Review: Hands On With µTorrent for the Mac
A Mac version of the popular torrent client, µTorrent has leaked out into the wild. Although the creators of µTorrent have been promising that a Mac version would be available soon, this is the first public confirmation of those claims.
BitTorrent Inc, owners of µTorrent, doesn’t seem overly concerned with the leak, though they have cautioned that the leaked version, currently available on The Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers (natch), is not even alpha grade software and definitely not intended for general use.
Comments on the Pirate Bay confirm that this pre-release version doesn’t seem to work for many people. However, I downloaded the file and took it for a spin on both a Macbook and my EeePC hackintosh and it seemed to work just fine (note that both machines run Leopard).
The main source of problems appears to occur with earlier versions of OS X and on non-Intel Macs, which, at least in this build, are not supported.
So what can you expect from the Mac version of µTorrent? Well, at the moment it isn’t all that much different than my current choice, Transmission. The interface and features are missing quite a few things found in the Windows version, but this is a pre-release leak so I’ll withhold judgment. However I can say that, like its Windows counterpart, the app is blazingly fast — it launched incredibly quickly and put very little strain on my system (using about 3 percent CPU, and only 10 MB of RAM after 30 minutes of downloading).
For the time being though we recommend waiting for an official release. But at least we know that a µTorrent Mac client is definitely well underway and we look forward to playing with a more feature complete version. If you’d like to know when an official release is available, sign up for the notification list on the Mac µTorrent site. There’s also more coverage about the leak at CNet.
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