OS X Leopard Ships On October 26th

David in AZ writes "According to the Apple website, Mac OS X Leopard will start shipping on October 26! From their blurb: 'Packed with more than 300 new features, Mac OS X Leopard goes on sale Friday, October 26, at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, Apple announced today. And, beginning today, customers can place pre-orders on Apple's online store. "Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we've ever released," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129.""

The student edition is now $47 more

[antifoidulus]

It used to be that for software anyway, the student discounts represented a significant savings, which was great for poor college students. But starting with iWork and iLife it seems that the student discount is only about 10%. So whereas Tiger cost $69 for the edu version, Leopard costs $116.....

Re:Macbooks

[BZWingZero]

Very likely. Its also likely if you just (within a week or two ago) purchased your mac you might be able to get the new version free of charge. I know this happened with my parents computer and Panther awhile back.

Re:Macbooks

[8127972]

Not likely, but you have the ability to get Leopard cheaply if you buy a Mac after October 1st.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/ [apple.com]

Re:The Vista bashing is starting to get old....

[Jaxoreth]

Why does it cost me so much for a point release is what I want to know and why aren't people lambasting Apple for such?

Because it's a major upgrade, not a point release.

Re:Yes, but...

[ozzmosis]

Yes, http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs/ [apple.com]
867MHz+ PPC.

300+ features...

[Techguy666]

Here's a list of all the new features: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html [apple.com]

I'm praying that it's not just more bloat like Vista. It seems like Leopard is good on paper, better Boot Camp for those who still need Windows; better iCal for the people who use their Macs for organizing their life; Instruments, Core Animation, Unix certification, built-in Sandboxing for programmers; and other doodads for Joe-user such as a cooler Photobooth... But then, do I need my address book to make calls to Google Maps or the OS-wide dictionary to reach out to Wikipedia? Those last two are cool but I get worried when my "OS experience" is tied in anyway to whether I have network or Internet access.

Re:problem is...

[spud603]

There's a lot that was done on the base level that will improve general usability. Finder is fixed (we hope). It's UNIX compliant now. Better use of 64-bit and multi-core processors.
Also, some of the "eye candy" will be very useful: easy backup and multiple desktops built in (I've been using a 3rd-party solution [berlios.de] for this for a while now that works remarkably well, but has a number of glitches).
I'm not beating down the door for 10.5, but I am looking forward to some of its conveniences.

Re:The Vista bashing is starting to get old....

[Apple Acolyte]

In order to maintain the longevity of the OS X name, full milestone upgrades of OS X are called point releases. People lambaste OS X for that numbering convention, as if OS X milestone releases are not as significant just because Apple isn't moving the first digit of the version number with each release. It's a really stupid critique, FWIW.

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[VCAGuy]

I think it still is, though it appears that Apple has reduced the places where you can get those steep discounts at...their online "Education" store pricing is higher than it used to be, but since they don't bother with compliance checking, I think I can understand why. I attend UCF, and a quick check of our computer store's ordering page shows that Tiger (M9639Z) is $69, and that Leopard (MB021Z) will also be $69. iWork '08 cost me just $39...a quick check of a another Florida university's computer store showed the same pricing.

Re:problem is...

[failedlogic]

Finder *is* definitely much improved. On a lower end system, its much faster and has enough features and speed increase it makes using Path Finder negligible.

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[mc moss]

Unfortunately, it is true. I just went to the education site and the pricing is as follows for Leopard: single user - $116.00, family pack - $ 199.00

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[spud603]

I just did what you recommended and I get:
Single User $116.00
Maybe it depends on the school?

Re:Interesting

[aliquis]

No, didn't know they had ever.

Re:SLOW

[Blahbooboo3]

You likely have too little ram (let me guess, a pathetic 512mb stock right?). Bump it up to 2gb, and the Mini will be great.

Re:New Systems or just OS upgrades?

[Blahbooboo3]

Mini had poor sales because it was priced too much for the hardware contained. This was more a result of their inability to keep it refreshed. The price is fine when first released, but they go so long between refreshes that it gets to be quite expensive for the hardware contained...

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[sribe]

I just went to the Apple Education Store, looked at Leopard, and it is indeed showing up at the higher price of $116.00 for me.

My apologies. I checked the institutional price, not the student/faculty price which does indeed show up as $116. I guess the Tiger troll left me hyper-sensitive!

Re:Anybody know?

[larkost]

If you bought it on or after Oct 1 Apple will cover you for a shipping fee (they are usually $20):

http://www.apple.com/macosx/uptodate/ [apple.com]

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[Stormwatch]

OS X only runs on Apple hardware. So while you can pirate the software as much as you like it only runs on apple hardware which one has to buy from Apple anyways.

Legally speaking, true. Technically speaking, well, there are workarounds... [wikipedia.org]

Re:Damn, "Time Machine" sounds cool...

[Anonymous Coward]

To be precise, Time Machine utilize hard links, not soft.
It's pretty useful this way, because practically it make every
snapshot 'complete' by itself.

Re:Damn, "Time Machine" sounds cool...

[slyborg]

Not quite. Following from recent article at AppleInsider http://www.appleinsider.com/ [appleinsider.com]

Snapshots and Windows' Shadow Copy

Time Machine has been frequently compared to Microsoft's Shadow Copy (or Volume Snapshot Service), because both systems involve file backup. In reality, they are not really very similar at all. Microsoft uses the background Shadow Copy service to duplicate files on the same disk. Those shadow copies record a "snapshot" of the file at a given moment in time, and can be accessed by the user using Previous Versions (which shows up in the file properties viewer), or tapped into by an external network backup system. Backing up these "shadow copies" simply prevents the external backup system from running into problems trying to back up live files that may be locked by the user working on them. The data backup features related to Shadow Copy are only useful if a Windows machine is running in an environment with a server backing them up. Shadow Copy is not in itself a backup system, although it can present a listing of duplicated files that were captured by the shadow copy service. Without a dedicated backup system, Previous Versions only shows local shadows of a file. It does not copy files to an external disk for safekeeping, and its shadow copies can't be browsed through by the user in the file system by date or by query. Shadow Copy is certainly not an easy to use consumer backup solution (nor is intended to be), which is what Time Machine expressly is.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft also tied Shadow Copy into System Restore, which allows users to roll back their entire PC software install to a previous point in time. This is not a backup system either; it's a system wide undo. System Restore is oriented around undoing the problems caused by installing a software title, a Windows software update, an unsigned hardware driver, or some other event that causes problems that need to be rolled back. It doesn't go back and find something lost from the past; it reverts the clock to a previous checkpoint and throws away the future from that point forward. System Restore is not even loosely related to Time Machine in what it does, how it does it, or why it exists.

Re:The Vista bashing is starting to get old....

[RogerWilco]

Microsoft does the same and sometimes Windows point releases cost as much or even more:

Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11

Windows 4.0 a.k.a. Windows 95
Windows 4.03 a.k.a. Windows 95 OSR2
Windows 4.1 a.k.a. Windows 98
Windows 4.9 a.k.a. Windows ME

Windows NT 5.0 a.k.a. Windows 2000
Windows NT 5.1 a.k.a. Windows XP
Windows NT 5.2 a.k.a. Windows 2003

And the gaps in release dates of the above aren't a lot different from the OS X ones, maybe a bit larger (1.5-2 years vs. 1-1.5 years) and they have some clever naming system since 1995, but then so does Apple (Panther, Tiger, Leopard)

Re:...and they seem to have their own exchange rat

[Paradise Pete]

So thats a 56$ premium. I don't think so. Congrats, apple. You just won a pirated copy of Leopard!

How much of that is tax? In many parts of the US the final amount will be 7 or 8% higher than $129.

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[Space cowboy]

What a load of tosh.

Any utility you can get on Linux, you can get on OSX by a recompile. The most popular are as far away as 'sudo port install XXXX'. And you get rsync, tar, bzip2, ssh as standard anyway. As a technical OSX user, I've been using ssh/rsync for a while now, but it's way way over the head of my parents, and they want their digital photos (with which to bore their guests) just as much as I want my '~/src' directory.

Not to mention that 'Apple Backup' has been around for ages. Does incremental/full backups, even off-site to .mac. Optionally uses spotlight to come up with what to back-up; Time-Machine is *still* far better because it's generational, and access to those generational copies is so easy.

Some fact-checking required before you spout off about "the fact of the matter", methinks.

Simon.

General requirements

[HTH NE1]

General requirements

• Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor

Looks like the rumors were true: G3 support has been dropped. Also my G4 Cube no longer makes the cut.

I guess I won't be buying the 5-seat license version after all.

Re:300+ features...

[ceoyoyo]

A lot of the new features (mostly the ones that aren't hyped on the main page) are specifically for developers. It's been that way with most of the OS X releases -- the best features are actually for developers. From memory there's full 64-bit support, CoreAnimation (CoreImage, released with Tiger, was a great tool for developers), a Dashboard development tool and Objective-C 2.0.

All of the new developer toys are nicely exposed through well thought out APIs, with free documentation and were announced two years ago and a pre-release of the OS made available a year ago so developers could get a jump start.

Apple has to put a few nice Joe Public features in the new OS so people will upgrade to it so there's a bigger market for all those third party developers.

Re:Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It was generally true at the time.

Hey look, things changed over a few years! Imagine that!

Re:This is exactly why I'll never buy a Mac

[edeloso]

Except for the fact that you can run pretty much every OS out there on an Intel Mac.

Re:...and they seem to have their own exchange rat

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that
1) Sales tax is about 7% in the states and NOT included in the listed price
and
2) Sweden sales tax is 25% and INCLUDED in the listed price.

Re:language distortion field?

[spiffyman]

Just checked, and it's been fixed:

Bonjour
Network your computers and smart devices instantly.

Meanwhile, Bonjour is nothing new [wikipedia.org]. It's just a Zeroconf implementation, and it's been around since 2002 [wikipedia.org], so the marketing droids likely aren't at fault.

I think it's pretty clear that the culprit was some kind of filler text on a template or a joke. This is probably the web team's fault and no one else's.

That sucks, but it's not Apple's fault.

[Kadin2048]

You do realize that 298 of those 1195 SEK are tax [nationsencyclopedia.com], right? So subtracting that out, you get a real price of 897 SEK, which is only 68 SEK more than the US price, or about $10.60 USD.

I doubt that you'd be able to order a US version and have it shipped to Sweden for less than $10 in shipping.

Seems like a pretty fair price to me. Maybe you should vote for politicians who support lower taxes if you don't like it?

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[Kadin2048]

I'll just get Leopard with a new Mac sometime in the distant future and put it on my older machines then.

This won't work. Although Apple doesn't do serialization or verification, the discs that come with a computer are different from the retail box versions of the OS. They're not the crummy 'software restore' discs like you get with some PCs -- they do have a regular OS installer on them -- but the installer is fixed so that it looks for the machine ID and refuses to run on a different model computer.

The retail versions, by contrast, will run on any machine that's listed as capable of running the software. (Which sometimes is slightly different than the machines that are *actually* capable of running the software; Apple specs systems that are capable of running the OS comfortably, but some people have found acceptable results after forcing it onto older machines.)

If you wait around until the next paid-upgrade OS release though, you can get the older version, in retail packaging, quite cheap. Either eBay or some of the used-Mac stores like Smalldog regularly have new-old-stock retail OS packages.

Re:I'll wait thank you.

[j!mmy v.]

You're either high, or hopelessly out of touch.

1: When's the last time Apple released a GM to devs? When was that? If you've been in the dev seed program at all in the last three years, you'd know that the seeds are most certainly available for devs, and when there's a GM, the product ships.

2: 10.5 wasn't "out on time" due to to dev team reprioritization to the iPhone project. Everyone else appears to know this.

3: You say it hasn't been well tested in order to "get it out on time," yet it's also "a year late." Your schizophrenia clashes with your tie.

Seriously, were you just making shit up there?

Re:The student edition is now $47 more

[netsphinx]

Perhaps jellomizer is thinking of the fiduciary duty owed by Apple's directors' and company officers to stockholders of the company...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors [wikipedia.org]. The SEC, which is a federal institution (created by Congress in the Securities Exchange Act of 1934) regulates publicly traded companies. IANAL, but to the best of my understanding, Apple's directors and company officers might have to be making money for themselves at the expense of the stockholders for the SEC to step in and make a federal, criminal case of it. Incompetence or blindness, rather than venality, might open the directors up to civil suits by stockholders seeking compensation for their losses. I'm not at all sure that anyone would have a case against the directors for a strategy designed to maximize long-term profits over short-term ones. Short-sighted measures taken to meet or beat earnings expectations one year may well leave a company without the means to maintain long-term growth and value.

Again, my lawyerness = 0. Caveat lector.

Re:Cocoa Regular Expressions

[larkost]

I am going to second this. There are a lot of great RegExp libraries available for Cocoa that have some great developers behind them. The shining one to me would be OmniGroup's OFRegularExpression (http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/). It has an easy license to work with, and is easy to embed in a project. Why should Apple spend resources trying to rebuild what is already there (or spend money updating it) when OmniGroup already has an interest in keeping it up-to-date?

Re:The Vista bashing is starting to get old....

[dadragon]

Actually, as Vista is VERY different under the hood, it's NT 6.0. 2000 was NT 5.0, XP was 5.1, and XP x64 was NT 5.2.

Re:language distortion field?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it says ``Network your computers and smart devices instantly.'' Someone at Apple must have agreed with you.

Re:problem is...

[spud603]

A lot of things are wrong with the Finder. By and large it works alright, but it's really clumsy. A few things off the top of my head.

• It's written in the carbon rather than cocoa framework. This means a lot of the nice things about the Mac OS platform don't apply. (certain keyboard shortcuts, system optimizations, services, UI elements)
• It hangs for a very long time if a volume (like an ipod or external drive) is disconnected unexpectedly.
• It makes connecting to shares clunky and counterintuitive
• It breaks the "physical metaphor" of the file system without gaining much by doing so.

There's a good description in this article [appleinsider.com].

From what I understand, the new version of Finder is written in cocoa which fixes a lot of the problems mentioned. Also, they rethought how people will want to interact with the filesystem by emphasizing spotlight and categories over the physical metaphor of folders within folders. I'm anxious to try it out.