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OS X Leopard Ships On October 26th 762

David in AZ writes "According to the Apple website, Mac OS X Leopard will start shipping on October 26! From their blurb: 'Packed with more than 300 new features, Mac OS X Leopard goes on sale Friday, October 26, at 6:00 p.m. at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, Apple announced today. And, beginning today, customers can place pre-orders on Apple's online store. "Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we've ever released," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $129.""
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OS X Leopard Ships On October 26th

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  • by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:07AM (#20994899) Homepage Journal
    It used to be that for software anyway, the student discounts represented a significant savings, which was great for poor college students. But starting with iWork and iLife it seems that the student discount is only about 10%. So whereas Tiger cost $69 for the edu version, Leopard costs $116.....
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you're a poor student consider opting for the "Bittorrent Edition" instead.
    • by VCAGuy ( 660954 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:29AM (#20995273)
      I think it still is, though it appears that Apple has reduced the places where you can get those steep discounts at...their online "Education" store pricing is higher than it used to be, but since they don't bother with compliance checking, I think I can understand why. I attend UCF, and a quick check of our computer store's ordering page shows that Tiger (M9639Z) is $69, and that Leopard (MB021Z) will also be $69. iWork '08 cost me just $39...a quick check of a another Florida university's computer store showed the same pricing.
    • by Applekid ( 993327 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:34AM (#20995369)
      I've never really understood the student discount thing. If they can afford to sell things significantly cheaper than full retail, why not just apply it across the board?

      I just can't separate that from price discrimination against those not in school.

      Ooh, wait.
      1) Create fake school.
      2) ???
      3) PROFIT
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Helios1182 ( 629010 )
        Price discrimination is how the economy works. You try and get as many people as much as possible, then get those that didn't buy it at the original price to buy it for less, so on and so forth. That is why they release a $29 hardcover book, then a $15 paper back, and then a $10 reprint.
    • Using google currency converter:

      129 USD In SEK:
      129 U.S. dollars = 828.979584 Swedish kronor

      and the list price for apple store sweden:
      1.195,00

      hmm
      1195 SEK in USD:
      1 195 Swedish kronor = 185.957535 U.S. dollars

      So thats a 56$ premium. I don't think so.

      Congrats, apple. You just won a pirated copy of Leopard!
  • Macbooks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:08AM (#20994927)
    Does this mean that Macs sold after this date come with Leopard pre-installed as well?
  • Let's see (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Centurix ( 249778 ) <(centurix) (at) (gmail.com)> on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:12AM (#20994975) Homepage

    "According to the Microsoft website, Windows Vista will start shipping on October 26! From their blurb: 'Packed with more than 300 new features, Windows Vista goes on sale Friday, October 26, at 6:00 p.m. at Microsoft's retail stores and Microsoft Authorized Resellers, Microsoft announced today. And, beginning today, customers can place pre-orders on Microsoft's online store. "Vista, the nth major release of Window, is the best upgrade we've ever released," said Bill Gates, Microsoft's CEO. "And everyone gets the 'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just $600.""


    hmmm...
    • Hmmm... Has the US dollar gone THAT low? Here, you can get the top version of Vista upgrade for $300. The home basic or whatever it is is $120. In addition, I believe that most major retailers selling computers with Windows bundled on it offered free upgrades to Vista if you purchased your computer three months before Vista was released (might have been more). Apple is cutting the cheap upgrade period at less than four weeks, and is charging its users to upgrade. Oh well... I don't use either, so doe
  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thyamine ( 531612 ) <thyamine@ofdragons . c om> on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:12AM (#20994991) Homepage Journal
    I find it interesting (and funny?) that all these years I've had a PC (built myself, not from Dell or such) and never once purchased a copy of Windows or felt bad about it. Now that I've had a Macbook Pro for 5 months, and have been so happy with it, I'm eagerly awaiting Leopard so that I can actually buy it.

    I'm trying to avoid the whole fanboy thing, but it's hard to not like it. I mean, the pricing of the hardware is certainly high, but once you dive it it's quite nice.
    • by BladeMelbourne ( 518866 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:17AM (#20995059)
      Wait until you ditch OS X and install Linux... you will need tissues and moisturiser.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by abigor ( 540274 )
        Why would he want to purposely cause himself pain? I use Linux every single day, but my main desktop is a Macbook, for very good reasons.
    • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

      by itsdapead ( 734413 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:56AM (#20995737)

      I find it interesting (and funny?) that all these years I've had a PC (built myself, not from Dell or such) and never once purchased a copy of Windows or felt bad about it. Now that I've had a Macbook Pro for 5 months, and have been so happy with it, I'm eagerly awaiting Leopard so that I can actually buy it

      Apple are not perfect - they have priorities and make assumptions that may not suit everyone. They tend towards a "closed" PC-as-appliance mentality, and would probably be just as monopolistic as MS if they could get away with it. They over-hype things. Sometimes they just plain screw up...

      but...

      ...you at least get the impression that you have been deprioritised, locked-in, monopolized and possibly screwed by someone with some sort of vision making an intelligent and possibly risky effort to turn out a better product rather than a committee of PHBs and marketdroids taking input from a focus group.

      Also, Apple have managed to take UNIX and wrap it in a genuinely friendly GUI front end, c.f. KDE/Gnome/X who have taken Linux and wrapped it in a usable but clunky and over-engineered GUI that is still suffering from its ancestry as a way of letting Unix geeks run 8 simultaneous instances of their favorite CLI shell in translucent windows.

  • I still dont see a reason to go there. But then I also still use an incredibly outdated G5 2.3Ghz Dualcore Power mac.

    The premium price I will have to pay, I usually use the wife's student ID to get it cheap but not anymore with the latest raft of Apple pricing, makes me yawn and let it slide past.

    Is there anything that really is important in it that is a must have or is it all eye candy like apples website makes it look like?
    • Re:problem is... (Score:5, Informative)

      by spud603 ( 832173 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:22AM (#20995151)
      There's a lot that was done on the base level that will improve general usability. Finder is fixed (we hope). It's UNIX compliant now. Better use of 64-bit and multi-core processors.
      Also, some of the "eye candy" will be very useful: easy backup and multiple desktops built in (I've been using a 3rd-party solution [berlios.de] for this for a while now that works remarkably well, but has a number of glitches).
      I'm not beating down the door for 10.5, but I am looking forward to some of its conveniences.
      • Re:problem is... (Score:5, Informative)

        by failedlogic ( 627314 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:32AM (#20995341)
        Finder *is* definitely much improved. On a lower end system, its much faster and has enough features and speed increase it makes using Path Finder negligible.
  • Best upgrade? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by p00n0s ( 1117823 ) * on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:16AM (#20995045)

    "Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we've ever released," said Steve Jobs
    Well they wouldn't get far claiming it to be worst upgrade they've ever released...
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bazman ( 4849 )
      Or even the second-best upgrade they ever released. Marketing eh, dontcha love it?

  • I'm looking forward to the release, but I don't think I'll buy it until the first patches come out. A lot of press said Panther and Tiger were pretty solid, but I found a lot of little "quirks" and bugs that needed squishing after the public release. It's also inevitable that I'll have to work around some new "feature" in some of my photography scripts because something tiny changed. And then there's the impact to various macports which I'll have to wait for patches (or learn enough of the codebase to h

  • by nweaver ( 113078 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:21AM (#20995129) Homepage
    http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/timemachine.html [apple.com]

    Automatically hourly incremental backups to an external disk, with everything done readable in the filesystem as simlinks so you can look at arbitrarily hour-snapshots for the past day, day snapshots for the past month, and weekly snapshots thereafter.

    COOL!
  • 300+ features... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Techguy666 ( 759128 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:22AM (#20995137)
    Here's a list of all the new features: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html [apple.com]

    I'm praying that it's not just more bloat like Vista. It seems like Leopard is good on paper, better Boot Camp for those who still need Windows; better iCal for the people who use their Macs for organizing their life; Instruments, Core Animation, Unix certification, built-in Sandboxing for programmers; and other doodads for Joe-user such as a cooler Photobooth... But then, do I need my address book to make calls to Google Maps or the OS-wide dictionary to reach out to Wikipedia? Those last two are cool but I get worried when my "OS experience" is tied in anyway to whether I have network or Internet access.
  • by Vokkyt ( 739289 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:26AM (#20995227)
    From the Dictionary Section:

    "Wikipedia in Dictionary

    Harness the power of Wikipedia when you're connected to the Internet -- built right into it's Dictionary. You get a great Mac OS X user interface with super-fast searching and beautifully laid out-results."

    From the Parental Controls:

    "Wikipedia Content Filter

    Limit access to profanity in Wikipedia."

    Huh...interesting.
  • by drjzzz ( 150299 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:28AM (#20995251) Homepage Journal
    The "Technology [apple.com]" highlights include:

    Bonjour
    Holisticly provide access to ethical communities vis-a-vis client-focused

    That's it, just a string of buzzwords, not even grammatical, followed by a link to "learn more [apple.com]". Somebody attended too many marketing or web2.0 presentations. Or maybe they want to put the mystery back in. Turns out, it automagically configures an "instant network". The intro is curious. Does the "ethical community" description mean that security sucks?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by martinX ( 672498 )
      I looked (being of a suspicious nature), and you are right. WTF is "Holisticly provide access to ethical communities vis-a-vis client-focused. "

      I suspect someone put in some filler text that someone else forgot to take out...

      Especially since "Holisticly" is the wrong spelling.
    • by spiffyman ( 949476 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @12:29PM (#20998437) Homepage
      Just checked, and it's been fixed:

      Bonjour
      Network your computers and smart devices instantly.
      Meanwhile, Bonjour is nothing new [wikipedia.org]. It's just a Zeroconf implementation, and it's been around since 2002 [wikipedia.org], so the marketing droids likely aren't at fault.

      I think it's pretty clear that the culprit was some kind of filler text on a template or a joke. This is probably the web team's fault and no one else's.
  • 300 reasons to upgrade: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html [apple.com]

    Another 300:

    Steve Jobs: [points to Microsoft Programmer behind Baller] You there, 'Softy! What is your profession?
    Microsoft Programmer: I am a trainee QA, sir.
    Steve Jobs: [points to another 'Softy] And you, what is your profession?
    Microsoft Guy: 3rd level branch tester, sir.
    Steve Jobs: Branch tester.
    [turns to a third 'Softy]
    Steve Jobs: And you?
    Microsoft Guy: Graphics guy, I repainted XP to make it Vista...
    Steve Jobs: [turns around to OSX T
  • by tjstork ( 137384 ) <todd@bandrowsky.gmail@com> on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:30AM (#20995277) Homepage Journal
    If translucency were so great in the real world, we would be printing on onion skin and writing on glass things. But I think translucency is more to show that they can do something in 3d, done by people that have no real vision as to what to do with it.
    • by Shadowlore ( 10860 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @10:26AM (#20996287) Journal
      And you've done what, exactly, with it? Your vision is where?

      Just because you don't do things such as writing on translucent materials or glass things doesn't mean the rest of us don't. Not all technology is for every person. For example, those who actually build things by hand (quilters, seamstresses, wood workers, metal workers, etc.) quite frequently use translucent or clear materials for patterns, templates, and sometimes finished products. How about clear measuring cups? I've seen chefs use clear containers and mark various levels and information on them using erasable markers. Then there is the clear surfaces with map inlays used by tactical planners and tac-rooms. In the Army, decades ago, we would use clear or translucent materials over maps to create different plans and routes, and lay them over various maps. Oh, and waaay back in elementary, junior, and senior high school, and lo even in college, transparencies were used in classrooms with overhead projectors. I've seen the use of transparent or translucent overlay "technology" used in the real world by police, firefighters, medical personnel, construction crews, demolition crews, surveyors, etc..

      So since many of us DO use it, translucency (or transparency by your reference to glass) by your own argument IS great, and you simply lack the vision to make use of it, right? It isn't translucency that is overrated, it's your post.
  • If they offer it free to people who recently bought Macs? I recently started a new job as did a fellow coworker and we both received new Mac Pro's within the last month. It sure would be nice to get a Leopard upgrade.
  • by failedlogic ( 627314 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:40AM (#20995453)
    I follow some of the Apple 'rumor' sites. Curiously there are no known updates on the Mac Pro and the Mac Book Pro seems to be rumored for an upgrade in the Winter. Apple seems to be weaning off the Mac Mini (as I hear the Mini has had poor sales). It seems new hardware will have Leopard included but will not be upgraded.

    Consider most iMac users will *require* an enclosure if they want to use Time Machine as it will only work with an add-on drive and not on the system disk.

    This leaves me to ask, will we see a go-between on the Mac Pro and the iMac? I'd really love to see a lower cost tower than the Mac Pro. Expandable hard drive bays, upgradable video card and an extra DVD drive in the same case would be most welcome. My iMac G5 is in need of replacement and the footprint of the system when I account for the external DVD and dual-HDD enclosure doesn't make it seem as worthwhile for space saving.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Blahbooboo3 ( 874492 )
      Mini had poor sales because it was priced too much for the hardware contained. This was more a result of their inability to keep it refreshed. The price is fine when first released, but they go so long between refreshes that it gets to be quite expensive for the hardware contained...
    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @10:58AM (#20996867)
      If the Mini hadn't sold well, they would have dropped it by now - not did a minor update to it a few months back.

      I know a number of people that have minis, and like them (the new Intel versions are a lot more powerful than the older G4 ones).
  • by Tim Browse ( 9263 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @10:41AM (#20996547)

    ...was the day Doc Brown [imdb.com] completed the first test of his Time Machine. [apple.com]

    What a bunch of geeks.

  • General requirements (Score:3, Informative)

    by HTH NE1 ( 675604 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @11:31AM (#20997457)

    General requirements

    • Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5, or PowerPC G4 (867MHz or faster) processor

    Looks like the rumors were true: G3 support has been dropped. Also my G4 Cube no longer makes the cut.

    I guess I won't be buying the 5-seat license version after all.
  • by DaveM753 ( 844913 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @02:40PM (#21000511)
    ...or does that cost extra?
  • by neutralstone ( 121350 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @02:49PM (#21000661)
    It wasn't advertized for long, but the archive [archive.org] managed to catch one of Apple's first pages about Xcode 3.0, which mentions this nifty feature:

    Step back

    Step. Step. Step. Step. Step. Drat! If stepping through code wears you down, you'll love more forgiving debugger in Xcode 3.0. If you step too far, you can rewind to the previous point. That's right, Xcode 3.0 has gone non-linear. Simply click the run button to update your application and start it up. Hover over a variable in your code to see its value in a tooltip. Then just pause when you need to debug. If you go too far, just rewind. No need to start over. No need to set up a debug session. No need to switch focus. Just code, build, run, and debug in Xcode 3.0.
    What ever happened to it? Hopefully it will be included in some not-too-distant-future version.
  • by puppetluva ( 46903 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2007 @09:45PM (#21005321)
    I don't want the ultimate version, I'd just like the late-2006 JDK 6 version.

    You know, the "I wish I didn't regret buying a mac for Java development version". The one on the shelf next to the "Boy I'm glad I didn't donate my old Linux thinkpad since its all I have for Java 6 development" version.

    My mac is great -- unfortunately I don't get to turn it on much these days.

    Same old story. . .
    1) Apple starts doing great
    2) Profit!!!
    3) Apple gets really egotistical and forgets that other developers exist. (And thinks that archaic languages like Pascal and Objective-C are the only games in town. While coming up with some platforms external developers can't code at _all_ for like the iPhone, early Newton, etc.)
    4) ???
    5) Struggle for a few years and almost die!
    6) Repeat

    I wish they'd "Think Different" this time. Here's what I would suggest.

    1) Support cross-platform development languages so developers could choose their platform (think Java) above others.
    2) Support cross-platform standards for documents like Oasis/open-office formats instead of the egotistical AppleWorks, ClarisWorks, Pages hubris. That way they don't almost die when Microsoft decides not to upgrade Microsoft Office for 8 years or so.
    3) Support developers that develop for their devices instead of handcuffing them with bogus languages on their main platform (languages that no-one knows or cares to know in the general industry) or worse, disable them from writing real apps like on the iPhone.
    4) Make laptops that don't burn the users' genitals.
    5) Be less secretive about things that aren't new features and don't need to be secrets. (Like APIs, and platform development - like JDK development).
    6) Listen to the users even _after_ they get popular. It seems they score huge points with users after creating stuff the users want, then they completely ignore them for years until it is too late.

    I like Apple, I don't care for the Red Sox. I want Apple to stop playing like the Red Sox.

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