Made that realization as I was driving down to Carousel to wait an hour in line to buy a copy of the new Mac OSX, dubbed Leopard. I never thought I’d do something like that.
I was just gonna blow off the big kick off at 6, but I had a friend who was going was looking forward to having a chat whiling away the hour. When I made the scene about 5:10 there were already about 40 people in line. Hmm, guess the stake out was a good idea. After I made to the end of the line, an Apple Creative wheeled a cart with coffee (Starbucks, none-the-less) and bottled water, thanked me for coming out and offered me a beverage. These Apples guys are alright.
The balance of the hour was split between diehards waxing on their various macs and iPhones and the uninitiated asking again and again just what Apple was releasing this time around. Of course, just saying Leopard got some strange looks. The other semi-amusing part was folks who wanted to get in the closed Apple store (or right after the reopening) to do their non-os related shopping.
Soon enough, at 6:02, the gate on the storefront went up to a semi-enthusiastic cheer. Thankfully (probably from iPhone experience), they controlled access to the store with some ropes and a few security guards. About 10 minutes later, I stepped in a got my free t-shirt and headed back to the check out to grab my Leopard copy. In normal fashion the line was moving fairly quickly with other staff pulling out the credit card purchasers and ringing them out on their handheld terminals. A few minutes later I was heading back out with my Leopard family pack in hand.
Later in the evening, I ran a Super Duper backup (not that I was really worried) and started the Leopard installer. The install process was fairly uneventful and took about an hour including a media check on the DVD before the actual install began. Everything came up nicely on the final restart.
For the most part, things are working out fine. I’m enjoying a lot of the new visual tweaks like the update doc and system menus. I’m trying to whittle down my downloads directory so the cool stacks feature on the doc will show the fan from all the Leopard screen captures I’ve seen lately.
Like I said, most things are working fine. But there are a few sticky wickets. The official Last.fm player and Mozilla Songbird go down in flames when you try to start them up. I’m not too worried about them, I’m sure there’ll be updates for those soon enough. The other slightly strange item I noticed was that when I go to the Network in Finder, I don’t see any other computers in my (otherwise Windows) network. I’m guessing its more of a configuration item than a bug. Gotta look into that further.
I’ll try to file further Leopard briefs as I find more cool (or busted) stuff… stay tuned.
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