Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg favorably compares Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard to Microsoft’s Vista operating system. For current Mac users, however, he says the upgrade isn’t a “must have,” calling it evolutionary rather than revolutionary. From what I’ve seen of the Leopard’s features (and I’ve only seen what’s publicly available), I can’t disagree, and I also can’t speak to what the “under-the-hood” features might mean for the future. It seems to me, though, that there’s a lot of anticipation over this release — even more than for Tiger.
Category: Leopard
Or you could just ask them
In an uncharacteristic departure from his usually excellent reporting, Macworld’s Dan Frakes makes one of those bone-headed journalism mistakes that drive me crazy, and that epitomizes the problems with the Mac web.
In an Editor’s Notes blog posting entitled “Has Time Machine’s AirPort Disk use been grounded?,” Dan notes the fact that Apple has removed references to using hard drives connected to its AirPort Extreme Base Station from its online descriptions of Leopard’s new Time Machine application. Running through a list of what might cause Apple to remove AirPort support, Dan ends the post with this: “On Friday, we’ll at least know if the feature has been removed from Mac OS X 10.5.0.”
Why Friday? What’s wrong with right now? Why speculate when you can just shoot off a note to Apple and ask them? If they give an answer, stop speculating. If they say “no comment,” report it.
Journalists don’t wonder, they find out. They don’t speculate, they investigate. If online journalists want to be taken seriously (and they should want to), they need to start acting like journalists — even in blog posts.
And before you ask: Yes, I did contact Apple. The answer is no — Time Machine will not ship with support for AirPort Extreme.
You can stop wondering now.