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How would you change Leopard?
Alright, so you've had seven whole days (and a few minutes now on the East coast, but who's counting?) to wrap your loving / skeptical arms around Apple's latest operating system, toss it on your machine and test out "300+ new features" that Cupertino managed to include. During the past week, we -- along with quite a few others -- looked this OS up and down in order to determine if it really was worth the $129 asking price, and while we wouldn't deem Leopard unflawed, we've yet to find ourselves itching to downgrade. 'Course, we're sure there's a plethora of you out there still perusing the feature list and wondering if it'll work on your near-decade-old machine, but this space is for the resolute souls who wiped their calendar clean last weekend to sit diligently behind a keyboard / mouse and put OS X 10.5 to the test.For those of you who fit the aforementioned description to a T, we're beyond curious to know how your experiences have been. Have you found that Leopard makes your life a little less hectic? Roiled senseless by countless bugs? Are there any features you wish Steve's drones would have programmed in at the eleventh hour? Considering that over two million of you have already made the leap to Apple's latest feline, we know there's a flood of squawks just waiting to be unleashed -- so go on, we're all ears.
RIP, Classic Mac OS: 1984 - 2007
It's not a huge surprise, but Apple's gone ahead and posted a note confirming that Leopard will not support Classic, even on PowerPC machines. Of course, Intel Macs have never been able to run Classic anyway, so only like Hypercard user groups and the three printshops still running QuarkXPress 4 will be affected by this. But this does mark the end of the road for the venerable and oft maligned OS, which ushered in the mainstream GUI era with the 128K Mac in 1984 and remained the default boot on all new Macs until OS X 10.1.2 was released 18 years later in 2002 -- prompting Steve to stage a melodramatic mock funeral for OS 9 at that year's WWDC. Still, the old warhorse managed to hang around for another five years, and we're a little sad to finally see it go. Check a vid of Steve's funeral after the break.
Leopard pre-orders shipping, blowout coverage commencing
As dozens of commenters have noted, Leopard pre-orders have started shipping out from Apple's magical workshops, and since the votes are resoundingly in favor of blowout coverage, we're getting ready to bring it to you. It doesn't look like anyone's gotten a (legitimate) copy yet, but rest assured we'll be all over it as soon as our package arrives -- we swear the FedEx guy looked a little nervous today.
Apple halts Boot Camp downloads ahead of Leopard's release
With just three days to go before Leopard hits the scene, Apple's gone ahead and made Boot Camp unavailable to download -- a move that shouldn't surprise anyone, because we knew it was coming the day Leopard was announced. Tiger users with Boot Camp partitions who aren't ready to make the leap to Leopard can rest easy, however, since existing Boot Camp installations will continue to work fine -- but you'll still be riding dirty since the beta license technically expires on Friday with Leopard's release. Again, none of this is a surprise at all, but it still would have been nice for Apple to let people know they'd be pulling the download -- if you haven't snagged a copy by now, you're stuck paying the $129 for Leopard.
Vista forecast: 20% chance of delays
If you're one of the many folks eagerly awaiting the January release of Windows Vista, then there's a small-but-not-insignificant chance that you may be in for a letdown -- a 20% chance, actually, according to outgoing Microsoft CTO, lifelong Engadget reader, and occasional video pirate Bill Gates. During a presentation in Cape Town, South Africa, Mr. Gates informed his audience that although there's an 80% probability that the next-gen OS will ship as scheduled, "we've got to get this absolutely right," and stressed that "if the feedback from the beta tests shows it is not ready for prime time, I'd be glad to delay it." Now, we can't imagine that anyone would want to purchase buggy software, so it's reassuring to see that Microsoft is committed to only pushing a polished product out the door, but we have to say that Gates' choice of words here makes him come across as just a little cavalier. Because if he's "glad" to continue frustrating us with these tragi-comic delays, then there's probably quite a few people out there who will be just as glad to stick with their copies of XP out of spite -- or even worse, make the dreaded leap over to Leopard or Linux.[Thanks, Matt and Oliver O.]
