesh. Get your facts straight, people.
Thank you, yes people read up what a BSOD is
here’s a start
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSOD
Check out the Windows Internals book for more information
10.5.1 is out to fix some things. I will probably jump at 10.5.3 or so.
I think the author be a Microsoft moll desperatel to find something wrong with Leopard.
Of course it isn’t perfect. But have you ever dealt with Windows XP or Vista? You don’t have to grasp at straws to find things wrong with those.
The only problem I had with Leopard was the fault of Logitech use APE (application enhancer) which was not Apple’s fault since Apple had told companies not to write software the way that APE creators did. It was just unfortunate that Logitech used their software for their drivers.
The issue was fixed fast looking at the Apple Discussion boards. Someone had found an answer for it before it was even for sale in Apple stores.
Note: People like me that ordered it from Apple got it around noon or earlier (11:15ish). Even with Logitech’s messup in previous years I was still up and running before noon and had the FireWall turned on to boot (not a pun).
My job is supporting computers for my bosses. We have multiple help desks due to having over 10,000 people that have at least one computer.
Apple computers, percentage wise based on the number of people divided by the numbers of calls per person, have far fewer problems than Windows computers. Which is why our bosses don’t like them. Less problems means less support is needed, which means they need less people working for them, which means they would make less money if we switched to Apple computers. Which is why they never will. My guess is they will be replaced for our Windows computers are.
There’s always rampant solipsism when a thread about possible problems in OSX surfaces. “It works for me, there must be no problem!”
Well, I did have a problem. Unlike some people, I know that my experiences don’t reflect on everyone, but I know for a fact that at least some people have problems, since I am one of those that do.
Out of the blue, any time I created a new folder (in my home folder of course) the owner of the folder was set to System. I then had no write permission in this folder I just created in my own home folder. It worked fine with mkdir on the terminal, but right-click->new folder in Finder was broken.
Someone else with the same issue: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5743589
Probably the same issue: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1247475
possibly the same issue: http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=leopard&Numbe…
The fix has been to reinstall the OS, and it was for me. By any stretch, this is not problem free. Luckily it doesn’t seem to be widespread. But it’s there.
Also personally, there was a minor problem with java and qtjambi with Leopard: http://lists.trolltech.com/qt-jambi-interest/2007-11/thread00011-0….
I’m well aware the fallout of a bug in a beta toolkit would be very limited, and one can easily argue it isn’t Apple’s fault. It’s jsut there as an example of a problem I personally had for a while (app I was developing wouldn’t run until Trolltech worked around it).
Other than that, it’s been peachy
I really am quite satisfied. I am pretty new to OSX, and got into it around 10.4.8 when Tiger was already quite far along. As such, I have no way of judging 10.5.0 against 10.4.0 so I have no idea how it compares.
If the one major issue I’d had hadn’t required a reinstall I’d be a lot happier, but it still seems pretty good. I’m mostly just writing this to say yes, there is a problem or two. I don’t mean it as a slam at all, I just don’t want to pretend it’s perfect.
This article is fud. Move along.
Leopard has been working just fine for me since I installed it – 3 days after the release.
Yeah, and because it works for you, it automagically works for everyone else. Riiiight…
It would be nice that the editors pointed out the mistakes in the linked articles when posting them.
This is article is clearly flawed in many parts and you can’t expect every reader to know this. By linking the article and not mentioning anything you’re becoming just as bad as the author, if not worse.
With the whining from that article, here comes with PRAISES Leopard as ’10 out of 10′:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20071126/tc_infoworld/93614
Who does one believe? the paranoid writer who thinks that Apple hasn’t fixed anything or the praising reviewer from yahoo?
Rockwell; Microsoft CHOSE to setup the market in that way. Before Microsoft all companies were like Apple, vertically integrated and well organised. Then again, you’re a youngster and probably never used something other than a Windows PC.
//Before Microsoft all companies were like Apple, vertically integrated and well organised. Then again, you’re a youngster and probably never used something other than a Windows PC//
Really? Companies like Commodore and Zenith? Well organized into bankruptcy, right?
Learn your history, “youngster.” (my first PC was a C-64, fyi.)
Apple’s hype is a double-edged sword. This is a risk they made for themselves.
The “alleged” problem of Leopard is in my mind minor in comparison to the censoring behavior of Apple towards any public posting of criticism.
I agree they can do whatever they want on their own forums but I find it disturbing of a company so hell bent on claiming happy customers to have such a totalitarian behavior when it comes to customer support.
I agree Apple is doing nice products but censoring criticism is not a nice way to win me over.
(Note: The below is not an Apple-only rant; it applies equally well to the ardent defenders of Windows or whatever other proprietary operating system you want to substitute.)
My question for the die-hard fans, the ones who can be relied upon to take the time and energy to rebut every article somewhat critical of Apple’s products with a carefully documented point-by-point list: WHY?
Why do you do it? Why do you care? They’re multi-billion-dollar big boys. They can defend themselves without your help. They aren’t paying you. You aren’t part of Apple. They don’t know you exist, and they don’t care. You are nothing to Apple other than a source of money, and that is all you ever will be to them.
They are not benevolent gods trying to usher in a bright new era of computing. They are not a social movement. They are not a philosophy. They are a company trying to release products appealing enough to convince you to trade money for them, and that is all they are. If you derive value from their products, by all means, buy them and enjoy them — but for crying out loud, save the emotional attachment for actual living beings that know you exist and are capable of caring back.
“Leap ignorantly to the defense of wealthy game companies who don’t know or care about you.” – Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation reviews
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctu…
Replace “game” with “tech company” and it describes well a lot of posts one sees on any topic related to Apple or Microsoft or nVidia or ATI or whoever. I don’t really understand it either.
“Nobody has a monopoly on quality — or lack of quality.”
Vista isn’t quite the Longhorn it started out and was promised to be.
when OSX was released?
“”This is something I never thought I’d hear myself say – or maybe I should say, see myself type – about an Apple operating system: Mac OSX Leopard was released before it was ready….”
clear case of selective memory
Yes my friends, no need to mod me down… rather use your search engine if you have forgotten or weren’t born yet back in the day…
More Leopard complaints, even going so far as to compare Leopard’s bugginess with Vista’s! (The horror!!) :p
Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2223921,00.asp
But the fact is, no software as complex as a modern OS is “perfect”, and none is even significantly less buggy than any other, IMO (crap drivers notwithstanding). I still don’t trust either Vista or Leopard enough to upgrade to them. In fact, I don’t plan to upgrade to either until I get a new Mac (which may be soon, since I don’t think Apple will support PPC Macs for much longer) and Windows computer.
Edited 2007-11-30 05:30