OSX 10.5 shipped Friday; but if you looked hard enough, you found it early…

Sorry this is a bit late, everyone. I’ve had a lot to do with the new edition to the family. Our son, Josh will be 6 weeks old on Thursday, and he isn’t even close to sleeping through the night yet.  Ah well… that’s what little boys are made of I guess… I’ll have a regular column out this Wednesday as planned.

Leopard hit the streets Friday 26-Oct-07 at 6pm. Interestingly enough, a final copy of the OS made its way around the internet before then. While Vista leaked before its final release, the biggest and most notable difference between the two operating systems is that Leopard doesn’t require activation or have other anti-piracy impediments.  Some Mac enthusiast sites are using the leak to prep early reviews of the new OS.

An interesting item of note for those sticking with Tiger… If you haven’t pulled down the latest version of Boot Camp, you won’t be able to find it on Apple’s site any more. As Boot Camp is part of the new OS, its beta status is officially over. New users will have to buy a copy of Leopard in order to run Windows on their Intel based Macs.  If you had Boot Camp on your PC before the Leopard release, you should still be able to boot into windows and use it without any issues.

If and when you upgrade to Leopard, exiting Boot Camp users need to keep an important point in mind: It is not completely known what Upgrading will do to your Boot Camp partition.  You should just be able to create a new drivers CD, boot into Windows and upgrade the Windows Boot Camp Assistant.  However, other WUGNET members are indicating that they are having trouble doing that. It seems strange to me that Apple would make current Mac-Windows users blow their Windows partitions and reinstall everything from scratch.  If that is the case, I know I won’t be happy. However, they may be trying to get existing BC users to cough up the $129 on the upgrade to Leopard, which ships with Boot Camp built in.