Time Machine
Automatic hourly versioned backup with an interface people were willing to look at. Its real achievement was getting ordinary users to keep a backup at all.
At launch
- Announced
- August 2006
- Released
- October 26, 2007
- Follows
- Tiger (10.4)
- Followed by
- Snow Leopard (10.6)
- Architecture
- PowerPC & Intel
Overview
Backup that people actually used.
Time Machine's trick was not the copying — plenty of software copied files. It was the interface: a starfield, your window receding into the past, and a timeline down the right-hand edge you could scroll through until the file you deleted came back.
Leopard was delayed by six months because engineers had been moved onto the first iPhone, and it arrived carrying three hundred advertised changes: Spaces, Quick Look, Cover Flow, Stacks, a reflective Dock, a translucent menu bar, and Boot Camp in the box. It was also the last release to run on PowerPC Macs.
Time Machine
Every hour, for as long as the disk holds out.
Hourly snapshots for a day, daily for a month, weekly until the drive fills, using hard links so unchanged files were never copied twice. Plug in a disk and the Mac simply asked whether to use it.
The same window, receding through its own history
Features
What shipped.
Three hundred changes, Apple counted. Six months late, because the iPhone came first.
Spaces
Multiple virtual desktops with apps assigned to each — an idea borrowed from Unix window managers and made approachable enough for everyone else.
At launch
Quick Look
Select a file, press space, see it full size without opening anything. Twenty years of muscle memory begins with this release.
At launch
Stacks
Dock folders that fanned or gridded open. The 3D glass Dock shelf they sat on divided opinion sharply and was retired by Yosemite.
At launch
Cover Flow
Flipping through documents by their previews, lifted straight out of iTunes and dropped into the Finder.
At launch
Boot Camp
Running Windows on a Mac, out of beta and included in the box — a direct consequence of the Intel move two years earlier.
At launch
UNIX 03 certified
Formally certified against the Single UNIX Specification, making the Mac a genuinely accredited Unix, not merely a Unix-like one.
At launch
Screen sharing
Built into the Finder sidebar and into iChat, so helping a relative with their Mac stopped requiring extra software.
At launch
Notes and To Dos
Both folded into Mail and synced through the system, several years before either became an app in its own right.
At launch
The delay
Six months late, because a phone needed the engineers.
Leopard was promised for spring 2007. In April, Apple announced it would slip to October, and said why with unusual directness: people had been moved onto iPhone, which shipped in June running an operating system built from the same foundations.
It is the clearest marker of the shift. From this point the Mac was no longer the centre of Apple's engineering, and iOS's ideas started flowing back the other way — Launchpad, full-screen apps, Notification Centre, autosave.
Desktop
Into deep space.
Leopard broke six years of blue for an aurora over a starfield — the beginning of a run of space imagery that carried through Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion.
AuroraLight over a starfieldThere was only ever one. A system-wide Dark Mode did not arrive until Mojave in 2018, so this page's light and dark appearances are ours, not Apple's — the switch in the corner still works, but the desktop of the day looked like this and only this.
Lineage
Where it sits.
Apple named ten releases after big cats before moving to California in 2013.
macOS 10.5 · 2007
Leopard
Time Machine, Spaces, Quick Look — and the last release to run on PowerPC.
macOS 10.6 · 2009
Snow Leopard
Almost no new features, on purpose. Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, half the disk space.
Compatibility
Machines that could run it.
The last release to run on PowerPC Macs, and the last that could — with an unsupported edit — be coaxed onto a G4 below the official 867 MHz floor.
- Processor
- Intel, PowerPC G4 (867 MHz+) or G5
- Memory
- 512 MB
- Disk space
- 9 GB
- Drive
- DVD
- Note
- Final PowerPC release