Panther Released into the Wild

u2fan00 writes "Those fortunate enough to have an Apple Store near them were in for a treat last night -- crowds! Oh, and also Panther. Check out the local reactions, photos and stories from some stores across the nation."

Comments

Avoided the whole problem, personally

[Malor]

Geeze. I saw the crowd last year at Lenox Mall in Atlanta for the Jaguar release, so I cleverly waited one entire day.

The Lenox Mall Apple store is a bit of a drive, so I went to the Micro Center not far from where I live. They're sort of a baby Fry's, but more expensive and nowhere near as good. This is, unfortunately, the South, and you take what you can get here. It beats Bosnia.

I walked into the Apple department, grabbed a copy of Panther, and asked if I needed to ring it up there or if I could keep shopping. The salesman put a sticker on it and told me to buy it up front, and then tossed a couple of freebies on the pile... a mousepad and a 64MB USB flash drive.

So I got a much shorter drive, no parking hassles, and a free USB drive in exchange for waiting a day. Calling this a no-brainer seems an understatement.

No impressions yet, I'm backing up before installing. Ok, one impression: the box is cool. Big silver X on a black background. Box upgrades are very important, you know. :-)

Re:Silly Apple stores...

[cliffy2000]

They give educational discounts on hardware, but not OSes. I got my PBG4 at Roosevelt Field and got the full edu discount.

Re:Heads up for unix types

[Llywelyn]

As a note, you can have it install X11 automatically by pressing the "Customize" button while setting up the install. Its one of the options there.

Re:Silly Apple stores...

[jo_ham]

Well, you can buy it online from the Apple Store using one of the demo machines in the phyical Apple Store at the edu price, then they'll give you a box to walk out with. My friend did this after the staff at the store suggested it to him.

Panther is fabulous. Finally.

[melatonin]

Finally. I bought a G4/733 (the first 733s... the ones that have 1MB L3 cache) a few years ago, and it arrived right when 10.0 came out. And naturally I used 10.0 on it never getting used to how fast OS 9 was on it. Coming from a 400 MHz G3, I never got to really feel how fast this Mac was.

After using 10.0 for a few months, my mind started melting away and Apple released 10.1. Yay.

After using 10.1 for almost a year, my sanity for a sane user experience started wearing thin. Finally Apple released 10.2, which was also much snappier. And it was something to rival OS 9 in a give-or-take competition for usability vs. stability, with Jaguar clearly winning.

But Panther just blows the doors off of.., um, not sure which doors I'm talking about. Let's put it this way in terms of performance. I used xbench to measure before and after the upgrade.

10.2.8 scores
CPU: 65.14
Thread Test: 35.3
Memory: 63.7
Quartz: 66
OpenGL: 60.5
UI (aqua controls): 57.87 (18.51 refresh/sec)

10.3.0 scores
CPU: 78.87
Thread Test: 60.95
Memory: 103.96
Quartz: 102.62
OpenGL: 78.6
UI (aqua controls): 141.58 (45.54 refresh/sec)

Totals:
10.2: 57.75
10.3: 85.19

Yes, HOLY CRAP this Mac is faster! My Q3A framerate jumped 15 fps (using the Q3 G4 beta). And the UI experience is much much smoother now, really the way OS X should be. Most notably, sheets and other window animation is VERY fast, and they now properly supplement the user experience, instead of just being eye candy. The Dock still sucks, but you can finally hide apps from the Dock contextual menu.

So, if you're sitting on the fence, jump off. If you thought Macs were slow, they just got a bit faster.