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Unlike Microsoft, Apple is not afraid to put developers out of a given line of business. Leopard integrates e-mail, browser, calendar, search, preview, dictionary, thesaurus, media player, code-free scripted workflow, accessibility, and almost innumerable top-level bundled apps and capabilities that, in one sense, take out any market for supplanting these things. No matter how well Apple does something, someone has cooked up what it feels is a better, but usually just different, way to do it.
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Leopard addresses that. Rather than seeing Leopard as a popping of the balloon for third-party enhancements to the Mac's core user experience, a more accurate way of looking at it is that Apple frees developers from trying to improve on that experience. Third parties can focus on new applications instead. Yet, Apple's 300-plus features are all things that third-party developers have at their disposal without requiring any hacks or workarounds to get at. If this registers somewhere between confusing and unbelievable on your scale, I understand. Apple has always let users and developers make their Macs into anything they like. Leopard moves the line between top-level functionality that can be improved upon and baked-in user-facing capabilities that don't need improvement.
Windows and Leopard don't compare
To the user, Leopard drives like the ultimate and ultimately extensible integrated application suite into which the Macintosh
happens to boot. Every application installed to Leopard plugs into and extends the suite. Developers can't help it; merely
using the Mac frameworks creates a Mac app, which is distinguished by its integration with and extension of the Mac as a whole.
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You can reasonably argue that in the commercial space, Windows is always Windows plus Office, and that the combination exceeds Leopard's core capabilities in many ways. Setting cost aside for now, what Office opens to the user does not improve their productivity when they step outside Office. Indeed, there is an entire industry dedicated to creating desktops that effectively boot into Office and hide Windows entirely because, from the standpoint of IT, giving desktop users the run of Windows adds nothing but trouble. This is the reason behind Vista's failure to thrive: IT doesn't want a pretty Windows; IT wants a thin and invisible one, out of users' reach. Over time, Microsoft has filled out Office to function as a user's sole interface, not only to the system, but to the network and the services wired into it. It usually falls to IT to extend Office's capabilities at the server layer, and at great expense.
As to cost, when tallied frankly, the price of a single commercial Windows desktop in an enterprise is potentially infinite, and it is a continuous and growing expense. It is so burdensome that outsourcing the management of Windows clients is another Microsoft-fed industry.
As much as the idea of a PC booting to Office appeals to IT, the idea of a Mac booting to Office is patently absurd. Even hard-core Windows shops concede that point. Likewise, nobody pays for outsourced management of Mac desktops or servers. OS X takes care of that.
Starting Leopard
Now that you understand how Leopard got its 300-plus features (new frameworks extended to the Mac's out-of-the-box user experience)
and where it fits, I can move into the review proper. Here, I do not presume that the reader is familiar with the Mac beyond
the groundwork that I have laid above.
