Trials & Tribulations Installing Leopard

<rant>

OK, so with the benefit of hindsight, I am a fool and a sucker for new ’stuff’, but I was excited by the release of Apple’s new operating system, and pre-ordered so that it would be delivered on Friday, release day in the UK. It arrived and I loaded it today. Well, when I say ‘loaded’, I mean that I have spent the entire day trying to get it installed on my beautiful 24″ iMac, and now at 8.30pm, I have finally succeeded.

I was complacent. With all-things-Apple, I am used to opening the box and for it to just work. It always does. Well, Leopard was my wake up call! Judging from the forums, there is a real problem with the Leopard install procedure and Apple should be ashamed of themselves for releasing it with such significant problems. Apple discussion forums have been on fire with problems today and, thank God for people taking the time to post their experiences and solutions.

For me, and most others it seems, the solution is to run an ‘archive and install’ rather than the straightforward update. For sure, this is the last operating system that I buy on release day - I totally advocate waiting a few weeks for it to bed in and inevitable patches to be released. But when you’ve got to have it, you’ve got to have it. Now that it’s running, it is very lovely - but there is a distinctly sour taste in my mouth from the fiasco that I went through to get it working. It just shouldn’t happen with Apple and I hope that they wake up and apologise publicly to their loyal user base for what seems to be a shoddy upgrade procedure.

</rant>