Apple seems to have suffered by under committing resources to Leopard, and the 10.5 release is a black mark on Appleis record, according to Charles Arthur at the Guardian.
TMO notes that one of Appleis new commercials speaks to Vista users backgrading to XP, but Charles Arthur has also noted that in his personal search for notes on how to backgrade to Tiger, heis run across many Leopard users who are considering the same scenario.
While most Leopard users arenit having many problems, a few are. While thatis always the case for any new OS release, whatis notable here is that there seems to be some specific areas where Apple didnit cover all the bases, and that was deemed a symptom on inadequate testing, an end of October deadline, and iPhone distractions.
For example, upgrade scenarios havenit gone nearly as well as clean installs which has led to more than rare system crashes and freezes. Specifically, those people who had certain third party plugins in Tiger were caught in the Leopard "blue screen of death." [TMO notes that another was the infamous file move bug dating back to Jaguar and only fixed in 10.5.1.]
Comments by Dave Winer were also cited: "The new networking interface is a big step backward. The firewall moved and lost features! Thatis simply never done, you donit charge customers to remove features, esp[ecially] security features."
"Despite its selling more and more computers, Appleis financial future depends increasingly on the iPhone and iPods. It has hit a software bottleneck. In trying to produce two high-quality software products whose deadlines were (in software terms) so close, and both of which needed so much attention to detail, it discovered the same problems that all software projects do: you canit make working code happen faster by throwing more people at it. Deadlines get missed. The iproperi release is always the one that comes with the after-release update," Mr. Arthur observed.
Another danger is that as the Apple Macintosh becomes more and mainstream, these kinds of problems will affect more and more people by proportion. As a result, "wider beta testing is needed to iron out bugs before they reach the paying public. Leopard is a big, black mark on Appleis record," Mr. Arthur concluded.