Leopard Review: Mac Nano Bugs

Damen PeamuTuesday, October 30, 2007

This post is part of Push the Third Button Twice, a ~2 month adventure where I would write parody articles based on the news as it happened — in 15 minutes or less. The posts are credited to my a fictional "staff", but they're actually all me. I apologize in advance.

Apple’s new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard has been out for a few days now, and we at PTTBT have been testing it extensively on our Macs. And while the Mac Mini, the MacBook and the Mac Pro all perform perfectly under the new system, we have been having many serious problems using it with our Mac Nano tablet . If your primary work machine is the Nano, consider waiting until 10.5.1

After installation, the Nano’s screen real estate is mysteriously crippled, giving you only 480×320 on a display meant for 800×600. The reduced resolution leads to bunched-up menus, which are painful to pinpoint with the touchscreen. What’s worse is that the “pinch” interface for zooming pages in Safari and iPhoto still seems to be using the full surface of the device, despite the fact that it’s not showing any picture. It’s also a pain when composing email, and the viewing angle bug of the early Nano units means you can’t always read what you’re writing.

Leopard also seems to bog down the Nano’s processor when playing graphics-intensive video games, which was never a problem before the upgrade. In some cases, the games outright crashed and reported “Unsupported hardware” when we ran them. Calls to Apple tech support about the issue just lead to a bunch of confusion, as if the call centre employees hadn’t even heard of their own product. All in all, a very bad experience.

Again, all these issues may be corrected in the first upgrade to Leopard, expected sometime next week. If you’ve got a Mac Nano lying around, wait until we give you the all-clear. Apple should have put more effort into their QA on this one.

PTTBT would like to sincerely apologize to Apple legal for the above post. Apparently Damen did not understand what the “pre-release unit” NDA was about.