Seriously Dissapointed With Leopard

Question

Not sure if I'm the only one here but I have seriously lost patience with both leopard and Apple now, and find this a worse and more unstable operating system then Vista. I have have only had my machine for a few months after switching from Dell with Vista to an apple Imac aluminum one with tiger, and could not fault Tiger, and was really looking forward to the leopard release.
I have had nothing but problems since installing leopard to the point whereby I uninstalled it and ran Tiger, until I saw the latest update, which I thought okay lets try it now hopefully Apple will have got its act together and the problems fixed.
Since reinstalling leopard (clean install), I have been switched to a standard user from Administrator AFTER installing the 10.5.1. update
I have tried the apple support article but as a new mac user am a total loss as to how to go about the whole reset root user thing.
As well as this my quicktime does not launch anything in my safari browser even after the upgrade, Itunes crashes and I had problems with IDVD, though that has been resolved thanks to about 2 hours on the phone to apple care.
My biggest gripe is I am constantly having to force quit applications, hard shutdown my imac, or reinstall software.
I thought at first the problem may be that I wasn't used to Macs and was doing something wrong, but after reading these forums, and seeing seasoned mac users running into the same problems, I think its safe to discard that theory.
If it has taught me anything I wont be rushing to buy Apples next operating system so quickly, or any "new" product that they bring out to the market, because if this is anything to go by then this is a major disappointment.
This is the main reason I have kept away from buying the Iphone, once bitten twice shy.

Answer 1

Just to pour some hope into your heart, I have been using Mac since Jaguar and I went with Panther, Tiger and now Leopard updgrade. Leopard is the worst so far. No issues (or marginal) with previous once. I hade the reason to have problems because I am running quite complex design studio with a lot of hardware around (printers, external drives, few input devices, scanners e.t.c.) for professional work of my wife (say professional licenses of Adobe and Quark software). Shge works for some magazine editor (yes you can find magazine she designs on one of your newstands) plus work for major education book editoor in the USA (those who will grab Dietel Dietel book will find the last name as in my post). So I would say syay close to Apple. Historically they have been much better than support from Dell, Microsoft (how do I lnow? I have been software engineer and hardware engineer for last 16 years and still working in it near Wall Street NYSE and I had my share of finding issues and resolutions plus I still design and write software with teams).
Aple will find the way. I do not have doubt. I am very positive. they are transforming. I had very unpleasant support incident today with girl engineer at Bangalore who suggested that I was serial number thief since she could not find in database. She refused to put me on phone with supervisor (completely unprofessional behavior out of business standards in the USA) to resolve the issue trying to play with me "Catch 22": "call us when you get correct serial number". Well my number with Apple Protection plan was finally confirrmed by good engineer name Chris in Canada and then I called another guy to get Leopard support. I was expecting worst because he said he was in Bangalaore (again!), but this time I was reminded how Apple support can be good. We still did not find out what is happening, but at least my case is now on much higher engineer level at Apple and hopefulle I will get chance to work with Apple engineers. I do not recall if it evere happend with Microsoft or Dell. However I rememeber that Microsoft guys asked me weird questions like: "how many cutomers are impacted by the issue?" or "we can do nothing from Dell India?" (with some arrogant tone of voice reading some script that I knew before I called), "it is behavior by design" (well, very arrogant design out of any accpetable standards on the market). However new Apple get the traing (that second engineer at Bangalore promised me to train his Indian collegues so they act properly and not offensively and since I myslef worked many times on teams with Indian folks I can tell you that they can be very arrogant with that mild tone of their voice and even smiling). They will learn technological and social needs of western cultures. They will have to and I consider Apple to be one of those firnms that teaches that.
I would be very patient for now. we know there are issues and some of them are fundamental in Leopard. Try to work with good engineers at Apple. Offer them help with your issue. Follow precisely their instructions even though you might know some shortcuts already. You will not be disappointed. And once Leopard becomes stable with minimum issues you will see that it is easier to live with some minor glitches from Mac OS X than with all those inconsistent and counter intuitive "convienences" from Microsoft... or primitive impelemanations that require a lot of knowledge and time form Linux folks (I also use Liniu and number of UNIX falvor in business and privately and I am proficent with about 5 distributions of Linux system too).
Stay in touch and do not lose your cool. The time will fix Apple back to normal as it was last years.
Maciej Samsel