These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. While the casual Mac user will gauge Leopard's worth by reading about the marquee features or watching a guided tour movie at Apple's web site, those of us with an unhealthy obsession with operating systems will be trolling through the internals to see what's really changed. And as I see it, operating system beauty is more than skin deep. Advertisementīut far be it from me to use Microsoft to calibrate my expectations. After all, as Apple's been so fond of touting, there have been five releases of Mac OS X in the time it's taken Microsoft to deliver Windows Vista. Eighteen months, two and a half years, who's counting? Maybe we enthusiasts are just getting greedy. Maybe the average Mac user just expects another incrementally improved version of Mac OS X. My state of mind leading up to the release of Leopard probably matches that of a lot of Mac enthusiasts: this better be good. Apple's tantalizingly explicit withholding of information about Leopard just fanned the flames.
If I had high expectations for 10.5 back in 2005, they've only grown as the months and years have passed. Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has gestated longer than any release of Mac OS X (other than 10.0, that is). It seems that I've gotten my wish and then some. That was exactly two and a half years ago, to the day. If this is what Apple can do with 18 months of development time instead of 12, I tremble to think what they could do with a full two years. At the end of my Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger review, I wrote this.
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