Macworld | Editors’ Notes | Leopard, four months later

Leopard is the first version of Mac OS X that has been less stable than the previous one for me—to various degrees depending on the Mac. Up until Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), each major new version—10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4—has been considerably better than the one before it: fewer application crashes, less-frequent system freezes, and better memory management. But my Mac Pro has had more kernel panics in the past month than it had in a year and half under Tiger, and I experience, on all my Macs, application crashes a bit more regularly under 10.5 than I did under 10.4.

I’m still on Tiger and getting cold feet about upgrading to Leopard. SuperDuper works fine for me so Timemachine isn’t a big deal. Spaces is the only thing that might persuade me to switch. Still, the Macworld warnings are fascinating.