I don’t personally think anybody should rush out and buy Leopard right away. It’s going to be buggy and unstable until at least 10.5.4 (just like every other OS X release). I didn’t upgrade to Tiger until almost 8 months after its release, and I’m not upgrading to Leopard until at least next year (probably).

As far as the long term is concerned, I think you’ll definitely want Leopard once the bugs settle down. Applications are going to start taking advantage of Leopard-only features in the Cocoa development libraries (some like Delicious Library already are, others like OmniFocus will in future versions).

It really doesn’t have anything to do with being a power user or not. Ask yourself what applications you use daily and whether or not they work better under the new version of OS X. If the answer is “yes”, then you want Leopard. If the answer is “no”, then you can wait a while. No matter what your answer is though, I strongly recommend waiting until the bug reports slow down and the new OS stabilizes, especially if you need your computer to function to get work done.

OS X is better than Windows when it comes to bugs, but any new release of any new operating system is going to have its fair share of bumps in the road. By waiting a little longer, you can also benefit from the experience of others who have found all the new tricks and hacks before you instead of having to discover it all on your own. (I’m hoping someone releases a free program to fix the newly-uglified dock and that it will be ready before I upgrade.)

I just checked out the demo on the apple website… Leopard is just gorgeous. The 3-d graphic scroll through… so pretty…. ! I’d like to see it in action on my mac (will it be agonizingly slow and suck every last bit of processing power?)

I got my current Mac and OSX when it was hot off the shelf, and had the double whammy of switch-over issues from PC, plus NOTHING ran on OSX - all the cute Mac stuff I was dying to try - the freebie apps and screensavers and stuff - nothing had caught up yet. So good advice to wait - thanks for that, MEP. I’ll wait and watch. Hang off till the new year for my new laptop, I think.

Oh and the new Mail app looks a lot like Entourage, with its funky note and reminder feature. Nice.

Helen

I think a casual user will find a lot to love in Leopard. I haven’t had any problems with bugginess or instability.

The big downside comes if you have a lot of legacy apps that you depend on—some of these are going to break. And various vendors don’t have fixes in yet.

I will say that I’m disappointed in the implementation of Mail 3.0. I blogged my first impressions of GTD with Leopard here: http://wildrye.com/?p=350

The good news is that a lot of legacy apps still run— Office X runs, InDesign 2.0 runs, Quicksilver B51 runs.

Now here’s the bad news: Photoshop 7.0 is dead. Missing Sync just won’t. iGTD and MailTags are apparently also not playing nice with Leopard.

I updated to leopard about 3 or so days after it came out and blogged about it at www.jkg3.com.

I have found the system to be generally fine, and time machine a lifesaver.

Though, all things considered, the thought of going back to tiger has briefly crossed my mind when some things stopped working as expected. i ended up changing to VMware fusion…

hope that helps,

^licks^

Jamie & Lion

I’d go for it - there’s at least one “killer app” that works only on Leopard & gives sufficient functionality to consider it. Bento, from the Filemaker guys, is a seriously non-power-userish take on the database management system. It uses hooks that are only present in Leopard to pull in data from Address Book & iCal so you can mash these up as you wish. It’s not for people who like to write SQL queries, but it’s so intuitive for people who want a no-frills domestic/hobbyist database that does the job & looks gorgeous while it does it.

(That said, I’m a MySQL user myself but I can so see the need for a DBMS that’s simpler to use than MS Access)