A manager at Best Buy told me the company’s Point of Sale systems (we used to call them cash registers) are being monitored for any sales of Apple’s Leopard operating system in advance of the official 6 p.m. local time release.

“We’ll be fined $130,000 for each copy we sell before six,” he told me.

That seems like a pretty steep fine. I think he might be mistaken about the per-sale part, though. I don’t know why Best Buy would agree to something with such a high potential cost in comparison to the potential return. Even if they make $40 on each copy, they’d have to sell over 3,000 copies to make up the profit lost from each one that went out early.

For those who just can’t wait the remaining few hours until Leopard’s release (or are just curious), AppleInsider has posted a gallery of screenshots from Apple’s newest big cat.

Seeing them all laid out like this gave me some overall impressions I hadn’t picked up on yet.

1. I dislike the new folder icons way more than I dislike the 3D dock;
2. I absolutely love the finished appearance the unified look gives to the system. I’m not saying it’s the perfect look and can never be improved upon, but the holistic effect of having all windows look the same is striking; and
3. The new icons are breathtaking (For a great example of this, just look at the texture in the Address Book application — there’s no technical need for this, but it speaks volumes on the values of Apple as a company). The text on what I think is the TextEdit icon is actually legible (the “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” commercial that launched Apple’ s “Think Different” campaign, for those wondering.)

In terms of eye candy, at least, it looks like a great release.

While I love the idea of Spotlight, Apple’s system-wide search utility, the reality is that it’s always been too dog-slow to be of much practical use as either a search tool or a program launcher (I’ve turned to the excellent Quicksilver for that). Maybe Apple realizes that, too: in Leopard, they’ve added some features that have the potential to make it much more attractive — much like some of the expanded capabilities of Google’s search bar.

Take this little tidbit, for instance, from David Pogue’s email newsletter, wherein he describes a sort of mini-calculator feature in Spotlight:

The Spotlight menu (upper-right corner of the screen) is also a tiny pocket calculator now. Hit Command-Space, type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu: 1879.6. You don’t even have to fire up the Calculator.

Neat.

Spotlight also (smartly) brings up applications that match your search criteria instantly — documents and other files come up later, making it potentially much more useful as a program launcher.

Finally, Spotlight now support Boolean searches, so you can look for things like “receipt AND iMac” or “report NOT biology.”

Now let’s hope Apple’s engineers have put similar effort into speeding up Spotlight’s performance.

Leopard’s Time Machine feature is spurring a lot of discussions on backups, and that’s a good thing. A lot of the discussion, though seems to be centering around backing up your whole machine, and whether or not your Time Machine drive is bootable if your Mac goes down for the count. (It’s not.)

I may be in the minority here, but I don’t backup my whole machine — I don’t wind up with a mirror image of my drive that I can swap into my Mac and reboot as if nothing ever happened. That would be an ideal situation, I suppose, but I’m more concerned with preventing data loss — things like pictures, family movies, important documents, receipts, email, songs I’ve purchased or ripped from CD, etc.

I have my original installer discs for both my Mac and my applications. If my computer crashes, I can just re-install them. It’s the irreplaceable stuff I want to make sure I protect. My backup strategy is to have multiple backups of my home folder and the separate hard drive that houses most of my media. Backing up those items takes less space and less time — and that makes it more likely that I’ll do it.

The fact that Time Machine doesn’t create bootable backups doesn’t matter to me in the least.

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.