My experience with Leopard on my new MacBook

[fjdouse]

Well after a long happy relationship with my Mac mini G4 1.25, I eventually went mobile and got a 2nd hand iBook G4 800. It was a bit slower than my Mac mini, but I was generally happy and Tiger was quite snappy - all things considered. Then Apple dropped a bombshell on me, Leopard would only run on an 867MHz machine or higher. Not being on a fat salary, I was not impressed at all. What the extra 67MHz is supposed to deliver is quite beyond me and all the explanations in the world will fall on my deaf ears.

Eventually I thought to hell with it, I took out a big loan (for me) and went and bought a lovely new 'intel' MacBook from my local retailer, they did not have Leopard to give with it, so I got £5.95 off to pay for Leopard via the up-to-date programme from Apple. I was actually shocked that considering it's a Core Duo 2 do-da with 1GB RAM, double what I've been using up to now, it wasn't THAT mind blowingly fast, the spinning ball still appeared from time to time, with agonising delays. But iTunes, iMovie and the like did open quite a bit faster. But I was still on Tiger. According to what I'd read my MacBook's CPU is supposed to be 64bit and Leopard would be 64bit, it should be as good if not a bit quicker than Tiger. I thought Leopard would take full advantage of my new beastie.

So I've received my Leopard. Did the upgrade, it seemed to go ok. Failed upgrading my printer drivers, not surprising, I didn't install them with Tiger to save space.

Ok, it looks pretty. Camino runs like lightning, but I'd say that was about it. Dunno what they did to Safari, I just dont like the look of it. Blender runs like sludge, iTunes, iWork etc. etc. load slower and have lost their snappiness. My remote stopped working, after 'pairing' it, I FINALLY got it working with front row, but it does nothing in VLC and EyeTV anymore! Somehow, I've lost around 10gigs off my hard disk, leaving me with an average of 10-6GB free on my hard drive, dunno where the rest went. Not much to work with anymore. Some things look so much more polished, the buttons on Preview are simply awful, someone needs to be shot, what happened to a unified look? Did someone forget? Photoshop CS2 which ran like a pig with Rossetta on Tiger became unusable with Leopard, more cash to whip up from somewhere. All in all, I like Leopard on my lovely new MacBook, but it doesnt feel MUCH faster than Tiger on my old iBook, considering I've blown the best part of a grand, I simply expected a bit more.

Anyone else have such problems or feel just a tad dissappointed?

[jbarley]

When you "upgraded", did you choose to do a clean install?
If you did the "Archive and install" bit, you can redeem a large chunk of your hard disk by deleting the old archived Tiger system.
Also a default installation on your macbook grabs a chunk of disk space equal to your installed memory size for its "safe-sleep" also called hibernate file.
This can be turned off and your macbook will revert to conventional sleep, saving this disk space for other things.

jb.

[fryke]

Can we merge this thread with the other one about just this subject you're opening at the end of the post?

[fjdouse]

Hi Fryke, no not really, this is for opinions and open letters, so I'm expressing an opinion and finalising with a question if anyone else has had similar experiences or 'opinion'.

[Lt Major Burns]

i have an iBook G3 700mhz, and a dual 1.8ghz G5.

considering one is about 4-6x as fast as the other, the OS is virtually indistinguishable. this isn't to say that the G5 is slow, but that the OS is so well optimised that it runs *amazingly* on my old G3 (Tiger). that's the impressive part, that a 6 year old computer can run the lastest and greatest [well, until october, anyway] smoothly and snappily.

the real difference is in video and image handling. a quicktime video export that would take ~20 mins on the G5 takes roughly 2-3 hours on the G3. and that same video encode would probably take about 3-4 mins on a new Core 2 Duo.

the OS shows very little difference.

[fjdouse]

Hi JBarley, after I read your post, I thought 'to hell with it', I'd used Time Machine to backup already to an external drive.

So late last night I did a new erase and install (without printer drivers, language support, X11 etc.). The freshly installed system HAS I'm pleased to say, provided a much improved user experience for me, there is a snappier feel which had not been there before. I've had problems getting Parallels to work, it just kept crashing on launch, but I got there eventually.

I'm thinking that maybe the original upgrade didnt work fully, because there are things which are different now, for example finder windows have a quick-look icon (with an eye) - that wasn't there before, I've notice a few other subtle differences. Overall though, like I said in the original post, my opinion is that I expected just a bit more 'umph', all things considered. Cheers JBarley

..oh but my remote STILL doesnt work with anything other than Front Row, nor can I find anything online about getting it working with VLC or EyeTV again - sigh!!

[fryke]

I, personally, could do without the graphical "oomph". I *love* QuickLook, however. That's one of the biggest "ooh!" and "aah!" features in OS X for years for me. Demo a Mac to older people: They're tired of opening two or three documents that are named similar in Word, only to find out it's something different. QuickLook is really, really good. Just hit that spacebar. It's *such* a great and simple feature.

[fjdouse]

well, I'm not sure about graphical 'oomph', I would just like some overall 'oomph'. As I continue to use my Mac I'm running into more and more problems with applications which I've never had before. I use blender heavily, I'm having to go back to an older eMac to do anything at the moment because it just crashes (usually at a critical point), general usage is getting worse! there is a second or so delay between clicking a button and it actually doing anything. Actually a lot of Blender users seem to be pulling their hair out about this, so I'm not loosing the plot. Parallels crashes, infact quite a few programs which have served me well seem slower, less efficient and way more unstable. I cannot render anything complex at the moment in Blender, there is no Leopard specific release, it just crashes to my absolute screaming fury. I'm working on a CGI animation and my new machine cannot cut it at the moment, I could swear profanities over it, I'm so angry about it. Parallels crashes over and over and over then suddenly works, the logic fails me, I go into XP do something, quit, do something else, go back to XP and Parallels has given up the ghost. Productivity is suffering.

I need efficient productivity and power, THATS what I've shelled out cash for - not flippin eye candy!

I would like to see Apple bring a Leopard 'Lite' minus all the superfluous guff, quick look is HARDLY a wow factor, come on, be serious! - sure its useful but I've managed so far without it and really dont NEED it. If I could uninstall that feature I would. Spaces, nice but I had a 3rd party app in Tiger which frankly was far better, even then I eventually stopped using it. I don't NEED to have pretty reflections on the dock, I'd prefer to save the processing for more important things. Don't get me wrong, I like Leopard but it certainly does NOT deliver the over-hyped wow factor I've been reading about. iTunes, iPhoto, iWork, iWeb etc. ARE DEFINATELY slower opening on my Mac now than under Tiger - WHY? These apps launched fast before, now they feel like they did on my old G4, that is cr@p in my view and sorry if I invite a flaming for it. Since starting out with Mac OS X, it always seemed to get better and better, even faster. It's taken a retrograde step from where I'm sitting, I dont feel like I've got my money's worth and my dissapointment is growing daily - sadly.

Yeah I know the flaming I could get for this, but I am a mac fanatic and I have to be honest when I feel that things aren't as good as they should be. It's my opinion based on my experiences so far. My MacBook does not feel like the dual core 64bit cutting edge power-beastie it should be, I cant say how much better things like rendering are because I cant do any. Video encoding and ripping music IS faster - obviously, but I do feel loading times are slower than Tiger, sometimes there are lags, that damn spinning ball of death still appears. I'm beginning to miss my old Mac, all the money I spent could have gone on a holiday or something.

Hopefully some more system updates will improve things, I remember being equally vexed at Tiger at first - I miss it now. Even a fellow Mac user who has my old Mac mini (G4 1.25, 512MB RAM) and Tiger wasnt overly impressed, infact he said he has asked me not to install Leopard because he likes the performance he has at the moment. I dont really blame him.