Leopard on a Powerbook G4

Considering upgrading your Powerbook G4 to Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)? After running with Leopard since its release, let me give you some unsolicited advice:

Skip it.

No, really. Just wait, and get it on a MacBook instead.

It comes down entirely to performance vis-a-vis Tiger. Here are Hithlum’s Geekbench scores:

• Leopard with updates (10.5.1) and Spotlight indexing complete: 804
• Clean Tiger install (10.4): 813
• Tiger with updates (10.4.11): 917
• Tiger (10.4.11) with Spotlight indexing complete: 942

While Spotlight performance in Tiger may be slower than in Leopard, overall chip performance is 17% better. I knew that 10.5 was optimized for the Intel chips, but that’s crazy to think that that sort of degradation is acceptable.

By way of comparison, machines with Intel chips running Leopard do significantly better than PowerPC chips. Most of the MacBooks are around 2500-3000, with some of the Mac Pros clocking in over 8200. Leopard seems to be a pretty good investment for Intel-based Macs.

But combined with the Disk Utility problems, random crashes, and overall sluggishness I’ve experienced with Leopard, the upgrade isn’t worth it on my older PPC machine. I’m certainly not going to upgrade my mother-in-law’s G5 iMac to it after this.

So, it’s back to Tiger for me on my Mac. Experiment over, back to work.

Anyone want to buy a Family Pack Leopard DVD set? I’ll trade you for Tiger DVDs…