Review: Can Leopard Take On Vista?

Well, one is a feline predator and the other is a view. While hardly comparable in those terms, solution providers need to consider how Apple's latest operating system stacks up in comparison to Microsoft's Windows Vista. Will Leopard finally convince solution providers to push Apple solutions instead of Microsoft? Channel Test Center decided to find out.

Just as Vista was a substantial upgrade to previous Windows operating systems, Leopard is a major alteration to the Mac OS. Like Vista, it includes updates to the integrated applications and attempted to improve its security features. Initial reports of Leopard have been fairly positive, but for this comparison Channel Test Center focused on usability features. Engineers were enthusiastic about Leopard's sheer number of features and ability to do things in fewer dialog boxes than Vista. Where there were gaps between Windows and OS X, such as in networking, Leopard has closed them, and where previous versions of OS X did something well, Leopard has jumped ahead and established itself as the king of operating systems.

First of all, a few caveats to this comparison. The Test Center did not look at installation: New York-based Tekserve provided a Macbook with Leopard preinstalled and Lenovo provided a Thinkpad X61 with Vista Business preinstalled. Since the hardware was entirely different, Test Center also did not run any performance benchmarks.

Price: Leopard is easily obtainable, since it will be preinstalled on all new Macs and the upgrade package is available starting at $129. While most PC vendors are selling pre-installed Vista machines, there are a few, such as Panasonic, that continue to offer Windows XP on some of their systems by default. Vista's upgrade packages range from $100 to $259, based on version. And there lies another difference: Unlike Vista, there's only one Leopard. Mac users don't need to scratch their heads trying to figure out which features are included in the "basic" or "business" editions.

Advantage: Leopard

Look and Feel: Mac faithful have waited over two and a half years for the upgrade to Tiger, but anyone hoping for a new look and feel will be disappointed. While there are some visual changes, Apple has focused on making existing tools work better and easier to use. In that sense, Vista is a very significant change visually, with features moving around and things being renamed.

In Leopard, the dashboard is now more transparent and the icons all have a reflection on the dashboard. While it adds to the "ooh, shiny!" element in Leopard, it's quite distracting. In previous OS X versions, an arrow indicated active applications on the dashboard. That arrow has now been replaced with a blue dot at the bottom of the application icon. Test Center engineers found the dots hard to get used to. What was wrong with the arrows? Finder has been overhauled to look more like iTunes. The new interface lets you scroll through thumbnails of images, videos, and documents. All folders use the same icon, however, so there's no way to tell what kind of files are inside the folders. Test Center engineers noted another change in folders they didn't like. In Tiger and previous versions, special folders, such as Library, Applications, Music, and Public, were easy to identify by the brightly-colored images on the folder icons. In Leopard, all the folders are darker blue icons with the images embossed. The low-contrast images make it harder to differentiate when looking at them in small sizes, such as on the Dock. Apple went a step backward in usability with the folder and icons.

As part of its attempt to overhaul the way Explorer looks and feels, Vista's icons do more than just differentiate between file types and folders. Many files have thumbnails for icons, making it visually easy to identify a file. For example, an image file's icon would be the thumbnail of the actual image in Vista. On Leopard, the same file would just have a generic JPEG icon to show that it is a JPEG file. When sifting through multiple image files, this can make a difference. Vista's folder icons also display little piles of thumbnails for a quick peek at what's inside.

Advantage: Vista

Next: Leopard makes a comeback in file management

File management: Leopard tries to atone for its usability mistakes by allowing users to view the files without opening them. Apple has brought Cover Flow (familiar to iTunes and iPhone users) into Finder. When Cover Flow is enabled, a large preview of each selected file appears about the list of files in a folder. Since these previews are live, they can be accessed without opening them: users can scroll through multipage PDF files through Cover Flow.

Quick Look is another such feature, letting users preview files without opening the file, and equivalent to Vista's Windows Preview Pane in Explorer. Quick Look is a bit more powerful, however.

Apple's Stacks is brand-new. Any folder placed on the right side of the dock takes advantage of this stacks feature. When the folder is clicked, all the contents are displayed, either as a grid, or as a neat list of icons. A default stack keeps all downloaded files in place and the desktop is no longer the default destination. Having all the downloaded files in an accessible folder cleans up the desktop.

Advantage: Leopard

Desktop: Leopard's desktop has new colors for its windows " gray " but old colors for its buttons and scrollbars " aqua blue " which seems a little off visually. Test Center engineers had about six applications open at one time, and it was difficult to identify which of shade of gray was the active window.

Like Vista's Aero Glass interface, Leopard also has translucent windows, which Test Center engineers found, frankly, annoying. At one point, engineers had Microsoft Word and Safari open at the same time on the Macbook. The animated banner ad on the Web browser was visible through the palettes on Word, which was a distraction. While the semi-transparent windows lend to the whole eye-candy effect, it is very difficult to work with on a regular basis.

Test Center engineers tried to reproduce the effect on the Thinkpad and noted that while the underlying windows were visible at the edges of the window, this effect wasn't as pronounced. For Vista Basic users, they are spared the transparent look.

Advantage: Vista

Hardware requirements: Like Vista, Leopard has some strict hardware requirements. While Leopard can run on any Intel-based Mac, it can also be installed on some PowerPC G5 and G4 configurations with 867MHz or faster processors. The OS requires at least 9 Gbytes of hard drive space and 512 Mbytes of memory. Based on these configurations, machines as old as six years old, may be able to run Leopard with some limitations. For example, Boot Camp runs only on Intel-based Macs and some features of Photo Booth won't work on a G4.

Vista, on the other hand, can work on hardware as low as 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and a 20 GB hard drive with 15 GB of free space. For the ideal experience, a 1 GHz processor and 1 Gbyte of system memory is recommended. The video card has to support DirectX 9 graphics and have at least 128 MB of graphics memory. Vista will probably work on machines sold within the last two years, but any older is tricky.

While Leopard will run on older configurations than Vista, Mac hardware is not as readily available as PC hardware. System integrators can easily build a PC capable of running Vista and solution providers can shop around for the best price. Business customers can probably upgrade their existing Mac hardware to Leopard much easily than their PC counterparts can move to Vista. However, hardware costs may not justify the move to an all-Mac environment.

Advantage: Draw

Next: For backup, Leopard puts in a strong performance Backup: Time Machine is such a game-changer that no look at Leopard can afford to ignore this application. As soon as an external drive -- USB or firewire -- is plugged in, Time Machine will detect it and ask if it should be used as a backup drive. Time Machine can also be configured to use a network drive for backups. Once the backup device is identified, Leopard will make up-to-date backups of every file on the Mac on the external drive. It will also make a backup whenever there is a system change. The system makes hourly backups in the current 24-hour period, everyday for the past month, and each week for any files older than that.

The graphical interface is very easy to use and pleasing to the eye. Time Machine can also encrypt files.

Unlike most backup applications, the user does not have to close applications when making a restore. To recover a file or the contents of the entire system, users would select a date from a scrolling timeline which has snapshots of selected folders and files through their history. The selected content is then restored. Files in the trash can that day can also be recovered.

Vista's Backup and Restore sets backup times on a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule. However, it doesn't back up any system changes. Even if it did, it doesn't have the slick feel that Time Machine has. Before seeing Time Machine, Backup and Restore seemed just fine. Now it feels lacking.

Advantage: Leopard

Networking: Leopard has made networking easier than in previous versions. Leopard can find all the shared folders on the network and other machines, both Windows and Mac, and drop icons automatically into the "Shared" section on the sidebar. This can be a little disconcerting when co-worker's folders appear without warning but quite convenient to have. Vista does the same for networked PCs, listing them under "Network" on Explorer's sidebar.

Connecting to Windows machines is not as seamless or consistent as it should be. Sometimes an icon would drop off the list, or report "Connection failed" when trying to establish a connection. To see the Windows machines properly, engineers had to restart the Mac.

Getting OS X to talk to Directory Services like LDAP and Active Directory used to cause many headaches for system administrators. Leopard now offers these administrators relief in the form of the Directory Utility application. The application has a summary screen that displays the Active Directory domain and the Open Directory Server to which the machine is bound. The application also creates NFS automounts to have certain network shares accessible to all users easily. Earlier OS X versions buried the setting where the name of the Windows workgroup could be entered. It is much easier to find under Leopard's System Preferences.

All these things are quite easy to do in Vista, of course. But now that Leopard can also do them, it's no longer a Vista advantage.

Advantage: Draw

Next: Leopard's built-in virtualization tools go beyond Vista Applications and Driver Support: Early Vista adopters had to deal with missing drivers and software applications that weren't Vista-compliant. Leopard users are encountering similar problems, on a smaller scale. There hasn't been much talk about hardware issues with Leopard -- in fact, the HP DeskJet printer that required a separate Vista driver installed perfectly fine under Leopard. However, many of the software packages are not quite ready for Leopard. For example, automation did not work properly in Adobe CS3 under Leopard and Framemaker had some issues. Many of the driver support issues are launch-date issues affecting only early-adopters. Third-party manufacturers will eventually catch up and release proper fixes.

It was nice to see hardware products continue to work under Leopard without needing any new drivers, though.

Boot Camp now comes integrated with Leopard. Users can install Windows XP or Vista on to the Mac and have a dual-OS system fairly easily. While there have been some hacks, as a general rule, Mac OS X will not run on non-Apple hardware.

Leopard also comes with some built-in virtualization tools that are beyond what Vista has out of the box. While there are plenty of third-party virtualization tools for Windows, there's nothing inside Vista that can handle multiple virtual desktops. Leopard's Spaces feature reminded users of the multiple desktops available to Linux users on GNOME. Having different applications on different desktops can reduce clutter and make multi-tasking easier.

Advantage: Leopard.

Security: Apple has improved a lot of security features in Leopard. For years, OS X users have benefited from the fact that the Windows operating system and its applications have been the target of most malicious attacks. However, Apple has come under increased scrutiny about whether its products can withstand an attack if it happens.

Leopard has introduced a sandbox feature which keeps certain applications and files in a restricted environment separate from the rest of the system.

Users are also prompted with a dialog box the first time they try to run a program they've downloaded from the Internet. The dialog box will have information about when the file was downloaded and which application was used to download it. The security messages are easy to understand, which is a plus on the usability side.

Finally, parental controls more prominent. These controls make it easy to set up content filters, define usage time limits and log all Internet activity. There's no equivalent control in Vista, although there are plenty of third-party applications.

However, Test Center engineers were shocked that Leopard does not have the firewall turned on by default, while Vista does. It seems like a basic enough option that Apple should have enabled out of the box, considering the likelihood that the Mac would be on the Internet. Vista's security features can be a little hard to take, especially its repeated promptings to confirm on opening files or running processes, but there's a sense of actual security protection in place.

Advantage: Draw. The firewall hurt Leopard.

Conclusion: Mac OS X has attracted users all along with its easy to use interface and lack of security problems. Leopard enhances what was already a stellar operating system with several improvements making it that much harder for Windows users to ignore.

That said, Test Center wonders how much of the business community will move off Windows to adopt Leopard. Along with hardware considerations, there is a vibrant and robust development community for Windows applications. While many business software will not work on Mac OS X, with so many management tools moving to the Web browser, that may no longer deter business users. Perhaps the channel should stick with Windows XP for a little while longer.