I'm still on Tiger and I'm probably not going to upgrade. I have a first-gen "lapburner" MBP which works just fine. Leopard didn't really offer anything ground breaking and it doesn't appear Snow Leopard will either. And I figure anything ground-breaking will require newer hardware, so I guess I'll stay on Tiger until the machine stops working. Which coincidentally is also why XP users don't upgrade either.

Insanity. Before Leopard, Spotlight was a debacle. After Leopard, it just works. Also: isn't there a whole lot of software you can't install now because Tiger doesn't have Core Animation and isn't LP64?

I also wouldn't trust Tiger security on an external network.

Every security update Apple ships for Leopard it also ships for Tiger.

And I preferred spotlight in 10.4. In fact, 10.4 was all around a much better OS than 10.5, which was the first update to Mac OS X that felt like a step backwards.

Of course, I'll be updating to 10.6 as soon as I can get my hands on it. If nothing else, the promise of a 10.5 that doesn't suck is worth it. To be fair, 10.5 is much better now then when it shipped. When it shipped, it was terrible.

You're making the assumptions that every security flaw fixed was:

(a) intentionally, knowingly fixed

(b) disclosed.

How was it a step backwards? Mind you, I was a bit late to the party - I started on 10.5.2 - but everything's much more polished than it was in Tiger, both graphically and performance-wise.

Leopard, pre 10.5.2, was indeed a mess. Lots of performance problems. I don't think it was until 10.5.5 that it caught up to Tiger in terms of performance and stability. 10.6.0 is great out of the box.

I think it depends. If you have a first-gen MBP than you are better off getting the new OS. 10.4 "supported" Intel chips but it always felt like a hack between PPC and Intel platforms. 10.5, and each update since, has gotten progressively better for Intel chips.

I think you've fallen for the marketing trap where a list of features has to be present for it to be worth something. Not many lists include code and platform optimizations because it doesn't market well. I've used OS X since 10.1 and each update has gotten remarkably better. Things have mellowed out in 10.5 but the OS feels fully baked.

Good points, but I don't think I'm falling for a marketing trap to want something tangible for paying out $130. The OS works fine for me now. If Apple wants more money for me then I want more than just optimized code.

In the end I don't think there really is anything they can do to make me pay more money for the OS. I already bought iWork 08, I bought SuperDuper! for backup, and everything else I use is either open source or comes included with the machine. If Apple wants me to upgrade, then they need to discontinue security updates for 10.4 or some widget I badly need needs to be 10.5+. And honestly, it's not me that Apple has to contend with, it's my wife and her iron grip over the budget ;)

Time machine alone was worth the price of admission. There were also some good unix upgrades in there if that sort of thing carries any weight with you.

Time machine is great, except for the fact that it Denial-of-Services my machine every time it does a back up. It reminds me of the late 1999-2000 when the Anti-Virus programs for windows (Norton/Symantec) would do a full system scan on a desktop and make it useless for an hour. That, and my 18 month old top-of-line spends an inordinate amount of time with the spinning beach ball. And crashes when I plug in a 30" monitor 20% of the time.

I'm hoping that a scorched-earth fresh install of 10.6 will either eliminate the amazing flakyness or alternatively point me to a hardware problem.

What Unix upgrades?

Leopard was the first version of OSX (actually, first BSD based OS) to receive UNIX 03 certification

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm

That's not exactly a good reason to upgrade by itself.

It could be if you were required by some regulation to use a UNIX certified OS. IIRC, there were little feature changes that warranted the certification.

As for myself, I have an older iMac that won't run SL, a netbook that runs Linux and I am perfectly happy with both.

The difference is that Mac OS X tends to get faster with newer versions. Apparently Snow Leopard even takes up less disk space. Not the case with newer versions of Windows.

I've upgraded a few MBPs (1st & 2nd gen) and even some old powerbooks all of which perform perceivably better with 10.5 YMMV

In the description it says perfect way to upgrade for tiger users, does it not?

I wonder how its going to work. If you have Leopard and your hard disk dies - do you have to install Leopard and then upgrade to Snow Leopard (which would be a pain), or will the upgrade allow a clean install onto a blank hard disk?

Still on Tiger here too, which is my main reason for wondering if I can get away with the $29 version!?

Reports indicate that the $29 version will install on a clean machine just fine, no need to install Leopard first. It's kind of an honor system thing with Apple.

Cheers for the info. I will get round to upgrading eventually then, but I reckon I will give it a few months until any compatibility issues are ironed out!

$29 version is only an upgrade for Leopard users.

<s>I'll buy a full version if I were in Tiger.</s>

Edit: Mac Box Set seems a better choice too, US link: http://store.apple.com/us/product/MACBOX-101801 169$

looks like they're recommending the 'Mac Box Set' http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MACBOX-101801