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It's premature to judge the value of many of 10.5's new features. I'm pleased with the improvements to Mail, iCal, and iChat. There are, however, some serious problems that should give a buyer pause. Apple has changed the Finder menus so that they are translucent. The lettering is no longer black-on-white unless you choose white as your wallpaper, which is hardly pleasing. I've compromised by choosing a solid light blue, but for the sake of efficiency and clarity nice designs and pictures are out. There is no corrective for the translucent pull-down menu: you always see a hazy semblance of whatever is behind it. This has introduced a lot of visual noise and may be a serious problem for individuals with vision impairment. In this case Apple has sacrificed clarity and performance for a dubious new aesthetic. There are instances when icons and buttons which are themselves grey and placed against a gray background. This is true with the Trash on the new Dock background (if you place the Dock on the right). This makes them more difficult to see at a glance. In changing many aesthetic features of OS X Apple seems to be addressing problems that don't exist. There is a reason why most books are not printed on translucent or colored paper, and that same reason is why the Finder should be black-on-white. Apple has added milliseconds to basic functions, thereby reducing productivity. Apple's habit of offering take-it-or-leave-it features which cannot be modified or turned off is frustrating. One of the few regular maintenance requirements of OS X is repairing permissions. In 10.4 this took less than a minute to accomplish, but after installing 10.5 I found that it took about 7 minutes, and then a cryptic message appeared. Each time I repeated the procedure the same thing happened, though it does report also that permissions have been repaired. (Update: It is being reported that Apple acknowledges this bug and is working on a fix.) When I click on the Applications folder in 10.4 the contents appear almost instantly. In 10.5 it takes more than 4 seconds for the contents to appear. It remains to be seen how many other basic functions of OS X have been harmed. In summary, Apple seems to have made substantial changes merely for the sake of change, rather than to improve productivity, and some of these changes have degraded both productivity and comfort. I installed Leopard on one of my three Macs, but I will not "upgrade" the other two until Apple eliminates the aesthetic drawbacks and brings speed back to parity with Tiger. It's nice to have eye candy, but productivity is my first concern. Some of the new visual features remind me of the clutter which is now standard on the screens of cable news channels. (The installation discussed is on a MacBook Pro 2.2 Ghz.)