Apple released Leopard on October 26th to much fanfare.  Touting new features such as Time Machine, CoverFlow and QuickLook, is the upgrade really worth it?  Here is my initial reaction to the installation on three separate devices.

Leopard installed gracefully on my PowerBook G4, MacBookPro 17  and newer iMac.  At $199 for the family pack (5 licenses) the software is a super value.  Especially when compared to the $129 for a single license or $340 for a license to Vista (yuck!).  But My distaste of Vista will be saved for another article.

I love Spaces.  I love the ability to have moving backgrounds in iChat (though I seldom use that application).  I have yet to try Time Machine.

But Time Machine does not appear to live up to the promises of Apple.  Sure, I once thought that Leopard was worth the price for that one feature alone.  I bought a gigabit Airport Extreme in advance to prepare for Time Machine's ability to centrally backup all Mac devices.  What could be better than connecting a terrabyte drive to the Airport Extreme and using it to continually backup changed or deleted files?  But alas, that is not how Time Machine works.

Though Apple initially stated that it would have this functionality, many users are learning that Time Machine will only work with locally connected hard drives.  Since my home computers are both Mac laptops, this is not a feasible solution to the backup dilemma.  I want what was promised.  I want to be able to connect a hard drive to my Airport Extreme and do backups with little to no interaction.  I am disappointed that the one feature I was looking forward to is non-existent.

But that is not my only issue.  Not only can I not use the shared disk for backups, Finder does not even readily show the drive!  When I can see the drive, it takes 5 minutes to connect to the device as a guest (thus preventing me from seeing my files) and then another five minutes to connect as a user to that same device.  That is absurdly long to wait!

Sure, Spaces is great.  CoverFlow is nice.  QuickView is wonderful.  I do like the new organization of the dock.  But the main things I was looking for either do not exist or do not work as they should.  I am disappointed.  I could have continued to use Desktop Manager and CoverFlow and saved the money.

Maybe Apple will fix these problems and the others I have noticed (Spaces does not refresh your desktop properly when moving a Microsoft Office 2004 document).

Bummer. 

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