To Leopard or Not To Leopard?

With Apple's advertising telling you to upgrade to the latest operating system with 300 new features, we get a lot of people asking, "Should I upgrade to Leopard now or wait?"

Our answer: it depends.

Apple has spent the last few months testing Leopard with key testers and developers like Tech Superpowers, and the results have been very good. However, there's no way that testers can test every program or every combination of software, so you can never play it too safe when it comes to doing a big upgrade like this on a business-critical machine.

For most home users, you can believe the hype: upgrading to Leopard should be a seamless and simple affair. Even so, don't do it unless you have couple hours to play - with 300 new features, there will be lot of things that have changed between 10.4 and 10.5.

For business and graphics users, the story is different. Many of us use our Macs for everything - and even a few hours of downtime and lost productivity (which is the norm for a major OS upgrade like this) is something that needs to be planned. Worse yet, if you were to have a critical application not work with Leopard, there's no easy way to go back to Tiger. So we recommend that business users wait for us to give the OK to upgrade - and we always advise that our professional Techies be the ones to do the upgrade in business environments - especially those with servers and large networks.

Meanwhile, don't worry - Tigers and Leopards will co-exist fine for a long time (in fact, some of our customers still use 10.3) - so unless you're in a rush to see all the great new things, you can feel confident that your Mac - no matter if it's running Tiger or Leopard - will do the job.

One last tip: When doing an major upgrade, always have a complete backup of your machine before doing the upgrade. That's your insurance policy in case something goes wrong.

Click here for more of our exclusive Leopard coverage, including regular blog posts from Leopard users with their day by day experiences with Leopard and feature articles from Ben Pender-Cudlip, ex-Apple Genius (he's still a Genius, just no longer an Apple one).

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	To Leopard or Not To Leopard? oh's blog Login or register to post comments With Apple's advertising telling you to upgrade to the latest operating system with 300 new features, we get a lot of people asking, "Should I upgrade to Leopard now or wait?" Our answer: it depends. Apple has spent the last few months testing Leopard with key testers and developers like Tech Superpowers, and the results have been very good. However, there's no way that testers can test every program or every combination of software, so you can never play it too safe when it comes to doing a big upgrade like this on a business-critical machine. For most home users, you can believe the hype: upgrading to Leopard should be a seamless and simple affair. Even so, don't do it unless you have couple hours to play - with 300 new features, there will be lot of things that have changed between 10.4 and 10.5. For business and graphics users, the story is different. Many of us use our Macs for everything - and even a few hours of downtime and lost productivity (which is the norm for a major OS upgrade like this) is something that needs to be planned. Worse yet, if you were to have a critical application not work with Leopard, there's no easy way to go back to Tiger. So we recommend that business users wait for us to give the OK to upgrade - and we always advise that our professional Techies be the ones to do the upgrade in business environments - especially those with servers and large networks. Meanwhile, don't worry - Tigers and Leopards will co-exist fine for a long time (in fact, some of our customers still use 10.3) - so unless you're in a rush to see all the great new things, you can feel confident that your Mac - no matter if it's running Tiger or Leopard - will do the job. One last tip: When doing an major upgrade, always have a complete backup of your machine before doing the upgrade. That's your insurance policy in case something goes wrong. Click here for more of our exclusive Leopard coverage, including regular blog posts from Leopard users with their day by day experiences with Leopard and feature articles from Ben Pender-Cudlip, ex-Apple Genius (he's still a Genius, just no longer an Apple one). Submitted by oh on Thu, 10/18/2007 - 09:37 Public Content leopard