What I Love, and Loathe, About Leopard

Features like Stacks, Time Machine, and Cover Flow are marvels, but they have irritating downsides

by Arik Hesseldahl

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I'm usually among the first to install a new version of the Mac OS after its release. So it was with the Apple's (AAPL) latest OS, Leopard. Apple released it on Oct. 26, a Friday. I had Leopard installed on my MacBook Pro by the following afternoon. Having used it for the better part of two weeks, I know exactly what I like about it, and more importantly, what I don't.

The features I favor probably won't surprise you much, because by and large they are the same ones everyone else likes. But there are a few things I dislike—some of them linked to the things I like.

Hard Drive Hassle

Take Time Machine, probably the most talked-about and eagerly anticipated feature in Leopard. I'm probably not alone in having struggled with the finer points of backing up important data. I can't begin to count the money I've spent on external hard drives and various software applications that promise to automate the backup process. None has really worked, and now I have caches of important data scattered all over the house in various drives I've acquired over the years. I'm still not sure what I'll do with them all, but from here on, I know I'll be using Time Machine to prevent a widening of my digital diaspora, and I'm delighted that Apple created it.

But Time Machine has a big, glaring weakness. It's great if you use it on a desktop machine like an iMac or Mac Pro that doesn't move around much. But many Macs sold these days move frequently. Of the 7 million Macs sold in the fiscal year that ended in September, 4.3 million were notebooks. And if your Mac of choice is one of these notebooks, using Time Machine is a slightly more arduous process.

In order to take full advantage of it, you'll need to carry an external hard drive with you—a fair option considering the compact size of good hard drives from LaCie and G-Technology. Or you'll regularly have to reconnect your notebook to an external hard drive in the place you use it most. It's not a big deal, but who needs the extra task in the midst of a busy day?

Seductive Stacks

Nor is Time Machine compatible with network-connected hard drives, It's an unfortunate shortcoming, considering the rising popularity of this method for sharing information among the various several computers on a local network. I use one from Iomega (IOM) and have been seeing network-ready backup drives hit the market from LaCie, Seagate (STX), Buffalo Technology, and others. Apple's own Airport Extreme wireless router supports just such a drive to one of its Ethernet ports. After first hearing about Time Machine I had visions of setting up one huge networked drive that could store a terabyte of data and letting Time Machine make convenient backups to it from my MacBook Pro via Wi-Fi. Until and unless Time Machine supports network drives, it will remain just a vision.

Time Machine is among a handful of Leopard features, good as they are, that may not be fully baked. While these features should have been in time for the release, I am hopeful that new capabilities will be added in the updates that are certain to come in the weeks and months ahead.

Here's another example of a shining Leopard feature that has a downside: Stacks. Having suffered from a desktop I would describe as pathologically cluttered for years, I love Stacks, which gives you a better way to organize stuff that would normally end up loose on the desktop. Instead of downloading files to the desktop from the Web, they end up in a "Downloads" file that is embedded in the Dock. Great idea.