Leopard to be released on 26th!!! Just PreOrdered :D

Same just ordered mine today. Sad to see the student discount didn't drop the price a little more. My college doesn't sell that type of software at the shop so I have to be at the mercy of the educational section of Apple.

But I am still quite excited :P

if I wit till after October 26th to buy my macbook pro, will it have leopard preloaded on it, or will Is till have to purchase it?

They killed the educational price...I ain't buying it yet until I can find it cheaper.

I'll have to see if my school's bookstore has it cheaper.

On the flip side it is still cheaper than the educational XP or Vista....

Oh wait there isn't an educational pricing for those...

And a family pack(5 licenses) of OS X costs less than a single of those.

Not sure I am going to upgrade for a good long while though to be honest. All my macs are now running OS X 10.4 and upgrading will likely cause me more problems than it will solve.

Seablade

Very true, and there is only one option to choose from. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure out if I wanted Leopard Ultimate or go for the Ultimate Platinum Gold Plated Awesome version. So I settled on Leopard Home Basic version.

Is it really cheaper?

People only ever really had to buy one copy of XP in the last seven years and if XP is any indication it'll be at least 5 years before the successor to Vista comes out.

Meanwhile, in the last seven years there have been six versions of OS X; five of which you had to pay 129 dollars for.

At least with the educational pricing, the people with the least amount of money got a break. Now it's a measly 13 dollar break...13 dollars barely covers a trip to the movies anymore.

I want to upgrade to 10.5 but not if I can't find it cheaper. I don't have anything that really hinges on 10.4 and everything I do use is mostly going 10.5 exclusive in the next versions.

i fail to see any of the new features as ground-breaking and worth the $130. its kinda like if MS charged you $100 for a service pack release. Quite honestly most of the new features are kinda stupid or already available on a different OS

seems to me they are focusing on:
Dock -- now fancier w/ 3D look and stacks of stuff ... ok, mildly amusing and reduces clutter. Fine.
Cover Flow -- for music in itunes...fine, for every single file in Finder it really gets to be a bit much.
Quick Look -- ugh? mega giant preview thumbnails. KDE has been doing this for years.
Time Machine -- system restore, nothing fancy.
Mail -- more integrated with iCal to actually be useful...still behind Sunbird + Thunderbird IMO
iChat -- last i checked the majority of the non-windows population uses libpurple based IM clients
Spaces -- virtual desktop. Maybe i say this as a linux user, but "about freaken time!"
Safari -- pointless when you have Firefox or Opera
Parental Control -- yet another feature long-standing in Windows and most major linux distros.
Boot Camp -- If OSX is so awesome, why would i wanna run XP?


i mean...good for apple to move up a little, toss a fresh face on their os, but this is not the release i'd be lined up for to get on oct 26 @ midnight.

Try to keep 5 computers in decent shape and tell me that Yes I will be abusing the family pack license the next upgrade I do.


I JUST upgraded my PB that came with 10.3 this year. I have had it for 4 years. I upgraded it for one specific piece of software actually, nothing to do with the OS at all besides the programming API available. I know others that are still running on, and quite happy with 10.2

Just because the latest version is out, doesn't mean you NEED it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it wasn't for the fact I am so dependent on somewhat specialized audio software I would still be running 10.3 to be honest.


And you can get 5 licenses for about $200, which is an incredibly nice deal for multiple computers. Seeing as right now I have...

1 17" iMac G5, former dedicated theatrical playback machine, now server and video center in the bedroom
1 15" Powerbook G4. Former primary laptop, the only machine I have had to upgrade recently from 10.3 to 10,4 because it has now been switched to a dedicated theatrical playback machine as it is a bit more portable than the iMac, and the software used is closed source
1 White MacBook. My wife's machine that she is very happy with, only does internet and text editing for the most part, with playback of video as well.
1 15" MBP. Only reason I have this is I needed to be able to run windows for game development. It replaced the Powerbook as my primary laptop.

Keeping all of those up to date, or rather, where they need to be, on Mac OS X is MUCH cheaper than Windows. I was looking at Windows recently, and for a single license of windows, instead of buying the OS it is nearly cheaper, and not a bad idea, to buy a whole new computer to run it and get the OEM version. Since I needed 2 copies it was flat out ridiculous. Keep in mind I am not talking OEM versions, student versions, or anything of that nature, but a full version that most people will be using. I personally was also looking for XP, an OS that is supposed to be being phased out in favor of Vista, as I won't touch vista unless physically forced to. Still ungodly expensive.


I will agree that the trip to educational is a kick, but even with that it is still cheaper than Windows in my opinion, which doesn't offer educational. Thinking about it from a business standpoint, what is the point of offerring an educational version of the OS? If you say it is to give college students a break, you would be very wrong. It is to get college students used to working with a particular software by giving it to them cheap, so that they spend more money when they are out of college. Thing is with Mac OS X, either they will use it or not, there is less ROI on offering an educational version for an OS than other things so long as Linux is not a major competitor.


Disadvantage of not using open source software I agree. But most programs I use and know of are not planning on going 10.5 exclusive for a LONG time.

Seablade

Boot Camp may be the thing that forces me to do this this in all honesty, and that will annoy me if they don't offer it for Tiger. For those not aware the beta license for it expires on the release of Leopard.

Spaces is a huge step up, and yes you and I both know Linux has had it for a long time, but that is why I know how useful it can be. I use virtual desktops on my Linux box non stop, it just makes staying organized in your work easier.

Time machine is a more advanced backup solution that is made easier. So for most people this is the first time they could use it. Am I a big fan of it? Not really, I can set up the versioned backup system myself if I cared to, and likely will on my infrant when ReadyNAS 4.0 hits(Currently in beta) with the ssh access to the Linux shell. But others don't really know how to and don't wish to learn it.

And I gotta say, the insinuation that iCal is behind the times compared to Sunbird at the moment, as much as I use Sunbird OVER iCal, is ridiculous. iCal really does blow away sunbird, but that is also because Sunbird is still in version .5 as opposed to iCal which has been fully developed and supported for a while

In general t hough, I agree, there isn't anything here to make me upgrade that shouldn't be availiable on Tiger. Obviously if they refuse to release boot camp for Tiger I will be pissed to say the least and forced to upgrade. If I do I will be picking up a family pack license and paying about $40 a license instead of $130 though.

Seablade

I wasn't sure when I read that bootcamp was leopard only. I mean I understand that they were developing i for leopard and will stop doing downloads of it once leopard ships but I wasn't sure what they planned to do to all the current bootcamp users.

Will the license expire and the software quit working or will it just stop receiving updates so whatever version you have now is what you'll have until you upgrade to leopard? It would seem stupid to offer a live beta and get people dependant on it then switch to new OS only and screw the customer base.

How sad is this: Amazon's price has gone down to 109. Amazon is cheaper than the educational discount...especially when you consider Amazon is tax and shipping free.

And ABF: the vast majority of the new features are under the hood. And just because some of the end user features are available on other OSes doesn't mean shit. We would be using those other OSes if we really wanted to, but we stick with OS X because it's what makes a Mac a Mac. Oh, and OS X had parental controls before Windows did.

Now stop trolling, damnit.

Kakaze you and I have discussed those 'under the hood' changes before, and to be honest there really aren't many changes under the hood worthwhile either. The major one that people were wanting was full ZFS support, at least read/write, which I believe the best I have heard was read only support in the shipping version, with write possibly coming later.

Seablade

I'm annoyed at the lack of ZFS in Leopard but if it's not ready for primetime I can understand not including it. It's going to be necessary in the future however, as HFS starts to show it's age.

Tell that to the educational application programmers that only provide support for Windows systems. And don't give me that Jack that it's hard to port over to OS X. Sometimes you have to run Windows because idiots run the world.

And as for spaces, everyone knows Linux did it first but does that mean others can't include that great feature?

And from coming from Windows/Linux to Mac I have run into a few things where I said "That was a great feature, where is it on the Mac"? It was sad to see that some of those features were not there. But hey leopard has them, and in light of how much I fell in love with Tiger and those missing features being added I have no trouble spending money for what is , IMO, the perfect operating system.

The issue with Parental Controls... They were there in Tiger, they are just better now, with more options and time lockouts and what not. So it is sort ok like DVD Player... its been there, it is just better now.

Yes, Linux has had Virtual Desktops for a while, but the way that Spaces integrates with Expose is killer, and is a welcome thing for OS X, regardless of who had it first.

Quicklook is so much more than just big thumbnails, letting you open up PDFs, DOCs, images, videos, music files very quickly without the main program opening up. Really great for DOCs and PDFs, as well as viewing slideshows of images without iPhoto.

CoverFlow is great for images, but can be lived without, you do not have to use Coverflow on every window.

The Finder enhancements are nice, as is Screen Sharing... honestly, it is great.

I have been running Leopard for a while now and honestly I can't stand running Tiger now. There are all these little things in Leopard that I miss when I run Tiger, and will be upgrading to full Leopard when it comes out.

By the way, for those concerned with the educational pricing, check with your local college bookstore. The institutional price for OS X is still $69 according to the institution educational apple store online, and many bookstores are still reportedly selling it at $69, so it this is very likely to be a good way to go.

Seablade

I just checked my college book store and they only have Vista and Office 2007. Oh well, I guess the apple store price will have to be it.

And on a side note I hope XP lasts a good while longer as the few programs I need to run in Windows for school are important but I never plan to purchase Vista. Or better yet those educational online testing systems need to be Mac compatible!

I am an engineer. Period. Engineering is a Windows world unless you work for JPL. However, when I do get around to installing Windows again, I will appreciate having it confined to its little virtual world within Parallels, running it only when I need to. This way, hopefully I only have to reformat Windows every 4 years instead of every 9 months, and I can avoid "driver hell" as much as possible.