The reviews are coming in from all over – some people have received their retail upgrade versions already. I’m heading up to the Apple Store @ Legacy Village tonight – It’ll be me, my three kids and Ben & Ashley. As I mentioned in earlier posts I pre-ordered from Amazon.com and so my copy of Leopard is en route so I won’t be making any purchases tonight but maybe we’ll get lucky and win something nice – last time Ben won a PowerBook – yeah, a whole freakin’ computer.  At a bare minimum they’ll probably at least be giving away some free iTunes credits. I fly my geek flag high so going to an operating system release party is something that my kids will just have to get used to, perhaps someday they’ll join me in my geekery.

So am I looking forward to tonights events, sure.  But Leopard in general? Not so much.

I know with 300 New Features! I ought to be excited about something, right?  Sure some of the features seem like they’ll be useful and by the time 10.6 rolls around I’m sure I’ll have found things that I wouldn’t want to give up, but right now I’m pretty happy with Tiger.  It’ll be interesting to see what I think of Leopard in the next few months.  Many of the podcasts & blogs that I read have said something to the effect that 10.5 is a release that’ll make developers happy – some of the core architecture of the OS will make the next generation of applications much more robust, combine that with the eye candy that stuff like  Core Graphics & Core Animation will provide and we’ll see some awesome applications.  But that’s in the future.

Sure, the Finder stuff will be a big improvement, Cover Flow looks neat and quick look seems like it’ll be convenient.  I’m sure I could go on but… I don’t really want to.

I give you all a full review after I’ve had some time to see Leopard first hand – and if I’m lucky maybe I’ll come home with some free schwag.

Next weekend the new version of Mac OS X 10.5 – Leopard – hits store shelves. The question that I find myself getting asked is – “Should I wait until new Mac’s are shipping with Leopard pre-installed to buy?”

My answer – No. Don’t wait to buy because…

• … you want to save yourself $129 bucks.
  If you buy a mac between now and when Apple starts to ship units with 10.5 pre-installed you’ll only have to pay $9.99 + Shipping. Apple has its Up-to-Date program which allows you to buy the newest version of the OS after its ship date has been announced and it still isn’t available on models already in stock at your local Apple reseller.
• … you get all squirmy at thinking about having to run an installation on a machine that you’ve already been using.
  OS X has a brilliant installer that keeps all your files safe from being overwritten by just replacing the OS files – that is unless you tell it to wipe out everything and reinstall.
• … you don’t want to get used to one version of the OS only to have to learn new stuff a few weeks later.
  Sure there are some differences in 10.5 compared to 10.4 but from my point of view there’s nothing significantly different enough for you to lose any sleep over.
• … OS 10.4 is an awesome, stable & secure operating system.
  My biggest reason for saying, buy now while you get OS 10.4 is because you’ll have OS 10.4 when something goes goofy with the new, and as-yet, unproven 10.5. You never know when an application will not work right because it wasn’t built for the newest operating system. 10.4 has served us very, very well for the last 2.5 years and it will serve you just as well during the early days of 10.5, while developers are getting their applications revised and updated to use all of the latest and greatest features in Leopard.

So if you’ve waited to get a new Mac, stop waiting and go get it.  If you already have a Mac, treat yourself and pre-order Leopard or if you’ve got a few Apple’s in your household get yourself a Family 5-Pack, like I did.