Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
Introduction — At the end of my Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger review, I wrote this. … That was exactly two and a half years ago, to the day. It seems that I've gotten my wish and then some. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer …
Context & Ripple Effects
Leopard closes a longer-than-usual gap: speculation through early 2007 had it shipping as a May 2007 release, but Apple held it back roughly two and a half years after Tiger, and Ars's own reviewer frames this review as the fulfillment of a wish stated at the end of the Tiger review. The October launch week was crowded with verdicts — Computerworld's in-depth look at Leopard's leap, InfoWorld calling it a beautiful upgrade, the New York Times cataloging extra goodies, and TechCrunch judging it worth the wait.
First-order effects
- Mac owners face an immediate upgrade decision on a $129-class release whose polish-versus-delay tradeoff every major outlet weighed within days of launch.
- Ars's exhaustive feature-by-feature treatment sets the reference standard other reviewers' quicker takes will be measured against.
Second-order effects
- The same-week appearance of guides for installing Leopard on generic PCs shows demand spilling past Apple's hardware lock-in, forcing the question of how tightly Apple polices its EULA.
- Leopard lands less than a year into Windows Vista's troubled rollout, giving Apple a fresh contrast point in its pitch to switchers.
Third-order effects
- A two-and-a-half-year gestation for a point-five release signals that OS development cycles are straining against user expectations set by faster-moving software — pressure that points toward more frequent, smaller updates if the pattern holds.
- If hackintosh-style installs keep spreading, Apple's business model of selling OS upgrades as a driver of premium hardware sales faces a structural test of its closed-platform strategy.
The trend: Desktop operating systems are entering a phase where release cadence, not just feature lists, is the competitive battleground between Apple's Leopard and Microsoft's Vista.