Why I'll buy Leopard - next January

Nobody seems to care about this, but Apple cares enough to rank it fourth on their list of new Finder features, right after the also incredibly great "back to my mac" feature.

Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - 300+ New Features

Back to My Mac
Connect to any of your Mac computers at home from any Mac on the Internet. Your home computers appear in the shared section of the sidebar. Just click and you’re in.


Instant Screen Sharing from the Finder
Start an interactive screen sharing session with other Macs on your network. Just select the Mac from your sidebar and (if authorized) you can see and control the Mac as if you were right in front of it. Change a system preference, publish an iPhoto library, or add a new playlist to iTunes."

This is going to hurt, because I'm sure Back to My Mac will require a .Mac account. So I'll be buying Leopard for two machines and getting a family .Mac account. Requirements, btw, are well in the scope of my G5 iMac.

10.5 will, of course, break EMC Retrospect Pro (the latest version actually works) and I'll need an update to my VMWare windows emulator. Happily the Retrospect server runs on my ancient XP box so I just need the client update.

I won't, of course, touch anything until 10.5.1 and until both Retrospect and VMWare's updates have been on the market for at least 1 month. I'm guessing January 2008 at the earliest.

I know Andrew will take the arrows for me.