The Inquisitr » leopard

Apple fail: Leopard 10.5.7 causes freezing, overheating issues

Duncan Riley — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:19:09 +0000

The latest update to Apple’s Leopard operating system 10.5.7 is causing widespread problems with Mac products including regular OS freezing and overheating issues (both possibly related.)

I know this because my two year old Macbook Pro has been constantly freezing since I installed the update, and when I started searching for a solution it took about 5 seconds in Google to discover that I was far from alone.

My first thought was that the freezing was directly related to the heating problem, and a number of threads say that this might be the case. Macbook Pro’s like the one I own have long been known to have overheating problems, and it has always run hot, so hot that you can’t place it on your lap some days. However until 10.5.7 it has never crashed on a regular basis. The problem though is that it would appear that what ever 10.5.7 does, it’s not just my type of machine having the issue, I’ve read reports of new unibody Macbook’s, iMac’s and even a Mac Pro have the same issues (I’m not game to install it on my Mac Pro yet.) I also implemented a third party fan controller to bump up the fan rate so as to bring the heat under control….and still it freezes on a regular basis.

You don’t have to believe me though: Jeffrey Zeldman who is well known and respected in the design community has reported the exact same thing.

Apple, I’ve spent thousands of dollars on your products because you’ve promised that they just work. Now they don’t. Please fix the issue urgently, it is not acceptable that a laptop I paid $3,300 AUD for constantly crashes and is unusable.

For everyone else: do not install Leopard 10.5.7 if you haven’t yet.

Apple yanks umbilical chord, fanboys get all jizzy

Steven Hodson — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:12:06 +0000

For those of you who haven’t placed themselves under some rock somewhere it is kind of hard to escape the fact that Apple hosted its World Wide Developer Conference today that saw line-ups around a whole city block. As usual the rumors and prognostications have been going strong leading up to this morning’s keynote speech and as expected primed up the troops for their dose of Apple goodness.

So I guess it’s kind of cool that they rebranded the current iPhone as … the iPhone but with a kill the Pre buzz price of $99.00. This of course opened up the way for the announcement every iPhone fan was waiting for – well at least some of what they had been hoping for. Video, Voice Control, Auto focus, and of course the holy grail of the one feature to rule them all – cut and paste. all this goodness that has existed on other smartphones for years for the price of $199 (16GB) or $299 (32GB).

Not to mention that for everywhere else except the US iPhone 3GS (S for speed WooHoo!) users would have MMS and tethering capabilities at some point after the 19th of June. For the AT&T ~~suckers~~ customers – well you’ll just have to wait for some undeclared future point in time.

Now the real interesting point for me was the announcement of Snow Leopard being available for $29.00. For those not familiar with this new release of OS X it is an upgrade to the existing Leopard release of the Apple operating system. For anyone else who is having to get it for the first time it’ll still cost you $149.00 (plus the cost of the Mac computer).

In other words they are issuing a service pack that has some enhancements included and you get to pay for the privilege – wow. I can just image the uproar if Microsoft started charging for their service packs, but then of course everyone knows how evil Microsoft is by selling an operating system that can run on just about any computer configuration on the market.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Twitter love-fest and other such useful real-time ego puffing.

[picture courtesy of Digital Daily]

The Important Thing With Leopard 10.5.3: It’s Safe To Install

Duncan Riley — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:07:15 +0000

Apple has released OS X Leopard 10.5.3, a service release to the Mac operating system that addresses over 70 bugs, or in Apple speak “general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac.”

The highlight of the release is Address Book support for syncing with your Google account. To use, users go to preferences with Address Book, add synchronize with Google, then enter their Google account details. Address book does the rest syncing your contact details to and from Google Contacts/ Gmail. Being able to sync contacts was always one of the selling points for a .Mac account, so is Apple planning something there, be it dropping .Mac or something else?

Other fixes include active Directory binding and login, Spotlight searches on remote APF servers, 802.1X behavior and reliability, iChat screensharing, Automator, Parental Controls, and VoiceOver.

The important thing with 10.5.3: it’s safe to install, at least I haven’t had any problems so far after having installed it. This compares to 10.5.2 which was perhaps the buggiest update Apple has ever released. Apple forums were full of people complaining of issues, and it killed both my Macs (relatively new Macbook Pro and MacPro) resulting in both needing fresh installs. On the fresh installs I’d been ignoring the prompts for 10.5.2 ever since.