In the Guardian: Why Leopard doesn’t make me purr, and others
I’ll probably get a zillion letters telling me it’s my own fault, but in today’s Guardian I’ve noted how many people are considering downgrading to Tiger after having installed Leopard. I’m among them (though a wipe-and-clean install is also under consideration, and is what I would do first):
Britney Spears on her own forms a useful control group for internet searches. Let me explain: if you’re using a search engine to try to find out how many times some phrase is mentioned - let’s say it’s “downgrading to Tiger” or “downgrade to Tiger” - then to cross-check your numbers, see how many times the phrase “downgrading to Britney Spears” appears. That’s because it’ll tell you the baseline of chance hits for that phrase. (It’s zero.)
Why was I looking up “downgrading to Tiger”? Because I’m considering it. And it’s clear from the search that plenty of other people, having upgraded to Apple’s latest version of OS X, codenamed Leopard, are doing the same.
The trouble out there was summed up best by a note from the ur-blogger Dave Winer: he moved back to the Mac a year or two ago and lapped up Leopard. But he says he’s not enjoying it. He mentioned this to a friend, who replied dismally: “It’s like Windows”. As in crashes, stalls, freezes. That must have hurt in Cupertino.
It’s not just me - there are plenty of other people considering the same thing, if you have a look. Why has this happened? I think because doing the iPhone and Leopard in the same year has been too much of a software engineering effort for a company with a comparatively small engineering base (though of course throwing people at the job wouldn’t get it done faster, only bigger).
I’ve also looked at the row over Western Digital’s network hard drive that won’t let you share files over the internet - if you consider it, not many do, but WD was trying to get some value from a company it bought. Unfortunately, it’s turned out to be negative value:
What Western Digital is clearly worried about is that protectors of intellectual property - such as the big record labels and movie studios - might, if they found that its drive allowed people to share files with the whole world, sue Western Digital for aiding and abetting in piracy. Sensibly, it decided to avoid that outcome.
What wasn’t sensible, though, was deciding to offer the internet sharing option but to restrict it. With the wisdom of hindsight, what WD should have done is much simpler: not offer the internet sharing option at all. (Gizmodo found that not installing the Anywhere Access software did the trick nicely).
And I’ve also reviewed Sony’s Nav-U NV-U92T satnav, and looked briefly at Ask’s “AskEraser” idea - which is really just a way to grasp at market share.
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Predictions for 2008: they're back! (6 January 2008; score: 41.97%)
- Just a quick question (or two) for Apple, from today's Guardian (1 November 2007; score: 39.93%)
- Leopard running slow on your ageing Mac? Here's how to speed it up: fewer colours (update: except Apple won't let you) (3 December 2007; score: 39.1%)
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December 13th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
That’s the message I’m getting too. To think that I was going to upgrade on release night; I even checked that my local Nextbyte (Apple dealers, down under) were staying open late that night, so I could have a few beers first. Thankfully, it was end of month beers (big thing here) and I have to confess that I overindulged at the free bar. Net result? Didn’t make it to Nextbyte that night. Lucky escape, it transpires.
Shortly after, I spoke to an ex-colleague from my previous employers, who happen to be a big Apple shop, and he told me, in no uncertain terms, to stick with Tiger.
Totally agree with your assessment of why it happened. And really, could it happened at a worse time for Apple? With Vista being such a dog’s breakfast, the Keys to the Kingdom were up for grabs for any serious challengers. I think that they still are. Not a good time to take your eye off the ball. Maybe 2008 really will, at last, be the year of Linux!!! (2007 already is for me; I mean, once I discovered that World of Warcraft runs as well on Ubuntu as it does on Windows or Mac).
Cheers,
- Mike
December 13th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
Charles, your case against Leopard appears to be based on your experience and a Google search. My experience of Leopard is diametrically opposite to yours (and my experiences chime with several friends). I did an upgrade install on two different machines (both about three years old) with fewer hiccups than the corresponding upgrade to Tiger. My installs are stable and faster than Tiger.
Describing Leopard as having “some nice cosmetic improvements” took me by surprise - have you used any of the new features? It’s worth the money for Time Machine alone, how could an informed commentator describe that as a cosmetic feature?
Henceforth I will treat your Guardian Technology pieces with the scant respect I now believe is due.
December 13th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Have to agree with Tim (about Leopard, possibly not about the technology pieces…). I stuck the disc in my Macbook, hit upgrade and left it to get on. Works like a dream and the new features are fantastic. Not the slightest hint of any kind of a problem anywhere, and everyone else I know had the same experience. The only things I did were to get rid of the glass dock and make the menu line white.
December 13th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
@Tim - it’s based on my experience, but then some Google searching, some comparison of that with people who downgraded the previous time, and the fact that 10.5.0 had some really, really bad bugs - who can forget the “don’t copy between partitions” bug? Or the “your Airport connection will fade in and out like a bad AM station” bug?
Those two on their own are huge, whoppers, should-never-be-in-a-GM bugs. Imagine if they had been in Vista: how the Mac world would have laughed. They’re in the GM of Leopard, though, and it’s “oh, you know..” Those bugs weren’t in Tiger. So the dev process *added* them to Leopard. That’s terrible. If they were in a piece of shareware it would be toast; nobody would trust the revised version not to have similar or worse bugs.
I don’t use Time Machine - I have other backup strategies. (I’m not obliged to use them all, y’know.) I tried Spaces and it drove me mad - Eudora constantly grabbed focus just because a mail had arrived. And I wasn’t calling Time Machine a cosmetic feature. I was calling the cosmetic features (new Finder sidebar, Dock with lights, darker front window title bar) cosmetic features.
It’s nice that your installs are stable and faster than Tiger. Mine aren’t. I’m not saying that Leopard is an across-the-board flop. I’m saying that the challenge for Apple is significantly greater than it was for Tiger: it has sold more machines, it is more in the public eye, and yet it’s also got the challenge of trying to keep the iPhone ahead of hackers. And in trying to keep that many balls in the air, Leopard is not better for a significant number of people.
December 14th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Charles, fair cop I’ve only just installed and wasn’t aware of some of the specifics you refer to (in your response). The data loss one looks horrendous. I think your point about a larger user base is also a very fair one. Apple prides itself on its kit being plug-and-go this won’t be easy to maintain going forward.
Your reference to cosmetic features was not specific to pretty blue dock lights (or other UI features) it clearly gave the impression that that was all there was in Leopard.
December 14th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
A Google search and your personal experience? Grounds for a feature? Are you sure Charles? Would you have commissioned that from a freelancer? I don’t think you would have. I installed Leopard the day it shipped and my iMac and PowerBook have been fine since. Can I run you off a few hundred word on it for TG next week? upgrade to Leopard 1,280,00 - Upgrade to britney spears 579,000. Leopard is better for a significant number of people.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Wrong on a few points, Chris.
1) it wasn’t a feature - it’s a comment piece. I don’t commission opinion pieces from freelancers, in general. (See my notes on writing for the Guardian elsewhere in this blog.)
2) It’s not just a Google search, though of course that’s quite important in determining whether your experience is a one-off or a multi-thousand off. I’ve pointed out above, in the comments, two serious bugs that were in the Leopard GM that weren’t in the Tiger version just before it. The Apple Support Boards were *alive* with people who were pissed off.
3) you need to put the searches into quotes - else you get a lot of random stuff and it doesn’t become useful. Googling ‘Britney Spears married Chris Brennan’ (not in quotes) gives about 7,000 results - something you want to tell us, Chris?
4) no doubt, Leopard is better for a significant number of people. But it should have been better for even more, and my question was, why isn’t it? A failure in the beta testing? A failure in the software engineering? Both?
December 15th, 2007 at 10:34 am
So is journalism about *The Facts* or a bit of a Google search now? I’m confused.
1) Feature/opinion/news piece I wasn’t trying to find out how you commission I was suggesting that it was a weak premise for any kind of coverage. Where are the facts?
Last week I paid to watch the Ricky Hatton fight but Virgin Media’s cutting edge V+ box fell over and when I got up at 4am all I got was blank screen. I was livid. If I’d called you up the next morning and suggested that there was an inherent fault with Virgin Media and its service and I wanted to use the Guardian as platform to expose this you’d have rightly wanted to know how many people were involved, to what scale was this actually a problem and was I just angry. If I’d come back to you with “well I did a Google search and there’s loads of hits when you type in problems with Virgin” I assume you’d have politely declined. If not I’m still livid it’s nearly Christmas and I need the money …
I’m not saying there aren’t problems with Leopard and major ones at that but I don’t think there’s much substantive evidence to your claim that it’s a failure for *many* people.
2) It *is* just a Google search. Dress it up all the ways you want but what you did was look at a load of useless raw data that tells you nothing.
3) Britney and I were married for a short while but I had to get on my high horse and come here so she dumped me. Such is life but I enjoy your work more than hers anyway.
4) I don’t think it is a failure but I have the same evidence that you do. That’s not very much.
Dave Winer? Couldn’t find the ringer switch on his iPhone. I don’t think the people at Apple will be bothered too much what he thinks of Leopard. To be honest I think the only person that Apple people worry about is Steve Jobs.
December 16th, 2007 at 12:05 am
@Chris: I don’t think it’s a weak premise: Leopard was big news, at least in the eyes of the Applehadin. The facts being that it’s had tons of coverage of all sorts, readers sending us letters demanding to know where our review was ahead of time like the US big-name publications. There’s the premise for doing a later evaluation.
If you could have shown news website after news website, and Virgin’s support boards, with people complaining about problems trying to watch the Hatton fight, you’d have had a start. If, that is, you’d also got an opinion slot. Could I have commissioned myself to do a feature on problems with Leopard? Pretty easily, now I consider it - the Finder copy/delete bug is egregrious, and the lack of support for third-party devs is big too. But I didn’t think we needed to use the space on that any sooner.
So if you can show that loads of Virgin boxes fell over and didn’t show the Hatton fight, and point us towards why, you’ve got a commission.
What was cut from the piece:
–Why was I looking up “downgrading to Tiger”? Because I’m considering it. Seriously. And it’s clear from the search - which yields about 3,000 hits if you include “downgrade” or “downgrading” - that plenty of other people, having upgraded their machines to Apple’s latest version of OSX, codenamed “Leopard”, are doing or have done exactly the same.
also cut:
–But my problems, and the other peoples’, aren’t what’s important here. It’s the question: why has this happened? Why has Apple, which got it so right by contrast in previous versions (so that, for example, “downgrade to Panther” - the equivalent move after Tiger’s release in 2005 - gets only 1,000 hits) missed the goal here?
The Google search gives you a straightforward indication that there’s a problem. It’s a way of testing the zeitgeist. There’s all sorts of other stuff on other sites telling you specifically what other problems people had. Winer’s anecdote bit. Hard. See how it got you.
4) A failure? Where did I call Leopard a failure? I said there might have been a failure in process. Not that it *is*.
I think we disagree on what Apple thinks about bloggers with the sort of influence (whether you think it’s deserved or not) like Dave Winer.