Bugs in leopard

[bucky]

After reading some posts on this Forum and other Mac related Forums it seems there is a lot of dissatisfaction with Apples latest iteration of its operating system Leopard. The amount of bugs reported, complaints and special reports on the MacFixit site alone seems unprecedented.

It would appear that Apple are using early adopters of Leopard as Beta testers on an unfinished product, at a cost to the users of £85, lots of frustration and hard work with little support from Apple and on my part a loss of confidence in Apple and its marketing strategy

Bill Gates must be laughing little apples at Steve Jobs.

It would be interesting to hear other Mac enthusiasts comments !!!

[Jeffus]

Hi Bucky, I'm inclined to agree with you. Thankfully I am never a quick adopter of new software in general and certainly a new OS. I'm still with Tiger and will stick with it until I see sensible postings. I probably frequent the same sites as yourself (I am currently in Central France) so I use MacFormat forums (UK content) a lot and there's a lot of disgruntled Leopard users venting their feelings. I think the 10.5.1 update that came out nearly as soon as the release of Leopard 10.5 speaks volumes. I use TechTool Pro (4.5.3 works fab with Tiger) and with the latest 4.6.1 DVD people are having a lot of problems getting it to work with Leopard. People seem to be aiming the blame at Leopard's doorstep not Micromats. I've already posted today somewhere on this forum supporting Dave and asking him to make sure SuperDuper! for Leopard is 100% (he was going to anyway) but not for him to cave in to pressure and release an unstable beta version.

Jeffus.

[Lyle]

The MacBook that I work on every day is running 10.4.11, but we bought a new iMac desktop for the house on Black Friday and it came with Leopard preinstalled (*).

Got the iMac out of the box, set up, configured, etc. and brought the wife in to show it off to her. She noticed the remote control (which her older iBook doesn't have) and asked what it was for. So I fired up Front Row and handed her the remote control to play with it. She navigated to the "Photos" section, selected an album and clicked "Slideshow".

And that's when the screen went blank and the iMac locked up. I mean, it locked up big time, as in requiring me to power it down. I thought it was a fluke and so I went through the process again -- it's definitely a repeatable bug. A subsequent search of the Apple Support forums indicated that other folks were having similar problems with Front Row under Leopard.

Now, to be fair, other than that I haven't run into too many problems with Leopard. But my wife is now afraid to touch the remote control for fear that she will "break the computer" again.

(*) Well, OK, it wasn't in fact preinstalled, but I felt like that was a good machine to experiment on since we were starting from scratch there.

[timlance]

I did a dirty install, just updated my 10.4.10 to Leopard. I have several other hardware software options so can live dangerously. Other than SD!, other "system type stuff" (Onyx & Applejack especially), and all my haxies not working yet I have had absolutely zero issues.

I'm talking on a 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM. I have 392 app & utilities, not all of which work yet but those that I need work well enough: Dreamweaver, Office, AppleWorks, Notes, all the usual internet stuff, xACT, Play, Max, Cog, and on and on.

I never use Spaces or Stacks or Coverflow. I do love QuickView. The bestest thing about Leopard is not even its overall speed is booting apps. I do believe Apple has finally gotten VirtualMemory figured out.

[midnightsun]

I too have been fortunate in my transition to Leopard. Conducted a simple updated from 10.4.10 with very few and minor problems! I do realize and empathize with those who have experienced horrific transitions into Leopard, regardless of the method used. Looking over this and other forums there are a good number of individuals experiencing problems, but, if I could, I would suggest that a significant majority of individuals that have moved to Leopard are not having serious issues.

A concern that is ever growing for me with regard to SD! are the messages that continually repeat the mantra that most individual are patiently waiting for Dave N and the folks at Shirt Pocket to "get it right" and other encouragement for patience. And, this is a good thing, but let's be careful in not creating unrealistic expectations. What I mean is, everyone here has their own machine which is unique, set up for many personal variations for their specific needs. When SD! is released and is deemed ready for Leopard, it is going to have to work perfectly for everyone, right? This is what I mean about creating unrealistic expectations, I don't believe it is going to work 100% perfectly for everyone. All I would suggest is to keep expectations realistic, please, because we all know what Dave N and his team can expect if something goes wrong. Just check some of the comments in this forum.

I sincerely wish only the best in being successful for Dave N et al.

[Low_Speed]

There are some truth to issues that you all have bought up in this thread. The iMac freezing issue is one but I don't believe that the issue is with Leopard. I bought an iMac 24in the day after they came out with Tiger installed and had the same problem. A firmware update came out almost 3 weeks ago that fixed the problem.

I have 4 four Macs and besides the iMac freeze, I have had very few problems. I do agree that there are some problems with Leopard but not because of some of the issues most people complain about. There were features in Tiger that worked well that seem to have been removed from Leopard for no reason what so ever. And Stacks seem to be half heartedly implemented.

I do believe that Apple for much of the last year or so choose to neglect their core business of Mac computers to spend more time on getting the iPhone out and it shows in Leopard but I do think that the amount of people having problems with leopard have been small.

Also, only reason why Apple should be blamed for 3rd party applications not working in Leopard is because they didn't get the final version of the OS to the developers within a reasonable amount of time. This is the reason why I wait for the update version of Superduper.

[branfordman54]

On a daily basis, I'm amazed at the amount of time I spend with workarounds or trying to get simple things to work in Leopard. Spotlight searches that don't find a file I'm looking right at in the Finder; printer settings that need to be reset every time I print, disk image (.dmg) files that won't delete from trash; parental controls that keep all users from sleeping or shutting down, Software Update downloads that result in error strings in Disk Utility; and many more. What's worse is that now that I have Leopard, the new features seem like mostly eye candy. Tiger was certainly more stable. Aside from Time Machine, which I'm guessing is a huge blessing for people who were never any good at backing up their Macs in the first place, I'm stuck wondering what the big deal was about.

[difficultrun]

I have 4 macs ... three are running Leopard and I've kept one at 10.4.10. I've had virtually no problems with any of the machines running Leopard. As far as I can concerned, it's running well.

[mikebore]

I am a working professional photographer using my computer several hours a day. I upgraded both my computers to Leopard on day one. Although on my main work machine (Mac Pro) I have a Tiger partition I could revert to at any moment, I have much preferred working in Leopard and am thinking of dumping my Tiger standby soon.

[Denis]

I've had Leopard installed since it came out and the only problems I've had were with 3rd party software not being totally compatible. I work on a mac all day and spend time on it in the evening. I've had no problems with the system itself, and it's running much faster than Tiger.

Timemachine saved me once already.

[MMM]

Originally Posted by bucky

After reading some posts on this Forum and other Mac related Forums it seems there is a lot of dissatisfaction with Apples latest iteration of its operating system Leopard.

If you really believe that that then go out and buy a PC with vista on it, and before the day is over you'll be back begging to use OS X again We visit nearly every Mac forum there is, and from what we've seen the problem isn't 10.5 per se, but the programs that run on it. For example, both iTunes and Mail have some serious bugs, but I know that in time Apple WILL address them. What is happening here is not new. Most everyone went through this same song and dance when Tiger first came out too, and look at Tiger now, it's probably the best OS on the planet! I am confident that 10.5 will follow in its footsteps. In fact we're on our way now to pick up a clients vista computer that is riddled with problems, and it is only a few months old. The owner has yet to ever really use it, because they keep getting the famous MS blue screen of death. They returned the first one (which was doing the same thing). They are very close to just returning it and buying a Mac, but I suggested that they wait until we first see what new Macs are coming out next month. Apple is at least putting out updates. MS won't be doing that for vista until July at best, so before you start complaining you might want to look at the big picture. We know plenty of people that are using 10.5 and haven't had ANY problems what-so-ever. You just don't hear from them because only complainers complain. Keep in mind that Apple only puts out but so many 'updates' a year. They have to pace themselves and cover as many issues as they can with as few updates as possible. I'm confident that within the next two or three updates that Apple will address most of the current problems with 10.5. These things cannot, and should not, be rushed. They're not throwing darts at a wall, they're gathering data, diagnosing it, and working out the best way to approach the situation. All new OS's have issues. It comes with the territory. Apple has a good track record of addressing these issues in a timely manner. We've seen nothing that indicates that they'll treat 10.5 any differently...