Do I really want iLife '08 and Leopard?

Leopard = yes. It’s great.

iLife = maybe, depending on your needs. Do you use iPhoto? That’s the only part of iLife that I use consistently.

I don’t know what you really want; that’s up to you to figure out.

Leopard has two new user-facing features that might make it worth your while to upgrade: Time Machine (automatic incremental backups to an external drive) and Spaces (virtual desktops). If neither of those is worthwhile for you, there’s no real reason to upgrade now. There are significant new programmer-facing features, so depending on how much new software you buy, you’ll probably want to upgrade eventually.

And iLife—the only part of iLife I use is iTunes, and that’s available separately.

That said, you’ve got SuperDuper, you can get the two of them as gifts—install them, play with them, and if you don’t like them, go back to the old way of doing things.

(Note that SuperDuper is not yet certified as 100% reliable on Leopard, because of changes they made to the filesystems to support TimeMachine. Basically, hardlinked directories won’t work, and you can’t make a clone of a bootable Leopard drive, but the new version is in the hands of beta testers and should be out Real Soon Now.)

iLife is great, but definitely keep iMovie ‘06 installed (it does this by default, puts it in a separate folder for you) until they add features such as timelining. I would definitely install Leopard, 100%. Firstly, it’s cheap in the scheme of things, and even if your budget doesn’t support it you can always borrow a mates as there is no licensing system or activation process.

I would upgrade to both. (Although Leopard is a little buggy in some respects, things have crashed on me more than in Tiger… but I’ve never lost anything, and it’s stuff that will be fixed in updates for free.)

FYI… Time Machine is the single greatest thing I’ve ever used. I would pay $90 for it alone, and plus all the other Leopard functionality, it well makes up for the price.

Oh, and when you do get Leopard, get this: http://www.anxietyapp.com/ asap. It’s also very cool, and since it uses the new central todo system it’s in sync with iCal and Mail.app. Very nice.

Oh, and good plan upgrading to iWork ‘08. Really brings everything together, I’ve officially ditched M$ Office.

I like them both. Leopard is life-changing (again!) and iLife ‘08 is a very capable replacement for Office, provided you’re not in a large corporate setting that’s already heavily committed to Microsoft. For small business, home or education use, it’s fantastic.