Peer Review: Leopard?s secret flaws revealed!
Have you heard? Mac's newest OS, Leopard, hit stores on Friday. It's the biggest product launch since Apple's last product launch, and so far Leopard has garnered the same swooning reviews the press so frequently gives Apple products. Putting together a decent round-up of opinions about a system upgrade that has as many features as Leopard (300) is nearly as difficult as rounding up all the absurd cat and spot wordplay from the reviews' headlines (Leopard is an upgrade that roars is a typical example).
But universal approbation is so boring. We know that the system comes with Time Machine (a.k.a the best automated back up system ever), a new, improved (pre-installed!) Bootcamp, a prettier Finder, better parental controls, blah, blah, blah. Call us grumpy, but we've mined the reviews for any criticisms we could find of the system, and put them all in one place. Check them out after the jump.
.Mac remote has firewall glitches
"I was able to use [Back to My Mac] at times but also ran into snags trying to remotely connect from a computer in a hotel and from USA TODAY offices in Virginia to a Mac in New Jersey." , USA Today
See through menus make no sense
"The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new see-through menus. When the menu commands— Save As, Page Preview, whatever ? are superimposed on the text of whatever document is behind them, they?re much harder to read", The New York Times
Time Machine is a Mac (and Leopard) snob
"While Time Machine can perform backups over a network, the backup destination can only be a hard disk connected to a Mac running Leopard." , The Wall Street Journal
We like Spaces, just one tiny caveat
"[Spaces] can get a bit confusing at times", The Times (UK)
Time Machine can get testy when you first use it
"If Time Machine hasn?t made a backup yet to visit, clicking the Time Machine button completely borks OSX?least it did for me. I took me a number of restarts and some serious banging of the keyboard (no CTRL+ALT+DELETE on a Mac) to fix it.", at That porn you tried to erase? Time Machine keeps it forever
"Time Machine has a serious problem: there is no way (that I can find) to remove a file from a Time Machine backup. This is a pretty glaring omission... people who are thriftier than I would probably do better to hold off on [purchasing] this update." , Technology Review
Stacks: not so useful
"The Dock's new Stacks feature is a mess, replacing a utilitarian approach to stashing folders in the Dock (click to open the folder, click and hold to see a list of the folder's contents) with a snazzy but generally less useful pop-up window" , PC World
Plus, this statement isn't critical, but we think it's a major Leopard flaw
"If you're still running Mac "Classic" OS apps, forget it. Leopard drops support for what was once Mac OS 9." , Computer World
Just so you don't get the wrong idea: though we've printed criticisms here (albeit minor ones), the reviews from which we quoted were all positive. We had to mine each glowing article to find them. And according to some sources, the system is completely flawless. Take this review from The Dallas Morning News, for example.
What do you think? Have you already spent the $129, or are you waiting for 10.5.1?
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