Apple has lifted the embargo on Leopard reviews and the three major American publications have been quick to the mark to get a review out. All in all the reviews are positive but does have minor bugs. Application compatibility is said to be excellent.

Wall Street Journal

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has reviewed Mac OS X Leopard and states that it is, “an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, release, I believe it builds on Apple’s quality advantage over Windows,”

“I did notice a few drawbacks, but they were minor,” he says. “The menu bar is now translucent, which can make it hard to see the items it contains if your desktop picture has dark areas at the top. The new folder icons are dull and flat and less attractive than Vista’s or their predecessors on the Mac. While Time Machine can perform backups over a network, the backup destination can only be a hard disk connected to a Mac running Leopard. And, on the Web, I ran into one site where the fonts on part of the page were illegible, a problem Apple says is known and rare and that I expect it will fix.”

Mossberg said Leopard felt about as fast as Tiger and that it started up much faster than Vista. “I compared a MacBook Pro laptop with Leopard preinstalled to a Sony Vaio laptop with Vista preinstalled,” he says. “Even though I had cleared out all of the useless trial software Sony had placed on the Vaio, it still started up painfully slowly compared with the Leopard laptop.”

Vista took nearly two minutes to perform a cold start and be ready to run. “The Leopard laptop was up, running and connected to the network in 38 seconds,” he noted. “In a test of restarting the two laptops after they had been running an email program, a Web browser and a word processor, the Sony with Vista took three minutes and 29 seconds, while the Apple running Leopard took one minute and five seconds.”

New York Times

David Pogue of the New York Times took it upon himself to review Leopard and noted that he had been using the final release of Leopard for a week before the review.

Pogue finishes off his review with this final thought; “Leopard is powerful, polished and carefully conceived. Happy surprises, and very few disappointments, lie around every corner. This Leopard has more than 300 new spots — and most of them are bright ones.”

Pogue writes in his review about the new interface Apple has added to Leopard, “The most serious misstep in Leopard is its new see-through menus. …. Often, Apple’s snazzy graphics are justifiable because they make the Mac more fun to use. In this case, though, nothing is gained, and much is lost.”

USA Today

Edward Baig of USA Today notes very similar results to that of Pogue and Mossberg but does add a section about upgrading from Tiger to Leopard.

Baig ends with, “Leopard is one cool cat.”