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I have long considered myself one of the worlds biggest Apple fans, so I have been biting my tongue for as long as I could about Leopard. But this week was the last straw. I’m sure there are even more fervent fans like me who will say, “well, you shouldn’t have done that.” I’ve seen them on the message boards, but when it comes right down to simple operations on the computer causing massive failures, there’s just no excuse in the world that can cover it.

It started a couple of nights ago, as I was enjoying an old episode of “Top Gear”, via Front Row on my MacBook Pro, connected to my TV, as you’ll sometimes do. The show was finished and I backed out to the main Front Row menu and the screen went black. Clicking Menu on my cute little Apple Remote did nothing, so I shrugged. Like I hinted, I’ve had more than my share of Leopard problems, and I did use Windows for years, so I chalked it up to a simple software problem and disconnected the cable from my TV and hit escape a couple of times. Still nothing. Well, okay. What do you do? Hold down the power button and do a hard reboot, right?

Well, my friends, with Leopard, it turns out, this is the worst thing in the world you can do. I don’t know what other options would have been open to me. Live with a MacBook Pro that shows nothing but a black screen? I believe the correct term for that is “bricked”. Anyway, it power cycles and I get my friendly login screen. I type in my password without a second thought to anything catastrophic being wrong, and go about my business. I come back to my trusty MBP a few minutes later and, what the heck? it’s still at the login screen. So I type my password in again, only this time, I don’t wander away. Everything seems to be alright, it looks like I’m logging in, but the screen goes blue, resizes itself, then comes right back to the login screen again.

Okay, starting to panic. I try a few more times, with the same result. Okay, deep breath. (Soft) Reboot normally. Same freakin’ thing. Alright. Still calm. The screen is going blue and resizing itself because it’s still looking for the external monitor (i.e., my TV), so I plug it back in and try every possible variation of rebooting: monitor plugged in, monitor not plugged in, monitor plugged in, but unplugged at the login screen, monitor unplugged, then plugged in at the monitor screen. Nothing, same old login loop time and time again.

Normally, at this point, I’d fire up my black MacBook and find some solution n the web, but I recently sold that in anticipation of getting an MacBook Air at some point, so I’m stuck with my iPod Touch, which is better than nothing I guess. A quick scan around the web yields nothing really fruitful, unless I happen to be installing Leopard for the first time — but I’m not — I’ve had it up and running since a week after it’s release, and these options are all pointing to reinstalling. Well, it’s 11:30 PM and that’s not an option. Besides, it’s been a long and bumpy road since Purolator first dropped off the disk (that, in itself was a shipping nightmare I don’t even want to revisit right now) …

First there was a spinning startup wheel of death. Not the spinning pizza, the spinning disk when your machine first boots up. Just that, spinning, for hours on end, for no reason, no login screen nothing. I reinstalled everything at least three times because of that issue. I don’t even remember what resolved it eventually. It was either a Boot Camp issue (the Apple FanBoys are now all going, “Ahhhhh, there’s your problem right there!”) or it was something that was magically fixed by that first 10.5 update.

Then there was the strange Dashboard widget causing error log to fire away non-stop at 110% CPU, only closing every Dashboard widget seemed to make this go away. Well, what’s the point of running Dashboard if you can’t even run the default set of widgets? Well, I learned to live without widgets.

The list goes on, mysterious WiFi drop-outs, Aperture incompatibility (recently fixed, although I haven’t tried it out), Adobe After Effects output rendered useless because of Quicktime’s DRM scheme (once again, recently fixed, though I’ve learned to live without After Effects for the time being), Time Machine strangeness, frequent kernel panics, and, last, but not least, constant Spotlight reindexing upon normal reboot.

But I remained happy and smiling through it all. Just ironing out the bugs, I reasoned. The big update will fix all of this, and it sort of did. I have been running reasonably smoothly since the last massive update, at least until this happened.

So, cup of coffee firmly clenched in my hand, the next morning I resolved to get my machine back from login screen death. I had Apple on my side, I figured, because, even though I’m on a portable machine, I hook it up to a Time Machine backup drive when it’s not in use, and I will not have lost any work from the previous day because I did a last and final backup before settling in for the night.

Via the Leopard install disk, I tried the usual suspects: permissions repair (which virtually mean nothing these days) and reset password. Neither of those did the trick, and I didn’t really expect they would. Archive and Install was my best, next option, but I was 1 GIG short of having enough disk space to do that, so I would have to put all of my faith into a full format and reinstall + time machine backup. I took a deep breath and formatted the drive. I could swear that I could see my life passing before my eyes as I watched that blue, formatting candy stripe. I’d been here before, with this cursed MacBook Pro, as I’d had a complete and massive hard drive failure only last summer (Apple admitted at the end of last year that there may be some hard drive problems on this model). I lost a year’s worth of work on that one, as I was on the road at the time and wasn’t doing regular, manual backups.

Formatting finished and I chose, Restore from Time Machine Backup. Okay, sees the backup drive, that’s good. Sees all my backups, that’s good too (although, it seems to have shaved several hours off of when my last backup took place, no matter, a couple of hours lost is better than everything lost). Go! “Calculating Time Remaining …” Bang! OS X setup restarts itself. I’m stunned. I go through the steps again. Bang! Same thing. Okay, so Time Machine’s an interesting concept, and after my hard drive failure, it was one of the main reasons I was eager to get my hands on Leopard, but … it … doesn’t … actually … work.

Fine. I know I can restore individual files — I’ve done that before — so I’ll just suffer through reinstalling all the apps over again (one more time) and restore my docs one-by-one via Time Machine. I run through the whole Leopard install. I swear, I have seen the Leopard “Welcome” screen so many times that I can now greet people from 15 countries without effort, and I now hate that startup music so much that I press my hands over the speakers on my MBP so I don’t have to hear it.

Anyway, my luck starts to change, and my impression of Apple starts to gain some old fondness after the OS is actually installed, as I am now offered a second chance to restore from a Time Machine backup. I leap on it, and it seems to be working, but it says it’s going to take the better part of two hours. So I sit and watch the progress bar slowly inching its way across the screen, and “time remaining” seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. Maybe this is in keeping with the whole “time machine” theme, I don’t know.

Eventually, I am greeted with my old familiar login screen. It now fills me with dread, as I type in my password as I have done so many times previously in the last 24 hours, but then I get a surprise: I’m actually logged in and everything is exactly the way I’ve left it, I mean everything. I am officially impressed. Sure, I still have to instal all the OS updates, but it’s a small price to pay. Back in my Windows days, I had to rely on the Microsoft version of Time Machine, and it was nothing but a nightmare. Your trouble only really started after you got everything back as you had to find drivers and re-edit INI files until you were blue in the face. Now, just so easily getting everything back was a nice feeling indeed.

But it never should have happened in the first place. All this, for something as simple as watching a video file on a TV screen. I mean, that’s something that people are going to do. It’s not like I was trying to mod my MacBook Pro to make toast or something. Really, the thing that irritates me the most is that I now have this massive trepidation when I’m about to click on something, or start some process, because I suddenly have a very expensive chunk of aluminum that I have to bring back from the dead. That’s not the Apple I know, that’s the Microsoft that I remember, where you would literally be taking your life into your own hands if you wanted to so something like capture video to your hard drive. I can’t even begin to count the number of weekends in my life that have been totally wasted with bits of a PC scattered all over the floor trying to track down something that was conflicting with something else, just working toward the point where the system would work like it did before I started doing whatever it was that I wanted to do.

Switching to Apple was a godsend for me after that, and many years of great productivity followed.

Until Leopard.

C’mon Apple, you just need to slow down a little bit and make right what you already have out there in the marketplace. If it’s all about the race for the desktop, Microsoft is so far behind they’re not going to catch up in a lifetime, so I think you can at least spend a little time making this stuff work, like you used to do.

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