Has Leopard moved on from Tiger? Really?

Question

okay so 10.5 was all this its going to be big, it's going to be the way forward and its going to deliver so much more than Mac OS X has ever done since they launched 10.1 back in 2001. Now all excited that when I installed 10.5 I was going to see the see Tomorrow, Today. To be sadly presented with a re-modeled skin version of 10.4, okay some new apps, some upgraded but nothing that would indicate to a typical user that mac has changed since the launch of 10.4. I have been a mac user for 20 years and to watch the change over the years has been awesome, but to come to 10.4 which I knew as soon as I started using it, the question remained "Next time how will they better it" and apple said "we will just design new skins for apps and the OS and call it 10.5".
The Point Im getting at is that mac os 10.5 has not moved forward for a typical day to day general user. Ical was a simple, easy on the eyes program, its got worse, Safari has never changed or moved on in shape and design for a long long time. Apple focused on this useless way forward, in reality users want a more focused way of working. On the Monday following the launch of 10.5 my employees logged in to their computers and was using 10.5 only one person noticed something had changed out of 110 people in the company and that one person said "Has my computer been updated?, because there are many new useless things on here I'll never use." 1 Person who did work for apple and thinks the computer may has been upgraded. It's still better than Vista because everyone knows thats a chicken soup made from chicken ....
I think apple could have really focused on what the user really wants, no what apple thinks looks good just to out do Windows. I use 10.5 and its nothing better than what 10.4 was.
But let me and my company know what you make of the new OS X. 10.5

Answer 1

I disagree. Though Leopard clearly has some issues that will need to be worked out, I find it a significant step forward. The underpinnings are much improved (for instance, early tests indicate that threading between multiple processor cores is much more efficient), Spotlight is vastly improved, much of the management is better organized, Time Machine (though again with some issues to resolve) provides an innovative and easy to use backup system, Quick Look is very handy as is Spaces, and the included applications have mostly seen nice improvement. Yes, there's some eye candy, and some features (Stacks, for instance) are perhaps not as well thought out and flexible as they could be. But overall I find Leopard to be a solid, evolutionary improvement, as much as Tiger was over Panther.
Safari has never changed or moved on in shape and design for a long long time.
Sure it has. There have been lots of new features. None of them are huge, and few are really innovative (Web Clip holds a lot of possibilities), but there's only so much you can do with a browser and Apple is clearly concentrating on providing a solid, well-thought-out, easy to use browser. You can disagree whether or not they've achieve that goal, but it's not correct to say that Safari hasn't moved on; or you could say that for just about any browser (IE 7 in Windows "moved on in shape and design", but in that case most people would agree that it was most definitely not a good thing).
As with any product, your needs may or may not take advantage of any of the new features in Leopard, or may find them less impressive or useful. But that doesn't mean that someone else won't find a given feature or addition very useful and appealing indeed. Personally, and speaking as someone who supports over 200 users, I find that having users not be immediately aware that a new OS has been installed to be a good thing; unlike with Vista, we don't have massive retraining issues to deal with.
Just my opinion, but that's what you asked for.