Now that Leopard has been out for a short time it is becoming possible to discuss the positives and negatives in the initial 10.5 release. We can expect some of the negative items to be resolved in updates from Apple or from third parties software companies.

Negatives

Printing  continues to be a major issues for many people. If you have a Postscript printer, there should be no problem at all and if anything, you should see improvements with Leopard. However, many other printers need to have updated drivers. A great many drivers ship with Leopard, but they do not cover everything.

Memory requirements are high with Leopard. This was also the case with Tiger. In some areas, Leopard does better management with less memory than Tiger, but in other key areas it seems to soak up as much as it can and doesn't always give it back easily. These issues likely will be fixed in patches from Apple.

Processing hogging seems to come up quite often on older machines with Leopard. Even programs like Apple Mail can become nearly unresponsive while checking mail and trying to keep up with your typing. Again, this will likely be improved by future updates - or by upgrading your computer!

Time Machine had many of its features dropped at the last minute. You can no longer back up to a network volume or to a hard drive connected to an Airport Base Station as had been expected. Time Machine's functionality with servers is quite limited in that it is really only useful for backing you your workstations, not the data on the server itself. Many users have found problems with Time Machine which seems to be very particular about its configuration. Make sure your Time Machine hard drive is formatted properly and that the name for the drive doesn't have any strange characters or even spaces in its name!

The new Stacks feature is of limited use and can in fact be quite annoying as it fans off screen hiding the files you want to see.

Positives

Data Detectors is fantastic! They really are a productivity boon.

Spaces is a great new feature that many people will find very helpful in their daily work.

Quick Look is intuitive and very fast. This along with the new preview thumbnails can speed up the small things in the day that add up.

All the hundreds of little improvements add up to welcome simplifications wherever you turn and are highly welcome.

Conclusion

Overall Leopard is a great step forward. As of July 2008 Apple has finally resolved the majority of the bugs that shipped with Leopard in the Mac OS X 10.5.4 update.

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