Leopard!

Sometimes I wonder whether or not any given piece of technology will actually be worth my time, will actually be something into which I should look for good qualities and useful abilities.

Not today however; as I'll admit I've dived right into pre-ordering Mac OS X 10.5, "Leopard." I can't say what I do and don't like about it yet, it's very early for that. I can however, say that I'm not impressed by Apple's pricing scheme. Retail Leopard is $129 as always, and Educational Leopard is $116, which is about twice what Apple has charged for Educational copies of Mac OS X in the past.

Could I get it for less at the NAU Bookstore? Probably, like iWork and iLife, I could get it for much less if I waited for it to be in stock at the NAU Bookstore. But when will that be? Purportedly, with having preordered it, I'll get Leopard on October 26^th, the day it will be released. Not too bad given my existing track record, where I purchased Mac OS X 10.3 Panther only the day after it was released. Just that this time, there will be no cool giveaways or Apple Store bag for Cory.

I'm going to admit, some of the features of Leopard to which I am most looking forward are Time Machine and Spaces. I'm looking forward to Time machine because of my awful track record with data preservation, and Spaces because of my awful track record with window management. The potential to keep every application or group of application in its own area is great. I can already imagine having a UTV62.com space, a chatting space, a music space, etc.

I'm also interested in the new iChat, Mail, and iCal applications, and would also love to see more of the integration between the Leopard client OS and the Leopard Server system. I've heard that setting up managed workgroups is much easier this time around, but I'm only going to consider it significantly so if it's actually easier than using Windows NT 4.0 or Windows XP and Server 2003.

Anyway, I'm writing about it as though I already have it, or like I'll have enough machines to test its group capabilities, which isn't true in either respect. I did preorder it though, so I will have it eventually.