Well, yours-truly got a new MacBook Pro yesterday, my first new personal laptop in 4 years. I spent 48 hours with Leopard and on the balance I like it a lot. Brief comments on experience to date:
The not so good:
- The install was problematic - something dodgy about the filesystem on my old mac prevented my account from migrating. I wound up grabbing my cut-down account from my work slab and will populate it with personal files manually. I've seen a lot worse experiences in the past and on other OSes ... but still this isn't what you expect of apple.
- Time Machine (simulates a VersionedFileSystem, though it is more of an incremental backup system) gave me errors at first because it didn't like my choice of computer name. Apparently it doesn't like spaces or punctuation characters - but CamelCase is okay.
- "Spaces" just plain sucks. Induced so many GUI pathologies I turned it off. I don't feel any need for it given Exposé so to hell with it.
- Tinkertool can no longer plonk the dock up on the top of the screen hanging under the menu bar. Yeah, most people don't do that because you have to know you can ... but still it was really nice and now it's gone.
- Intermittent trackpad freezes for just a fraction of a second. I fixed this by unchecking the "ignore" boxes in trackpad preferences. Not certain which box does the trick ... seems to be okay to ignore accidental input ...
The rather nice:
- This GUI is shiny! I actually like the transparent menu bar - pick a light background however.
- Time Machine is actually kinda useful. Not as useful as WaybackMode? but, heck, they never asked me ...
- The new quicklook/coverflow finder is genuinely extremely cool. Visualizing files by their contents rather than just an icon is amazing.
- Mail.app is vastly improved. It snaps, the old annoyances are gone, and it looks right now too. Not certain why apple thinks "stationery" is something to advertise, but never mind that.
The extremely spiffy:
- The integration with the hardware. No offence to all the apple programmers that made the pretty functional improvements, but what I like most is that this OS sticks to its bones. Fast, consistent, and lovely on the MBP.
More later --
PeterMerel
Osx Leopard