Yes, it’s exactly as it appears to be. I am now a beaming owner of a Macbook Pro running OSX Leopard.
They aren’t lying where they tout a 24-hour-next-business-day delivery time. I ordered it on Saturday; received it Monday afternoon. I have to admit that I was expecting Leopard preloaded, but the drop-in disc installation was a painless experience. Apart from some outstanding minor, but nagging application compatibility issues (curse you, font not setting properly in Adium bug), I’ve already set it up as comfortably as possible, of course, spending the better part of the afternoon doing so.
This may sound obvious, but it’s a helluva lot more responsive than my iBook ever was… in addition to the monstrously powerful dual core Intel processor I figure Apple has tinkered behind the scenes - and nowhere is this more obvious than the Finder. Not only has it received an ‘upgraded’ iTunes-esque facade (ugly), I hear its processes are now multi-threaded (no more lags playing around with network shares) although some anticipated functionality (in essence, to finally match up with Windows Explorer) is still very glaringly missing. Cover flow is superfluous, but I like the tweaked List view.
Stacks, Spaces and Time Machine are beyond a shred of doubt very nifty, and they work flawlessly, although Time Machine makes for a perhaps too compelling reason to buy an additional high-capacity external hard drive. But my favourite new OS feature has to be Quick Look. Highlight virtually any file and hit the space bar - and an unbelievably speedy popup preview of its contents appears. I never liked Preview - now I can browse PDF files without opening any program, for that matter.
I love my new laptop, and I would love it even more if I could disable the dock background entirely (currently I’ve switched the horrendous reflector to the dark glass, which is somewhat bearable, but still not perfect). Or get rid of that distasteful translucency plaguing the menu bar. Seriously, Apple, what the hell. You don’t have to go out of your way to discourage people from dual-booting Vista by dressing OS X up so ostentatiously; furthermore, please, what is with this NON-CONFIGURABILITY?
On the desktop front, I’ve implemented a pretty (and working, and workable) Enlightenment desktop on the Xubuntu install on the Pentium III. I might utilize it as a photograph repository - Picasa works.
Oh yes, time for some Civilizations IV and, thereafter, Extended Essay. I need to pack these boxes, though.
