6676 Still waiting for my copy of Leopard to arrive from California, but my daughter (who lives about 450 road miles away) has it installed, and says she's liking it a lot.

"It reminds me of the way I felt when we upgraded from Systems 7.5.5 and 7.6 to OS 8," she told me. "You just didn't want to go back. This is the same feeling."

However, she's using an Intel box, and I'm not, yet.

I hope I get that feeling running Leopard on a Power PC laptop. The impression I'm getting from various reports is that Apple devoted the lion's share (so to speak) of its optimization efforts for OS 10.5 on the Intel side, which I guess is logical and understandable. It won't surprise me if Leopard is the last Mac OS version to support Power PC machines at all, especially if it has as long a tenure as Tiger has.

It will take using it for a bit to determine whether Leopard makes better sense on a semi-elderly 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook than Tiger does. As for my two 550 MHz G4 upgraded Pismo PowerBooks, I'm highly skeptical that Leopard would be a satisfactory performer. It's officially unsupported at least two ways (sub-866 MHz G4 and a processor upgrade from a G3 machine), but apparently where there's a will, there's a way.

Low End Mac publisher Dan Knight dropped me a not to say:

Charles:

Exciting news. I've received two emails from people who have Leopard up
and running on Pismos with G4 upgrades. Their letters are posted at:
http://lowendmac.com/mail/mb07/1105.html

These are the first successful reports I've heard from G3 hardware
booting Leopard thanks to a G4 upgrade.

Dan

Hmmmm. I suppose in the fullness of time I may get around to trying a Leopard install on one of my Pismos just out of curiosity. I've got lots of empty hard drive space on one of them and two partitions. However, there have been folks who professed to be happy running Tiger with hacked installs on 233 MHz WallStreet and 333 MHz Lombard PowerBooks.

Personally, while I find Tiger's performance on the 550 MHz G4 Pismos satisfactory, Finder response is less than what you would call snappy, and I don't think they can gracefully cope with much more OS overhead. If Leopard offered similar performance to Tiger on these machines there might be a case to be made, but I wouldn't venture it without upgrading to 1 GB of RAM (currently 640 MB).

Which roundaboutly segues me back to my daughter's OS 8 analogy, which I only partly agree with. I remember upgrading to OS 8 from System 7.5.5 on my PowerBook 5300 back in 1998, and while I liked the expanded feature set, some of which was genuinely useful, I still think that System 7.5.5 was the optimum OS for that computer. With that version, Apple had finally wrung at least most of the bugs out of System 7.5, which is in general my unfavorite Mac OS version ever, and the anaemic old 5300 with its puny 100 MHz 603e processor was reasonably lively under 7.5.5, but annoyingly sluggish with OS 8.

I think it's the case as time unfolds that any Mac hardware system will hit its optimum OS version, but that most users, me included, will often venture beyond optimum by one or two versions.

I still think that for a 233 MHz G3 like my old WallStreet PowerBook for instance, OS 9.2.2 is the ideal performance system, and that's what I'm still using.

For these Pismos, I would venture to guess that the peak features/performance tradeoff has been reached with OS 10.4.10 (or 10.4.11 if it ever materializes).

For this 1.33 GHz PowerBook, the jury is still out. We'll see when my copy of Leopard gets through the customs constipation at the Canadian border thanks to the red-hot Canabuck's effect on cross-border shopping.


Charles W. Moore

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