Apple's OS X Leopard on the Loose

Bumped from its slated June launch date thanks to the frantic scramble to finish the iPhone, the latest version of Mac OS X—complete with a revamped desktop, a new backup feature, and more ways to inspect your file folders—is finally ready for its close-up.

Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard goes on sale at 6 p.m. sharp on Friday the 26th; expect to shell out $130 for a single-user license, or $200 for a five-user family pack. Also keep in mind that the system requirements for Leopard are pretty hefty this time around: those with Intel systems should be OK, but PowerPC users will need at least an 867MHz G4 processor with 512MB of RAM. Sorry, G3 users—looks like Mac OS 10.4 is the end of the line for you.

What's Different:

Many of the changes in Leopard look more like tweaks than full-scale innovations. The Dock, for instance, is now glossy and foreshortened, and it has a new feature: Stacks, which are Dock items that spring up with files and folders when clicked. The Finder, meanwhile, adds a revamped folder sidebar that organizes system items into Devices, Shared, and Places; even better, you'll be able to browse your files using Cover Flow from iTunes. Nice, but not exactly mind-blowing.

More interesting is Time Machine, the Mac's new backup utility. According to the specs, Time Machine works seamlessly in the background, backing up your entire system and tracking file changes; rolling back your hard drive to its appearance on any given day is (supposedly, at least) no problem. The actual features aren't revolutionary—plenty of utilities will let you save and restore incremental backups—but Apple is promising seamless, painless ease of use. Sounds great, but I'll believe it when I see it.

The Mac Mail client gets a few new features, including an integrated RSS reader, built-in e-mail templates (think more "Birthday!" and "Party!" than "Business Meeting"), along with a Notes feature similar to the Notes app on the iPhone (hmmm…will iPhone Notes finally sync up to your home system?). Not bad, but here's what looks cool: Mail will supposedly recognize written invitations (such as "dinner tomorrow?") in e-mail message and let you add them to iCal with a click. Again, sounds cool, but I'd like to see it in practice.

What's New: 

Leopard does come with a couple of genuinely new features that look interesting. One is Quick Look, an app that lets you peek inside documents (including video and audio files, and even documents backed-up by Time Machine) without having to open their parent applications to do so. Another is Spaces, which lets you create two or more on-the-fly workspaces; a birds-eye view lets you switch from one space to another with a click.

As I've said before, there's nothing in Leopard to match such game-changing features as, say, Spotlight universal search in Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, or the Dashboard widgets. Still, I know I'll be picking up my copy of Leopard as soon as possible, and I'll post my impressions shortly thereafter.

So, what about you Macheads out there; looking forward to upgrading to Leopard? Or are you content to stick with Tiger for now?

Related:
Product page [Apple]