Apple OS X Leopard screen shot
Just over a week ago, Apple earned kudos for regularly releasing upgrades to software that powers its Mac computers. Maybe I was too quick to applaud—and maybe Apple was too quick in pushing out the last upgrade to its OS X, version 10.5. There seems to be a wave of complaints building like none I've heard with earlier editions of OS X.
The clincher might be a reported bug that eats data. Ouch. It's one thing to have a machine—a printer, say— run more slowly, crash too often, or disable peripherals. Those are complaints heard widely about the latest version, also called Leopard.
But it's another thing entirely to lose data, and not under what appear to be exotic circumstances. Leopard reportedly deletes data that it thinks have been moved to another destination, even if something caused the data to not land where they were supposed to (say, if a USB drive gets unplugged too quickly). The experience was first reported on Tom Karpik's blog, and has been echoed by others, including ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes.
Windows Vista has had its shares of problems, including running slowly and disabling hardware that doesn't have drivers ready. But Kingsley-Hughes sums it up in his entry's headline: "This Leopard bug beats anything Vista has to offer."

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