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Apple's Microsoft-Devouring Jungle CatHow Leopard demolishes Vista.

By Harry McCrackenPosted Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2007, at 12:28 PM ET

The Stacks feature in Apple's OS X LeopardSteve Jobs may be the undisputed grand master of technology hype, but when it comes to numbering operating systems, he's oddly self-effacing. With Leopard, the new version of OS X, Apple has nudged the version number forward from 10.4 to 10.5. Most companies would assign such a teensy increment to an update with a few minor bug fixes, but Leopard includes more than 300 new features by Apple's count. Even after you weed out several dozen pieces of ephemera such as Kerberized NFS—if you don't know what that is, you'll never need it—the $129 Leopard is a big deal with plenty of meaningful enhancements over its predecessor Tiger.

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Apple is smart to underpromise and overdeliver. Its approach stands in contrast to that of Microsoft, which trumpets each new version of Windows as an epochal breakthrough, thereby raising expectations so high that it can't possibly meet them. Windows Vista, for instance, has been saddled with the slogan "The Wow Starts Now" and an ad campaign that claims the OS leaves users speechless with wonderment. It turns out that "wonderment" isn't quite the emotion that Vista has evoked. Nine months after Microsoft's new operating system reached consumers, it's been forced to reassure customers that they'll be able to order new machines that run Windows XP, not Vista, well into the foreseeable future.

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Jack Shafer ridiculed the press corps' crush on Steve Jobs. Paul Boutin wrote that he wants OS X on his PC. He also investigated the features of Windows Vista and called Office 2007 the "most annoying upgrade since Windows 95." Adam L. Penenberg revealed why Microsoft just can't figure out how to keep its computers secure. Seth Stevenson critiqued Apple's now famous PC vs. Mac ad campaign and reviewed the oft-parodied iPod commercials of 2004.

It's easy to understand why many PC users are clutching onto the six-year-old XP. The new version of Windows is rife with new features that are half upside, half downside. The 3D Aero user interface is slick and modern … but it's such a resource pig that the $1,000 PC I bought after Vista shipped can't run it reliably. On the security front, a feature called User Access Control can help keep you safe from hackers … but its in-your-face nag notes are so irritating that it's tempting to turn the whole thing off and take your chances. Vista offers better technical underpinnings than XP for sophisticated applications yet to come … but many existing programs and add-ons won't ever work with it.

Leopard isn't all cheery news. Some early adopters report Microsoftian-sounding installation meltdowns involving a blue screen of death, for instance. Paul Boutin's advice back in January, to hold off on buying a new OS until the first round of fixes has been released, is equally sensible here. But Apple's upgrade is far closer to unalloyed goodness than Microsoft's. For years, I've been urging friends, relatives, and acquaintances who ask me for computer-shopping advice to consider Macs as well as Windows machines. Leopard is a classy, coherent upgrade that makes the Mac alternative that much more compelling.

Its flagship feature is Time Machine, a utility that makes backing up data so painless that people might actually start to do it. Turn Time Machine on, and it'll silently copy hourly snapshots of your Mac's state of being to an external USB hard disk. If disaster strikes, you can reach back to restore old files that would otherwise have been lost, courtesy of a simple yet idiosyncratic interface that involves whizzing through space and time.

Time Machine isn't perfect: When I plugged a new Seagate hard drive into my MacBook, OS X could see it, but Time Machine couldn't. (Reformatting the drive did the trick.) And some Leopard leapers are reacting as negatively to its playful look and feel as XP users did to that operating system's search tool, which inexplicably involved a tail-wagging canine search assistant. Still, the basic concept and execution are so solid that Microsoft is no doubt working on copying it as we speak.

As well it should—Vista's backup features are archaic by comparison. From a technical standpoint, they're in some ways superior to Time Machine. For instance, you can recover old versions of files without having to back up your data to a secondary drive, as Time Machine requires. But Vista confusingly scatters its backup capabilities between multiple OS features, some of which aren't available in all half-dozen versions of Vista. Most users will never have their bacon saved by the useful Previous Versions file-recovery option, since Microsoft has chosen to withhold it from all consumer editions except the $399 Windows Vista Ultimate.