Leopard available for pre-ordering
 

Apple OS X "Leopard" is now available for pre-ordering on the Apple Store. Looks like it should come out on the 26th of this month. ^

The question I have to ask myself is do I feel lucky? Do I have the time and patience to go through another operating system upgrade?

Granted all my past experiences have been with Windows, but the pain is still very real....

:)

^ Very much looking forward to this! I placed my order this afternoon

Having done many Mac OS upgrades on my own machines over the years I can tell you that you have nothing to worry about. Mac OS upgrades typically go very smoothly!

What would be the benefit to pre-ordering? I doubt there is a discount.

The current OS is pretty robust, so I can't imagine why anyone would rush to the next one. Better to wait a few months until all the bugs are fixed.

Official availability is 6 pm on the 26th. (Presumably that's local time wherever you are.)

No major benefits and there is no discount. My order status does say it will be delivered on 10/26 - beats waiting in line at the store I guess.

Quick Look and Time Machine look like great ideas. Time Machine backs up your Mac every hour as long as the Mac is connected to the back up harddrive. You can go back and see what your Mac looked like at any previous hour. Of course eventually you'll have yet another full hard drive.

Quick look lets you look at files without opening them. It's a faster way to find stuff.

I'm picking up my copy at Mac Expo. I have no concerns over upgrading to Leopard and look forward to finally having a proper play with the new features!

Just so everyone knows, the price for Leopard on Amazon is $109 for the single license and $189 for the family pack. Free shipping as well.

For those interested, here's the features list: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

Discounts can be found on the interwebs.

Amazon and Macmall offer a 20$ discount, free ship. Not guaranteed to arrive on Friday, although amazon DOES have a tendency to offer books on their release date to arrive ontime.

As for the Leopard OS. one of the nicest new features, is the ability to control, show screen and share screens from local to remote macs. In essense, remote desktop sharing. This has not been a standard EASY feature of the past os's, the underlying technical VNC infrastruture has been there, but apple always charged 179$+ to get the client applications.

Third parties have offered a similar FREE solution for a while now, but it wasn't perfect or optimized for mac to mac os usage.

For the 129$, or 109$ of the upgrade this will be a real benefit for me.

Education price is $116 online from Apple, not $69 as it was for Tiger and its predecessors. :(

Education price for Leopard at the university where I work (Northwestern) is $69 on university purchase orders, and free shipping. I ordered 10 copies this morning for my staff, off of our customized Apple web site.

Education discounts for Apple products sometime vary from one institution to another.

yes
 

yes, last upgrade was 59$ at stanford, I heard some institutions has it for 39$. Each institution historically, at least, was selling at differant prices. I think I'll drive down to the bookstore and check it out.