But the biggest “secret” feature (which was never actually secret) is Core Animation. You’re going to see some spectacular new user interfaces coming down the pipe soon from Apple and others. Think Time Machine, Cover Flow and Front Row-style 3D motion throughout.

I have waited for updates to come out before installing OS X on my production machine in the past. I will NOT be doing that in Leopard. Next friday that sucker is going to be in my hands and on my Mac Pro, and I will be happier and more productive for it! I used to loathe Jaguar after using Tiger. Now I loathe Tiger after using Leopard. It’s so… clumsy and inelegant. Clunky almost.

Yes, it’s nice and all, but is backing up your whole hard drive to a remote network volume even close to feasible for anyone with less than a T1?

Even the fastest consumer-level broadband solutions are still going to take hours and hours to back up and restore 100 GBs. Hell, 10 GB isn’t going to happen too quick either.

Time Machine not pointing to remote network locations is a positive, not a negative. Why? because it’s not going to be reliable in the real world except for a small percentage of users while the majority of users would see high failure rates and frustration.

Get a second drive, its cheaper than a T1 and faster. You want offsite storage, get a safe deposit box.

Online storage is okay for supplementing your existing back up strategy, but is not a good idea as a primary back up tool. first, many online backup alternatives are slow (like .Mac), have limited storage space, and require Internet access.

I’m not at a point yet where I want to trust my data to someone else at a nameless data center in who knows where.

…which is mostly just a redesign and eyecandy

(emphasis mine)
actually, that is the least of it - that is just what you, as a user, see. Under the hood it is SIGNIFICANTLY changed. Believe me, it does not take 2.5 years to add eyecandy and redesign…
As I said before, the features that enable new classes of applications are phenomenal…

I am still waiting for the holy secret features (if exsist). But sooner or later i will upgrade all my Macs at office.

What i really need is unexpired BOOTCAMP!

Spend a paragraph talking about the improved iChat, but only talk about the slideshow feature? What about screen sharing? What about share-anywhere screen or files via .Mac?

Time Machine is “a good idea” and then on to criticize it, without mentioning any of it’s cool implementation or how it’s different from old-fashioned backups? Spaces is simply a rehashed virtual desktop, which Microsoft already did years ago?

Yes, I think “silly” is actually a kind way of putting it. It goes way beyond a different viewpoint, into something so idiosyncratic as to be, well, silly.

Reading your comment about silly reviews of Leopard, I must wonder–do you feel a review must cover every single new aspect of a piece of software or hardware for the review to be “not silly”? The reviewer may not have addressed some new features you found to be impressive, or was less impressed with a feature you liked, such as Spaces, but that doesn’t make the review silly. Even products rated highly by CNET or PCMAG, for example, have reviews that don’t necessarily cover EVERY feature, nor do they focus entirely on everything they love about the product. Any good review, even one titled “In defense of..”, would not be credible unless it provides a discussion of some negatives. I’d rather read an article that gives me the good with some bad rather than one that tries to make me feel all warm and fuzzy by telling me that every aspect of the product is “great” or “spectacular”.

I think the reviewer has the basics down and beyond. He may have said an external drive was required for Time Machine, instead of “recommended”–however, you yourself note that any smart computer user would never back up to the same disk. So, given that no smart computer user would do such thing, an external or secondary drive does become a REQUIREMENT for proper back up using Time Machine

For example, Spaces. The reviewer says that the virtual desktop concept has been around forever, even in Windows, so it’s no big deal. Well, the Windows implementation was a proof of concept that had all kinds of problems. Spaces, by contrast, works and it works in a smart way. The Dock knows what Space an application is in, Space switching and organization is intuitive, you can drag-n-drop between Spaces, you can bind apps to particular Spaces, etc, etc.

And you didn’t even mention that Spotlight now includes boolean logic out of the box. You didn’t mention the dramatic improvements to Preview or Mail. Did you mention screen sharing (including via .Mac)? What about the sandbox and other security features? Hard to find many improvements among your complaints and downplaying.

The title of the article is “in defense of”, but it would really help if you actually mentioned improvements instead of harping on your dislikes — it’s not clear you actually like the new Finder, considering your bellyaching about previous, “unusable” versions. One has to assume that you like it, based on its location in the article.

Time machine is a good idea, but it does require an external hard drive.

External drive is recomended, not required for Time machine. But it’s stupid to make backup to the same disk. You should learn the basics.

I’ve already pre-ordered the family pack. We ordered it from Amazon the day it was available.

“A built-in auto hide would have been a nice addition to reclaim a little bit more of the desktop.”

Not sure I follow since there is an auto-hide function for the dock in Tiger now which I would be pretty certain is not going away in Leopard.

System Preferences > Dock > Automatically Hide and Show Dock

Did you mean to say something else?

I have been using Leopard for many months now (from interning at Apple and being a member of the ADC). To sum it all up, I would never want to go back to Tiger.

In particular, the new Finder is far more than a new skin. It really works a whole hell of a lot better, in particular with respect to network shares. They actually work reliably now. The new sidebar is a better UI than the old one. Live icon previews (a service offered by the QuickLooks infrastructure) are incredibly useful.

There are a ton of other things as well. Spotlight is faster, has a much better UI, and as mentionned can search on networked computers as well. The UNIX underpinnings of the OS, if you make use of that, are a lot more complete because of Leoapard’s UNIX03 certification. Leopard also takes better advantage of multiple cores (that’s every Intel Mac out there save early Minis) and is more power efficient, giving you better battery life.

Leopard is a fantastic upgrade. If you’re not convinced by the marketing, do at least give it a try in a nearby Apple Store.

That’s what I want to know. Most unlike Apple to make such a major goof like pre-announcing something as incendiary as TOP SECRET FEATURES only to find out it basically referred to some eye-candy on the Desktop.

Most perplexing, surprised there’s not been more comment about it.