Just a quick note to folks who have been asking – hold off on installing Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) for now. It’s not ready.
I got a chance to test it today, and encountered the following:
* Kernel Panic
* Mail Crash
* Main Index Corruption
* Keyboard didn’t work after wake from sleep
* random network failures, e.g. curl downloads
* linker bugs (e.g. OpenGL)
* Disk Utility failed to resize a partition
and I really didn’t push it too hard at all, these were just basic install and setup tasks.
There are some very nice things to look forward to:
* USB disk access is dramatically faster
* QuickLook is handy
* Coverflow views are surprisingly (to me) useful
* Much more responsive UI
* Faster SATA disk access
* More modern networking features (VLAN’s, etc)
* Mail support for IDLE, faster IMAP
* largely 10.4-compatible ABI and POSIX
* deferred Software Updates
* “Alex” voice in Text-To-Speech is amazing (but speech recognition still is at 1993 levels)
and more. This looks like it will be a good upgrade once they get the kinks worked out. But for now, if you want to get work done with any stability, stay with Tiger (10.4). I’d guess we’ll have a decent update in January for MacWorld.