I was one of the people who posed a lot of question marks behind all the changes, but I always had, in the back of my mind, the idea that you cannot judge a user interface based on its screenshots. Many people wondered if the changes made actually had a point, if they contributed to better usability or a better user experience, or if they were just a sort of knee-jerk response to Windows Vista’s Aero. If there is one part of Leopard that received criticism even months before its targeted release date, looks is the one. Leopard has seen a major overhaul of its graphical appearance. Intel GMA X3100 with 144MB of shared memory.I asked Apple to loan me a fairly basic MacBook, as this basic configuration is most likely the most popular. After the initial ‘new-Mac-setup’, and the update to 10.5.1, I was ready to go. Seeing this was a brand new MacBook, I did not have to perform an installation or upgrade. For more information on those, I redirect you to John Siracusa’s outstanding review of Leopard over at Ars. Seeing I am not a programmer, I will not go into the various new developer features. In this review, I will start by detailing the visual changes, after which I will delve into the various new and updated applications and features, a few words on the MacBook, followed by a conclusion. They changed the dock massively, the menubar, the finder, the overall theme, the icons, and so on. Still, Leopard is probably the biggest visual shift in the history of Mac OS X.

Apple really stuck to their original design. Despite the massive changes over the past 23 years, the visual similarities between the software on the first Mac and this Leopard release are amusing to see. Obviously, the Mac OS has seen a massive shift between Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS 10.0, but the lineage remains, and is clearly visible.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is the Mac OS’ 66th release (not counting the 10.x.x releases), dating back to 1984, making it one of the longest running lineage of operating systems available. Apple NL was kind enough to fix this problem for us, by generously loaning me a brand new MacBook with Leopard installed so I could review it for OSNews. Since my Cube could not run Leopard, and I did not have any other Macs, I was unable to delve into Leopard right away.

Mac os 9.2.2 to mac os x 10.0