Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-15 of 105
 Should not be sold till it's ready November 3, 2007
Jack H Bloom PhD (Fairfield CT)
4 out of 25 found this review helpful
The Leopard "improvement" should not have been sold or recommended by Amazon untill the interface with AOL was fixed. One cannot attach documents and if one is responding to an Aol Tech Support Email, the program crashes. Apple should have done better than to put this on the market with what is for many of us some woeful glitches.
 Not perfect, but close November 24, 2007
Walter T. Pollard (South Orange, NJ)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
First, let me list the reasons I'm happy with my Leopard upgrade:
1. Spotlight is finally fast enough that it's usable a program launcher; it's a huge improvement. It's still not as usable and powerful as QuickSilver, but for 90% of what I need, it's now good enough that I've turned QS off.
2. TimeMachine is as fast and convenient a backup system as I have ever seen on a personal computer. We have a system like this on our expensive network-attached storage system at work, but Apple has actually has made this accessible to anyone who knows how to plug in an external disk drive.
3. I use my aging 12" Powerbook fairly heavily, and with all the applications I typically have going at once (Safari, NetNewsWire, iCal, Mail, Pages, iTerm, ...) I was used to seeing the spinning beachball under 10.4, especially when using Safari and Mail. With Leopard, even if these applications themselves aren't faster, I only rarely see the beachball anymore, and as a result they're significantly more responsive.
4. Screen sharing between my laptop and our family iMac was possible before, but it's simple and seemless in Leopard. Before, it was something I'd set up every now and again when it was especially useful - now it's always available.
There are only a couple of things I actively dislike about Leopard.
1. The colors in the new user interface are darker less colorful, and this often makes things harder to read. The labels of tabs in Safari are particularly hard to read now.
2. The new Dock (when you put it on the side of the screen) is also darker and less attractive than the old Dock, and the little glowing dots are less easy to see than the triangles the old Dock had.
3. It's more awkward to edit event information in iCal, because the side panel, where that information was previously displayed, was replaced by a popup window, that needs to be dismissed and reopened when you move from one event to the next.
There's more to say, but these are the things that most affect my day-to-day use of my Powerbook. All-in-all, it was a great upgrade for me.
 Update-Mixed Blessings (if you currenty use Adobe PS/CS3) February 10, 2008
A. Abrams (Vermont)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A happy ending to a rocky start - At long last and sooner then I had ever expected, on 2-11-2008, Apple released the 10.5.2 update for Leopard. I eagerly downloaded and installed it and was delighted to find that the CS3 issues are resolved and in fact, it seems CS3 PS and Bridge as well as other apps I am using on Leopard seem to load much faster. Some of the other quirks other users have reported like the Mac Mail app hanging or not shutting down (and that I also experienced), now appear to be fixed as well. Finally the stability that I always had in Tiger now seems consistent as well in Leopard. At this time, I'm definitely going to keep my Leopard software rather then return it.
10.5.2 Info and installation details of the update are here at this Apple link:
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We've purchased our 3 Macs (Mac Pro, Mac Mini and MacBook) from Amazon and all had Tiger OS X installed. Tiger has been bug free on all of these system s with few updates or fixes ever being needed to be downloaded. I use Photoshop CS3/Mac on my Mac Pro. We just recently decided to give Leopard a go and purchased the 5 system family pack. I chose to use my Mac Pro as the first system for upgrade. Well, unfortunately and only after installing Leopard did I realize there exists some major issues using PS CS3 within the Leopard OS. There is a known issue with most all of the tools in CS3 when using Leopard and a lot of instability when entering numerical values for crop as well as many other CS3 tools. After seeing this and doing some web research, it seems that Adobe and Apple are working on a fix ASAP which will be in the next upcoming update for Leopard (referred to as 10.5.2). In fact I know only too late that Apple plans over 150 "fixes" to the existing bugs in its latest OS with the Photoshop CS3 being only one of them. My rating is less about the new features in Leopard and more due to having taken the plunge into what I thought would be a safe and stable new OS for the MAC only to find that the most often used piece of software I use almost daily, limps badly in the new OS. Shame Apple for releasing Leopard either too soon and perhaps without having fully tested it on some of the most often used software on the Mac, and CS2/CS3 on a Mac should have been a super high priority. We'll be returning our DVD of Leopard to Amazon and for the meantime, staying with good ol' stable Tiger until we see what owners are saying about the "fixed" issues, later this year. This is certainly no fault of Amazon's, but, buyers need to be aware of this issue, especially those who depend on using Adobe and other SW products on their Mac! By the way, all of our Macs were purchased from Amazon since they beat the best price out there and using our Amazon PRIME account, we got our systems either in 2 days with FREE shipping or in one case, overnight for just $3.99. If you routinely shop at Amazon and want free 2 day shipping from Amazon, Go PRIME! They have never failed us yet on an order and we do a lot of shopping there. Well done Amazon!
Aesthetic improvements + Generally faster November 24, 2007
Daniel Keller (Takoma Park, MD)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I really like Leopard's new look, with the iTunes-style windows, 3D dock, improved Spotlight, etc. Also, Quick Look is an amazingly useful feature that enables me to view documents without having to open their respective programs.
There are also a number of setting tweaks that I really appreciate, such as the ability to share specific folders. This allows me to share certain files without having to dump them into my public folder, or provided access to my entire computer,
Overall, what sold me on the OS was the fact that, despite these graphical improvements, the system itself is faster. Because its so speedy, I now use spotlight as both a file finder and an application launcher. Navigating file folders is quick, and everything from changing preferences to opening programs seems more responsive. This is no revolutionary OS like Vista, but unlike Vista, it is a solid system that improves upon the previous edition without sacrificing speed or security. I would definitely recommend it to all Mac users.
Good OS/application/feature set December 7, 2007
D. Sklar (USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I upgraded two machines from 10.4 to 10.5 (Leopard), and bottomline, I am pleased. If you already have 10.4, its ok to wait a while since 10.4 is good and quite solid, but I took the plunge and have enjoyed the nice enhancements.
Most people say do a backup and then a fresh install. That is probably the best approach, but I was innocently hopeful, and went ahead with an upgrade on both machines without backing them up. One machine (MacBook with Intel) upgraded with zero problems, and I have not had any problems with it. Very pleased. By the way, immediately after the install, there was a system update (10.5.1) that I immediately did which addressed some known some bugs. The second machine (iMac with PowerPC) installed but froze on the reboot. Thank goodness I had a second Mac to look up the problem/solution and a Firewire cable to hook up the two, remove the application enhancer file remotely, and reboot. That fixed it, and I have had only one problem in the last three weeks (a freeze).
It's the little things that make Leopard a joy. I don't mind the reflective dock, and it nicely shows what is running. The Finder windows are improved with the sidebar. Quick Look is excellent and quite productive. The Spotlight search is excellent. iChat with the screen sharing is FANTASTIC -- it paid for itself in one use, it is so easy to use, two of us edited a document together and I gave a tutorial remotely on how to use pivot tables in Excel. I've always enjoyed the Dictionary, and it is improved with Wikipedia results. It is all these little things here and there that make it an excellent OS/application/feature set...whatever it is.
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![Apple Mac OS X Version 10.5.4 Leopard [5-User Family Pack]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51JcgilFn0L._SL500_.jpg)
