Is Leopard a Failure?
December 17th, 2007After long months of anticipation, Leopard went on sale in late October, and I’m sure many of you succumbed to the lust for eye-candy and the promise of over 300 nifty new features and placed your orders early on. I know I did.
Others waited for hours for the big bash at an Apple Store, as if some famous entertainer was going to be present. All this for a personal computer operating system? Well, in 1995, Microsoft got a similar reception to the introduction of Windows 95. How times have changed!
But has Leopard truly realized its potential? Did Apple deliver on its promises, or deliver a buggy product that a few tech pundits are even comparing to the dismal Windows Vista rollout?
The problem here is that there’s a huge disconnect between reality and some of those published claims. At the heart of this is the fact that, like all new operating system releases, Leopard was plagued with some annoying bugs when it left the starting gate. True to form, Apple probably released the product a little early in order to meet the deadline of shipping by the end of October.
But most of the serious problems were fixed within weeks with a fast 10.5.1 update, yet the perception some so-called journalists want to convey is that those fixes never existed, or just weren’t very important.
Among the complaints that were supposedly so serious: Failing Wi-Fi connections, application crashes and, of course, that infamous bug where you could lose a file while moving it to another drive or partition using the seldom-used Command-drag process.
But, as I said, that’s a moot point, although I grant some of you are still having problems that, one hopes, will soon be solved by Apple or a third-party developer in the very near future.
What is a fact is that Leopard had a terrific reception out of the starting gate, garnering some two million sales the very first weekend. I don’t presume to have the figures since then, but I think it would be fair to say that there are probably going to be another million or two Leopard users by the end of the quarter, even if most of those sales involve copies preloaded onto new Macs. My impressions of Leopard’s ongoing success are apparently confirmed by a MacNN report about the results of a recent NDP retail study.
With such a fast influx of new Leopard users, you have to expect some ongoing teething pains, but to suggest that Leopard is somehow a failure strains logic. Lest you forget, previous versions of Mac OS X also had their share of troubles in the initial releases. Tiger, for example, had problems with VPN and cross-platform networking, and it took quite a while to sort things out. However, I don’t recall a spate of public pronouncements proclaiming Tiger as some sort of abject failure. In fact, Tiger is considered a great product, and it’ll take a lot for Leopard to attain that status.
So why the difference?
Well, the Apple of 2007 is quite different from the Apple of 2005, when Tiger came out. Although Apple was doing quite well with iPod sales and all, and had garnered great reviews for Macs, sales for the latter had yet to really soar.
Today, Macs are ascendant, and growing fast. There are estimates that some 30% of Americans planning to buy new computers in the next three months intend to select a Mac. This is one extraordinary development with a product line that, only a few years back, had sales of but a few percent even in the U.S., Apple’s largest single market.
With the iPhone and iPod also growing rapidly, Apple can’t do a single thing without attracting attention just about anywhere in the developed world. That is a double-edged sword, because it means that the vultures will be looking hard for bad news to create headlines, even if they have to ignore a few facts.
Now if you have had bad experiences with Leopard, I suppose you might be inclined to believe it has been a failure on an individual level. But when I see it on Top 20 lists among the misses for 2007, I just believe that’s going way too far.
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It’s mostly just ill-informed journalists and wannabe tech writers who haven’t got anything better to do than grind an axe over Leopard’s issues and try and boost page ranks by writing something sensational about Apple. For example, if they were really serious (and writing intelligently), they would have reported a lot more about the Quicktime RTSP bug that effectively could execute arbitary code from a well designed Internet web site, or other Apple vulnerabilities.
True, but that problem has been fixed, so they’re just too late 😉
They were too busy looking for fake stories to find the real ones.
Peace,
Gene
No
Personally the thing I have had the biggest issue with is the Ruby on Rails implementation they bundled with Leopard.
I have had NOTHING but ISSUES with it. I had it working very easily on Tiger and working well. Now i can’t even install certain gems that worked on tiger, and now trying to do a simple gem update –system … it took out the whole ability to even create a rails app.
Not to mention I am still waiting for Java 6 … for a computer that developers love …. they sure did make it worse. (this being said i am no where near wanting to trade it in for Vista)
I believe that new OS’s focus too much on appearance and too little on functionality. This is probably more true of Vista than Leopard to be fair, but at the end of the day, why spend valuable system resources on the presence of pretty desktop effects when the second you open up one of your applications to do some real work, the majority is hidden anyway? The OS (in whatever form) is only the platform on which to run your real software that allows you to perform your work whatever that may be. Perhaps we should just oogle at our pretty desktops and be happy in the knowledge that our systems are powerful enough to display them 😀
In the defence of Apple, They cant possibly plan for every eventuality that may arise through conflicts with a multitude of software that is effectively outside of their control. All they can do is respond quickly with effective updates and patches, which in the case of leopard appears to be exactly what they are doing.
Leopard is a failure in my book. It caused multiple problems with iMovie. The most disappointing part? Apple Tech Support refused to help me unless a purchased AppleCare for my MacBook Pro. They refused to honor the “free” software support because of this, which infuriated me. What a load of carp!
I’ve also been plagued with WiFi connection drops (I wasn’t aware this was a Leopard problem until I read this article). Mac OS 10.5.1 is not-yet-ready-for-prime-time!
I’ll give Leopard a C-, but Apple Tech Support gets an F for screwing people on the software support!
Interesting how folks excuse Apple for the very things Microsoft Microsoft gets for. (i.e. “With such a fast influx of new Leopard users, you have to expect some ongoing teething pains, but to suggest that Leopard is somehow a failure strains logic.”)
I’m perhaps a little unique in that I don’t support or any platform, I just want something that does a good job.
“the best first-month results for an operating system upgrade in the company’s history”
I think this pretty much sums it up. By far, users are happy with Leopard. Especially if run on recent hardware. I’ve put it on some G4s though, and although a little slow, saw no issues.
Speaking as one of those people with persistent WiFi problems on Leopard, it’s very frustrating seeing it dismissed as “supposedly so serious”.
I feel for you, really. Tell me more.
Peace,
Gene
I wouldn’t say Leopard is a failure in general but it’s definitely one of the buggiest OS release Apple has ever done since the days of System 7.
I installed and run Leopard on 8 different Macs, 2 for home use, 5 for office use, and 1 for both. They are a mixture of Intel and PPC, laptops and desktops. So far I’ve had problems with 2 out of the 8 Macs, which is normally unacceptable to me but Leopard simply runs too well on the 6 Macs that DON’T have problems for me to label Leopard as a failure.
One of the Macs is an Intel MacBook Pro and the issue was fixed after we did a reformat and reinstall of Leopard. It was probably time anyway as it was having issues with Tiger as well.
Leopard simply killed AirPort on the other Mac, which is a PowerBook G4. It worked fine for about 3 weeks then suddenly it had a kernel panic and when restarted, the AirPort menu was turned off by default and when clicked on, it said “AirPort Card Not Found”. System Profiler also said “No information found” under AirPort Card.
I have since crawled the web for solutions and it seems like there is an easy fix for Intel Macs but none for PPC Macs.
I have tried the following in chronological order:
1.) Run Disc Utility, no problems found.
2.) Zapped PRAM, nothing.
3.) Booted in Safe Mode, nothing.
4.) Reinstalled Leopard, nothing.
5.) Reformatted hard drive, zeroed all data, reinstalled Leopard, nothing.
6.) Reformatted hard drive, zeroed all data, reinstalled Tiger, kernel panic on reboot.
So now I can get this PowerBook G4 to work in Leopard, just without AirPort.
—
Anyway, my point is, it’s easy for people who have no problem with Leopard to dismiss other people’s problems as “no big deal” or “exaggerated”, but having seen Leopard both run smoothly and problematic on different Macs, I can assure you that Leopard is far from perfect, not that anything is. But having used Macs for 17 years and managed COUNTLESS Macs, I can tell while Leopard isn’t a complete failure, but it has serious issues that Apple not only need to address but ACKNOWLEDGE first.
One more factor that may be involved in some of this is bad RAM. We had an issue in Panther where it was more sensitive to such matters.
I wonder if this is, in part, the cause of some Leopard miseries.
Peace,
Gene
With popularity comes scrutiny. Every OS has bugs on release. Yes, the release of Leopard seems to have been rockier — and in some cases more disastrous — than most. And for some, it has been one of the smoothest, easiest upgrade to OSX yet. Could it be that most problems can be traced to other hardware or software issues — bad RAM, installed but forgotten tweaks and input managers, that sort of thing? Continued refinements to the OS seem to always bring out previously dormant hardware issues, perhaps exposing flaws not present in lab-perfect test machines behind Apple’s doors.
I think buggy releases (at least from the POV of the bloodthirsty press corps and mad bloggers) are going to become more and more of an issue for Apple as it becomes more mainstream. The range of software and hacks is ever-increasing, and as people mod their machines and their software (in some cases optimizing it for Windows), Mac software may suffer.
I believe this is the reason Windows is so problem-plagued: the range of hardware it must support is so wide, no bridge could span the gap. It’s the big advantage to having a comparatively closed system — but as that door opens even slightly, more bugs and issues, completely and utterly beyond Apple’s control, might unfortunately sneak in.
This is a good advert for getting your RAM from reputable sources such as Crucial or indeed from Apple if you can afford it.
I’ve been involved with the Apple developer program for a while now, and have been testing Leopard since its first release to developers. I’ve also used virtually every single Mac OS release extensively. Leopard, across several machines we test in house, is absolutely one of the buggiest, most problem plagued releases Apple has put out. We regularly went weeks, even months without crashes using Tiger, and now cannot go a day without a machine crashing on Leopard. I’m talking about machines that have been wiped clean, formatted, and are running freshly installed copies of 10.5.1. We’re working hard with Apple to resolve the issues, but the idea that this is a fabrication of anti Apple journalists is a stretch.
I appreciate the features of Leopard very much, and it may one day be the finest OS Apple has ever developed. As it stands however, it’s got a long way to go to achieve that status. Not counting the first releases of what amounted to public beta versions of OS X, this is the least polished version of OS X to reach the hands of the public.
My sister had an interesting problem with Leopard. She has dialup (sorry there isn’t another choice for location and budgetary reasons) and that worked only partially under Leopard. That is her e-mail worked fine but web browsing was spotty. Some sites like Google worked ok but others like say Slashdot would begin to load then would stall forever. Now web browsing on dialup is not speedy but she just couldn’t get to a number of places no matter how long she wanted. After much web/forum searching we found that the MTU value (max size packet) for PPP (dialup connection protocol) was set to 1500, I think by her ISP. Leopard added some new stuff into the packet headers (time stamps for protocol tuning) and that was making the packets too large and fragmenting (& losing them ?). Anyway if she ifconfigs the mtu to 1400 each time she logs in stuff works again like in Tiger. We made an automator script for this since it’s actually “sudo ifconfig mtu 1400”. She is not by any means a command line person so the automator script is something she has no trouble using.
Anyway I spent a lot of time on this since I really wanted her to be on Leopard just for Time Machine. She didn’t have a backup. Leopard would be the only way to prevent disaster.
The difference between 10.4.1 and 10.5.1 is that while there is a smaller percentage of people experiencing problems, there are a greater number. This is the double-edged sword of marketshare growth.
2.5% of 1 million per quarter < 1.8% of 2.2 million per quarter.
Stability and satisfaction is going up, yet more people are experiencing OS problems. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s simple math.
There are more people complaining about Leopard because there is a huge increase in the number of people using the Mac. The percentage of people with problems is still minor, but 1% of 10,000,000 is a lot higher than 1% of 500,000. The 99% for whom everything is fine have no reason to write and complain.
But actually, all of the publicity about all these “problems,” IMO, is good news. First, it will help Apple become a better and more responsive company. Second, it will help Apple discover and resolve issues with this and future releases. And third, much of this publicity is in the Windows-oriented media, indicating that they feel that the Mac is important and both a competitor and viable replacement for Windows computers.
As someone who has supported Macs since the 80s, and a former MacGenius, I would look to hardware first if you brought this to me. Try booting to a known good OS on an external drive (perhaps another PPC Mac in target disk mode) and check System Profiler again. If the card is still not listed then you can pretty well knock software off the list of causes. Your Leopard install may have had something to do here (bad driver maybe) but is more likely a coincidence. I know that may sound fishy but it does happen that way sometimes.
If booting to a known good OS shows the card in system profiler, then I would suspect the OS having more involvement.
As Gene points out, bad RAM is very often associated with these types of issues and some versions of the OS will react more to it than others.
A
Thanks for your insight Adam and actually I did try to eliminate the possibility of it being a hardware issue first.
I have an older PowerBook G4 which uses the same AirPort Extreme card. I swapped the cards and both worked in the older PowerBook G4 but neither worked in the newer one which was having the problem.
I have not yet tried booting from an external hard drive though, but it’s only because I didn’t have one handy. But it is a good idea and I will give it a shot.
I installed Leopard and had to go back to Tiger because Maya 2008 wouldn’t run. What I saw of Leopard while I was using it, I liked a lot. And to be honest, I don’t think the failure of Maya 2008 was as much Apple’s fault as it was Autodesk’s (and yes, mine, because I’m an Apple developer and should have tried running Maya so I could have reported problems). The license background program for Maya is so flaky. Often you’ll quit Maya, restart it again, and it won’t run (and that’s in Tiger; in Leopard, the licensing program simply wouldn’t run at all). Sometimes it requires a trip to the Terminal, sometimes it requires a reboot. None of my other programs gave me problems though.
There were actually a couple of problems that had been bothering me with my WiFi connection in Tiger that went away completely in Leopard. And they bother me all the more now, as I sit and wait to go back to Leopard again.
The real questions surrounding OS X revolve around the hybrid open/closed source development model being employed by Apple. As such, Leopard’s bugs may reflect larger issues of the development process.
Vista is widely touted as the poster child of a long-standing assertion by the Open Source development community: The proprietary development model, it is said, does not scale well in the face of complexity. Whether the OS X development model also reflects such a situation is still open to conjecture, but there are indicators that this may be the case.
Since adopting a BSD core for the Mac OS, independent researchers have consistently found OS X to have several times more security bugs than its Open Source antecedents. Additionally, those bugs have been found to have greater severity than those generally found in Open Source projects. Time will tell if Apple will be able to reverse this trend, but so far the evidence is not favorable.
Analysis of recent growth statistics suggest that Apple may soon face stiffer competition from Linux than from Windows. All complex systems are subject to bugs. Just as Japanese production methods buried Detroit in the last quarter of the 20th Century, the Open Source development model appears poised to deliver a crippling blow to the proprietary software development model. Wide swaths of the ISV community are voting with their feet: Open Source development platforms and targets are seeing a landslide of independent development houses adopting them. Whether Apple’s combination of the two models will long endure is yet to be determined.
But on the other hand, it may well have been the case that Apple would have wanted to work on Leopard a few more weeks, except for the artificial deadline they’d set for themselves. What do you bet that 10.6 won’t ever have a “We’ll release it in 4 months” promise attached to it…
Wow, we must really be getting a lot of Windoze converts if completely reformatting your hard disk and reinstalling your OS and all of your apps from scratch has become a commonplace/acceptable fix for minor problems. 😉 (Something, by the way, I’ve NEVER had to do in my 20 years worth of Mac usage, EVER.)
Failure or success? It just doesn’t matter anymore. M$ and Apple have such a large installed base that success is irrelevant; people will just use their OSes no matter how good or bad they are. It’s their only choice. (Linux?!? Don’t make laugh. 1 web browser and 10,000 command line text editors do not a usable OS make.) As for me and my business, we’ll stick with Tiger. Leopard breaks too much backwards compatibility for us (we’re talking real engineering apps here, not emailer or Word v5.1). For the first time in my 20 year love affair with the Mac I’ll be skipping an OS release. Ouch!
My Leopard install onto iMac was the most terrible experience in 20 years of using Macs, my first was a brand new 512ke.
I have never taken a computer in for service for a software problem, I’ve always been able to fix things myself. Not this time.
I tried to install from the DVD after I had run the option to check the DVD for errors, it claimed that there weren’t any so I began the install. About 20 minutes into the install it quit with an error dialog claiming there was something wrong with the disc and that some package couldn’t be read.
Ran the error check again and it again found no errors, so I tried the install again. Same result except a different package was called out. Take the DVD to the Apple store for a replacement. Tried the new disc and same thing!! Things were really screwy now, couldn’t even reinstall Tiger, the machine wouldn’t boot from that disc.
After many hours of trying to install leopard I made an appointment with a genius and he installed it from an external firewire drive. No problems. He ran a ram diagnostic and it claimed some bad ram.
I have been running Leopard since the day after it was released with the same ram and there has not been another issue. Leopard is great, now that it’s installed.
Absolutely no bet at all. Every OS release since at least MacOS8 has had a prior announcement with a release date attached to it. Also, recall that Apple did push this back when resources were too limited to meet the original June deadline.
The fact of the matter is that you can never release an OS that is perfect. There are simply too many variables to have something that will work in every case. As an example – when I installed Tiger on an iBook I was using FruitMenu from Unsanity. I had been using it for so long, and so ubiquitously, that I had totally forgotten about it. One of the Tiger updates (10.4.3 I think) was not compatible with it and I had a heck of a time figuring out why my right-clicks and my Apple menu were no longer working. It turns out they were working fine, but not the way I thought they should. Several people I know had their whole Finder break because of this and they (naturally) blamed the OS update. This is an obvious example, but nonetheless it is a real example of how an outside variable can and will sometimes cause trouble.
Leopard has had a remarkably smooth deployment. Really. I read about all the “pristine” Macs that had various problems, and I don’t doubt them. I would bet, though, that the majority of them were not brand new out of the box condition. One of my last Genius Bar customers before I left Apple bought an iMac, upgraded to Leopard with the disc in the box, and couldn’t use his computer at all. Could not even log in. Talk about pristine! I re-installed Leopard, got him logged in and sent him home. Two hours later he was back with the same problem, saying he hadn’t had a chance to use anything on the iMac and he was ticked. Well, what he had done before trying to use his iMac -both times- was migrate data, applications, and system settings from another computer. Included were FruitMenu, ShapeShifter, Quicksilver, WindowShade, and probably more, along with all of his settings for them. It took me ten minutes of asking questions to find out that it had booted long enough to use the migration assistant. Once we took out the system hacks from the equation all was well.
Can any software vendor predict all variables? No. Will any piece of software (let alone an OS) ever roll out without bugs? No. Will Apple continue announcing release dates well ahead of time and then make sure they hit them? Absolutely! I’d bet on it.
P.S. Unsanity – if you see this – I can’t wait to get my FruitMenu back! I miss it horribly.
Response to the author:
Do you consider this a failure? I don’t.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/12/17/npd_leopard_latest_in_chain_of_blow_out_apple_os_launches.html
Sales during Mac OS X Leopard’s first full month on store shelves reached an unprecedented high for any Apple operating system release to date, according to new research from the NPD Group.
When compared to OS sales in May 2005 — the first complete month Mac OS X Tiger was available to customers — Apple’s November 2007 sales of Leopard were 20.5 percent higher, says NPD directing analyst Chris Swenson. This amount does not include copies pre-installed with new Macs but does blend both online and retail figures.
In comparison, Tiger represented a 30 percent increase over the 2003 Panther update, and 100 percent more than the 2002 release of Jaguar.
“It’s really stunning to see Apple have one blow-out OS launch after another,†Swenson tells AppleInsider. “It’s clear that Apple has hit upon the right strategy for rolling out new versions of its OS.â€
I’m not the OS/Networking expert in the family, so I can’t get all technical with you. I can tell you that if I’m connecting to our cable modem via airport, I have constant dropped connections. Web pages regularly time out, I can’t upload files via FTP or via web forms, and even Mail downloads conk out occasionally.
If I turn off airport and connect via ethernet, all the problems go away completely.
On this same exact hardware, running Tiger, I had no problems at all with airport. The Leopard is a clean wipe-the-disk-and-install version, with my user account copied over via firewire.
Oh yeah, and LOGINserver crashes every single time I log in, despite having removed every login item from startup.
Leopard isn’t unusable, it’s just frustrating.
Look, first off, an infantile article title … Leopard is, of course, NOT a failure … but you sucked me in 🙂 Leopard is the basis of iPhone and iTouch, and they are huge successes, so the answer must be Leopard is a huge success. That’s from an internals point of view. From a user’s perspective, I find Leopard evolutionarily better than Tiger.
And as a counter to complaints on the install / upgrade process, please read this:
http://web.mac.com/lusol/Multiverse/Technology-Apple/Technology-Apple.html
Every one of my 9 installs, from a 24″ aluminum iMac to a lowly Cube has been faultless.
I’ve installed Leopard on all my family machines. The one I had the biggest problem with was mine which is the newest. I have a MacBook Pro 17. My problems may have been related to software issues from Tiger. My daughters was doing the same thing and it looked like I might have to do an erase and install to get it to work. After running TechTools 4.6.1 all the problems disappeared and the install was one of the smoothest.
I love Leopard.