First Look: Mac OS X Leopard

Leopard has pounced onto Macs everywhere, bringing forth a new set of features and many under the hood improvements. Cupertino’s new OS is more subtle than previous upgrades, relying more on appealing to developers and satisfying users with a visually appealing interface.

Upgrading & Installing Leopard

If you have not yet upgraded to Leopard or have setup your backup solution, please reference my Apple Matters’ Leopard Pre-Upgrade Guide Upgrading to Leopard is a simple process, although it is time consuming. Instead of performing an Archive and Install or even just a simple upgrade, I decided to erase everything and start from scratch.

Leopard’s Installer is identical to every previous incarnation, besides the new theme being reflected once you start upgrading. An hour later, Leopard was installed with everything besides additional fonts and languages, a whole 9 GBs. It isn’t too bad considering Tiger took the same amount of time on the same machine for me.

Is Your Mac the Hunter or the Hunted?

It’s been widely echoed that Leopard would be evolutionary and not revolutionary, which is evident once you upgrade your Mac. But there are still many changes; not all will be noted, but only the most important, the kind that would affect your buying decision of Leopard.

You may have read other reviews of Leopard which cite that it may be better to invest $129 dollars into a new Mac than upgrade your older computer. I am happy to report that Leopard runs flawlessly on my Mac Mini G4. Yes, a 2-year-old computer is more than capable of running Leopard, but there is no doubt it’d be much faster on an Intel Mac, specifically one with a 64 bit processor.

My test machine is a Mac Mini 1.25 GHz G4 stocked with only 512 MBs of RAM, but its graphics card is the Achilles’ heel. The included and devoid of any upgrades ATi Radeon 9200 with only 32 MBs of VRAM does not really hinder performance, but you’ll have to go without some minor visuals. Upon opening Time Machine you received a (Flickr Link) static image of glowing stars and galaxies sans the rear glowing vortex.

It seems Leopard has a built in mechanism that scales down graphics to accomodate slower graphics cards and may offload some of that to the CPU. When under very heavy strain, I found closing windows, launching Time Machine and Front Row, or even resizing the Dock, was somewhat laggy but not enough to bring everything to a standstill.

While you may enjoy the newly overhauled interface, Leopard doesn’t sport many new features that will shock you, not in the way Spotlight did when Tiger launched. But you’ll appreciate Leopard’s swiftness; it’s very fast, faster than Tiger on my Mac Mini.

In addition, Safari 3 is blazing and very stable. I’m a frequent user of Digg.com and dread visiting any story with hundreds of comments in fear of my browser being brought down to its knees for an extended period of time. All that is gone, no lag or hiccups whatsoever.

A Lot of Under the Hood Improvements

In the scheme of things, Leopard is a very pretty upgrade, bringing some useful yet minimal features, but a lot of the major changes have been under the hood improvements. These generally range from making the Operating System faster, even on older Macs, to making developers ecstatic.

Leopard now fully supports 64 Bit processing, which only means good news for Mac users everywhere wanting to upgrade to the new OS. While I can’t say for sure how fast Leopard runs on a Core 2 Duo Mac, it’s still plenty fast on a 32 bit Mac.

Wrap Up

While that wraps up my first look at Leopard and early impressions, my full review will be up Friday and will delve deep into what the new OS means for developers and home users, plus go over many of the major and minor changes.