Leopard is here! Oh dear.

Clearly, I never fall for the media hype.  Yet got up at an almost unusual hour, to go give my money to Mr Jobbs and purchase Leopard, the latest 

release of the MacOS X Operating System from Apple.  I came to Apple late in life, Tiger being my first long lived encounter with the Apple World - a moment of clarity, as years of the frustration, wasted time and just huge amounts of effort were dispensed with by a truly wonderful user experience that MacOS X delivers.  I’d pretty much abandoned the Microsoft world many years ago, at least for home use (us Corporate Lackets don’t get too choose our tool of frustration), and whilst Linux is superb, it used to be at least, a lot of work to get as you like, and to maintain as needed.  

MacOS however, really showed you can build an experience where productivity is the focus, and frustration is kept to a minimum.  Since first buying an iMac in 2005, I’ve since invested in a Macbook, and have found the whole Apple Fanboy legend, pretty much spot on - usability is high, look is pretty, bugs are few and far between, stability is rock solid, hardware is georgeous (and correspondingly expensive). So, Leopard was my first “upgrade”, if you don’t count iLife 08, in which I handed over some cash recently, primarily for the latest version of GarageBand.   

As I understand it, 10.5 of Mac OS X is meant to be an evolution, not a revolution, and is meant to enhance, improve and offer a few new innovations into Home Computing.  All well and good, if you could actually get it installed.  Ok, now, I’m pretty au faix with computing in general, i tend to push my Computing pretty hard, I tend to fiddle with stuff I shouldn’t, and if I maintain a single OS installation for over a year, it’s going to have a lot gumf installed, a lot of third party weirdness, and potentially have some odd settings.   And generally, I’m pretty aware that any “upgrade” of an OS is a sub-par approach to system management - few OS’s support it well, Windows certainly ends up half-crippled and with a rapidly shrunk half-life is you take that approach, and the only version of Linux that ever seemed to do it well for me was Gentoo, which was primarily because you had to know what you were doing and invest a lot of time in maintaining the thing. With an Apple, and the level of integration between the Mac hardware and the Mac OS, I’ve never actually done a clean install of the machine, and I guess I’ve got so comfortable with the way the machine works, the way the OS doesn’t degrade over time ever (ala the Redmond upgrade machine), that it’s been installed for a few years, it’s got a lot of documents, music, files and assorted data that the prospect of an upgrade in place seemed appealing. 

So, after handing over my 80 quid, i put the install disk in and immediately hit a rather worrying problem.   The install screen offers me a choice of target disks to install Leopard on - that is empty - apparently I have no hard drives available.   Interesting.  A reboot or two later, and I’m still offered nothing.   Not a very encourage start, and to be honest, at this point I should have stopped, and perhaps place a call to support.  Instead, I of course tinkered.  And by loading up Disk Utility, and pretty verify lots, get info, exiting and restarting, lo and behold, finally my hard drive appeared and said it was a-ok.So we start an installation, which worrying told me it was going take over 4 hours (after taking 10 minutes to work that out).  So, 50 minutes later - it was complete, and I excitedly agreed to reboot the machine into Leopard.8 hours later,  my iMac was sat with a blue screen and a black cursor - and refused to do anything else - repeated reboots revealed nothing, and all I could gather from searching the Apple Support Forums, was that a good majority of (l)users out there were suffering the same problem as I and not making a lot of progress.  There were a few hints and tips surfacing around deleting certain application components via the command line in single user mode, which I tried, to no avail.   

After wasting much of the day, I eventually discovered the now becoming oft-repeated advise of doing an “archive and install”, a re-installation that meant losing all my previous settings and configurations, and placing my old data in a holding pattern for me to retrieve manually. Two hours later, and hooray, Leopard was installed and running.   

But wow, what a let down - such a huge, and clearly massively impacting bug really should have been discovered by Apple in the testing surely - particuarly given how late Leopard is and how much hype there’s been around it.   It’s hugely damaged my respect for Apple, and the worse of it is, in the deepest darkest moments, I felt like a complete Windows user. No Support, no explanations, no indication what was wrong, just a thousand pounds worth of electronics sitting there ignoring me. Well, it’s up and running now, on both my Macbook and iMac and initial impressions are very favourable, if I remind myself that it is only an incrememental revision - there’s nothing that makes you go wow in here, but lots that makes you go “nice”.  More of a review to come later when I’ve lived with it a while - but Apple - you really screwed this one up.  A lot of your street cred will go up in smoke with this one…..