OS X on PCs
There are plenty of reasons for apple keeping OS X off generic PCs. Apple keeps all the hardware sales to itself, making more money and keeping out competition. But more importantly to us users of it, it means that there's only a handful of different machine specs so apple can keep good standards of software control. Getting a dodgy driver is very rare.
The 'teething troubles' mentioned are pretty much insignificant - systems with a 'system hack' application fail to upgrade, and it's a version behind on java (which will no doubt be updated anyway when it's ready). Overall the leopard launch has been surprisingly smooth, and there's plenty of good new stuff in there to justify the upgrade.
The bad news though is that apple have arsed around with a few things and made them worse:
- The dock is now 'reflective', making it less legible. But who cares about usability if it's shiny, right?
- The menu bar is now translucent, making it a LOT less legible. Why? So you can see the top 10 pixels of your background picture. Really useful.
- The stacks are a nice idea, but they have no icon (the icon is just the contents of the stack, all piled up) so if you have a few of them it's hard to tell which is which, and the icons change when the content of the stack changes. The old pop-up menu in tiger would be better for some folders, but it's been taken out.
- The icons for folders are crap. Instead of a folder with a nice colourful representation of what it contains on the top, so it's easy to tell which folder is which, they're all plain blue folders with a faint embossed bit to tell you what it is. At a glance, they look identical!