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Just seen the new guided tour of the new mac operating system: the Mac OS X 10.5 AKA the leopard, which is coming out on October the 26th, exactly 5 days from now.

Here are some of my thoughts on pros and cons of the new operating system.

Pros:

• State-of-the-art user interfaces. (Com’n! it’s a mac)
• the new feature of spaces (old feature of linux).
• Itunes-like new finder, which means there is a cover flow of all of your files, you can scroll through all the files from your finder like scrolling through the album covers in itunes. You can even preview pdf, keynotes, windows excel sheets and VIDEOS without opening them. (this feature was in tiger, but you have to preview them from “get info”)
• the new Ichat. It’s really hard to describe in words, you can choose your background using leopard preset videos, and even your own videos, the semi-craziest idea is to show many documents such as pdfs, office files and even videos to the guy your are chatting with. The craziest idea is that you can remotely control the other guy’s computer using Ichat, sort of like the remote control assistant in windows, but it’s so much easier and you can keep chatting during the whole process, bringing video chatting into a totally new era.
• There is only one version of leopard, no such things like home, professional, business editions.
• Pricing. The Leopard costs only $129. A much better operating system than windows Vista and only costs half as much, totally putting Microsoft on shame.
• The last but the most important (to me): Upgrading. If you try to upgrade your new system on your old mac but worrying about the hassle of reinstalling all the software you had on your old mac and backing up all the old files. The solution is: you don’t need to. When you upgrade your new computer, the system asks you what to keep and what not to.

However, some of the pros are also cons:

• yea, I know the design is a beautiful piece of artwork, but is it gonna be running smoothly on my n-year-old mac? doesn’t apply to me because I have the freaking ass kicking macbook pro. Although the tech specs are here.
• about the new Ichat, you have to have a 128kbps to enable screen sharing, which means say goodbye to wireless, hook up a cable and pray that you don’t have internet providers such as earth-link.
• I’m not a Ichat user, I have aim which can be run on Ichat, I also use gmail(Gtalk), MSN messenger, I have to talk to my parents in China on SKYPE every week. Unless all of your friends are using mac, then this fancy feature is more or less useless to you.
• I don’t actually like the time-machine, I like the idea that you can go through all the files that you deleted and the star wars interface. But to back up the files needs a huge hard drive and what I’m REALLY worried about is if your computer has viruses, and it is GONNA be in your back up files and after formatting your computer you happen to extract some files in your infected back up files. I think apple is confident about there anti virus system because there’s only few viruses running on unix and I admit I never use anti virus software on mac because I’ve never got viruses on my mac, but there’s still possibilities that your mac CAN get one.

Other thoughts:

I like Leopard VERRRY much, but there is always compatibility problems when the new operating systems come out. I know and lots of people know that never ever be the rats of the biology labs, wait for couple of months and see how the reviews are.

P.S.

If you really hate reading and can’t go through the videos because of the poor internet connections. Learn more on apple’s leopard new features page.