Leopard Preview: Letdown or Return to Normalcy?

On August 7, 2006 the Mac community was twisted into a tightly coiled ball waiting to erupt in a spastic frenzy of Mac love when Steve Jobs previewed Leopard to the world. At 3:00PM EST on August 7 the same members of the Mac community were despondent, nothing seemed like a must-have or a Mac-only thing. Beefed up iChat with green screen effects? Yes, soon you can upload your Daily Show on location, knock off bits to youtube and share them with the world! Forget that Leopard is faster, 64 bit, Intellifiied and the like, those are under the hood things, we’re Mac users, we like our cool out in front where we can show it off to the world! Most disappointing preview of an Mac OS ever! Steve, really, go slap some folks around and make it better, we need more shiny!

Or, equally plausible, maybe the expectations of the Mac community were too high. How did the still incomplete (what is that secret thing you’re holding back Steve?) Leopard preview stacked up with OS offerings of the past? A quick survey may shed a little light on the subject.

It is tempting, at this point, to start at the very beginning and examine every Apple OS produced. While that would be informative, it would also be tedious (and I’ve got the market cornered when it comes to tedious writing). The real interest in Apple produced OSes didn’t start until System 7 and didn’t really get going until OS X. So, somewhat arbitrarily, we start with System 8 and see just what each revision brought:

System 8

The same year that Apple bought NEXT, a few years after the “next generation” Apple OS was supposed to be finished, Apple released Mac OS 8. The year was 1997. As with any Apple OS revision they tried, really tried to make a big deal out of it. Thing was OS 8 wasn’t really OS 8. OS 8 was, in fact, OS 7.7 renamed to make life difficult for the clone makers who had licenses to use all OS 7 software.

What users got when they bought OS 8 (and a lot of them did, OS 8 sold over a million copies in under two weeks) was a different look, a finder that multitasked better than system 7 but still not very well, a HFS+ file system and a chance to help Apple make it through some rough times.

System 9

A few years later Apple rolled out System 9. What did system 9 have to offer to consumers? Free iTools! Host a page, get a .mac mail account and several other nifty things included in the price of the upgrade.

In truth, there really wasn’t much for the average consumer in OS 9 but there was ton of improvements as far as Apple was concerned. The transition to OS X was underway and OS 9 featured a lot of things to help the transition move along as smoothly as possible.

OS X Beta

There was a huge difference between the version of OS X and the OS it would some day replace. The graphics were completely different, gone was the Apple menu and the dock had arrived. It a move that showed an astonishing amount of gall Apple was willing to sell the beta to customers for $30.

Whether that money was well spent or not depended on your perspective. If you were willing to pay Apple for the privilege of seeing the new OS up close and personal, it was the deal of the century. If you wanted to use it for something useful, well you were straight out luck. OS X beta was so slow and limited it probably should just have had a build number.

OS 10.0 (Cheetah)
It wasn’t difficult to outdo OS X Beta and Cheetah managed to be ever so slightly better. It was still slow and kernel panics happened far too often. The big improvements over the Beta for Apple included the new asking price ($129.95).

The dock was tweaked but, to the average user, most of the other changes from the Beta were hidden from view.

OS 10.1 (Puma)

10.1, code named Puma, was dubbed by Steve jobs to be the “mainstream release” of OS X. In one way the description was apt users could play DVDs in Puma and use many more peripherals.

Sure, Puma was much better than 10.0 but the interface was the same and there wasn’t any added eye candy. Apple had more faith than the masses and used 10.1 as the default OS for Macs.

OS 10.2 (Jaguar)

Jaguar is the release that can be pointed to as the one that set the stage for later expectations. The video card started pulling more weight thanks to the inclusion of Quartz Extreme. Address Book made its first appearance, Bonjour made networking a no hassle kind of thing and iChat showed up. Most deliciously, Mail got a spam filter.

While there was plenty of shiny newness to go around Jaguar also sped everything up… a lot. This was a huge release and the first time OS X was truly competitive with anything beside the previous version of OS X.

10.3 (Panther)

10.3, of course, sped the whole system up. The release also provided plenty of eye candy. People were stunned by Expose window management (does anyone still use this?) and fast user switching is still a compelling (and cool looking) feature. iChat got upgraded to iChat AV and Apple switched to the brushed metal interface. All in all, another update that kept the entire “Steve is gonna wow us” vibe going.

10.4 (Tiger)

Tiger is what you’re probably using right now and, since you’ve become used to it, you have likely forgotten all the greatness that is Tiger. With Tiger came not only Dashboard Widgets (had people drooling at the time) but Spotlight. There is plenty of eye candy to go around but there were a plethora of other improvements as well.

Naturally, there was an iChat upgrade, now conferencing was possible. Safari received iffy RRS support and Mail went to version 2. Core Image, Core Data, and Core Video all made the scene. In short, Tiger was a huge update that satisfied both developers and users.

With that necessarily truncated history of Apple OS releases, we see a few things. The notion that every release must be chock full of new applications and drool producing eye candy is of a recent vintage. You can also tell that someone at Apple really loves iChat, can’t have a new version of OS X without a significantly upgraded version of the chatty! So, were the expectations to high? The answer depends on what your perspective. If you take the long view, you see 10.2-10.4 as anomalies, a bump in the graph so to speak. If you’re new to Mac watching you’re wondering where the magic went.