[pdlr]

thank you for this information.

[Snowshiro]

Originally Posted by pdlr

i was just thinking about switching to mac and now this is making me nervous. if i buy an imac next week will it come with this problematic operating system? this "leopard"?

Next week? No. Leopard isn't due until October. Tiger is pretty stable. Bear in mind no one has seen the final version yet - all the comments about instability are regarding developer releases.

You seem a little unsure about how Mac OS releases work, so briefly:

Apple's major OS is called Mac OS X (where the X means 10).

The current version is 10.4, which is generally referred to as 'Tiger' (Apple have named all their version 10 releases after big cats). This is what you will get if you buy a Mac in the next few weeks.

Next month, 10.5 is due to be released, which is known as 'Leopard'. You can read a lot about the changes here:

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard

You will not need to upgrade to Leopard unless there are particular features of the new version that you want (e.g. Time Machine - the new backup system). I will probably upgrade after a few months, but anyone who buys a newly released OS in the first few days is an idiot or a fanboy. They usually take a short while to iron out any initial hiccups.

Mac OS is pretty stable for 2 main reasons. Firstly, it's a unix derived system, which is an inherently better designed and more proven platform than say XP (although to its credit, XP is pretty stable these days). Secondly, Apple has a very small range of hardware to support, when compared to Microsoft. Windows needs to support literally thousands of different product configurations, and one crappy third-party driver can cause your system to meltdown. Apple by making their own hardware don't have to deal with this.

Vista is too early in its life cycle to be particularly stable yet. People are currently waiting for the first Vista 'service pack' - an update by Microsoft to improve and fix the OS. But this won't be out for a while yet.

Edit: One tip you might want to consider. Around the time of major OS upgrades, retailers often offer 'free upgrade when it's released' coupons to customers who buy a new machine just before the change. If they don't, their cash flow suffers because they don't sell any hardware for several weeks as everyone is waiting for the new version. You might want to keep an eye out for this, and take advantage if it happens. Then you can get a machine with the current stable OS and get a free upgrade in the future when you want it. Obviously there's no guarantee that this will happen with Leopard, but it's a possibility.

Edit 2: Also bear in mind that Macs also run Windows as well these days, so you can have both OSs on your machine and use whichever you need for a particular job, which makes the switch a lot easier to deal with.

[funkyprem]

not sure if this helps but... Analysis: Adobe CS3 may not work with Leopard - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)