Ars Technica Posts Panther Review

Nexum writes "Today Ars released their latest Mac OS X review, this time for Max OS X 10.3 Panther. It's great to see another tour de force from the Ars guys. They have, as usual, an excellent insight into the new OS release, and they also cover that burning question 'is it worth $129?,' and Panther seems to come out rather well. Certainly worth a read."

Comments

Re:$129 for 0.1

[Graff]

This seems to me like Microsofts strategy. It's another year, get another 'major release' out of the door so we can get everyone to chip in another hundred dollars.

Everyone seems to think that these ".1" releases of Mac OS X are not really major releases. In fact, they are pretty much whole version releases, it's just that Apple doesn't want to have to call their new baby Mac OS XI, Mac OS XII, Mac OS XIII, etc.

The amount of new features, better ways of doing things, corrections to problems, additions to the user interface make each one of the .1 releases to Mac OS X worth being treated as a full version. Take a look at how many reviewers and users are saying that this upgrade is well worth the $130, that alone should tell you that it really is a full version and not some minor update.

Re:The speed... the speed

[0rbit4l]

Regarding "booting back into 9" - you're comparing apples (no pun intended) & oranges. Booting back into 9 is a great reminder as to how AWFUL 9 was. I booted my tibook 867 into 9 not long ago to do some disk maintenance. Yeah, 9 is super-fast - as long as you only ever want to do one thing at a time (I'm not talking about disk-only utilities - we're talking anything here) and don't mind the occasional crash. Face it, running 9 on a modern mac is like running Win 3.1 on a p4 with a gig of ram. It sure is speedy without that annoying overhead of real virtual memory or a useful scheduler, right? - thanks, but no thanks. All the speed in the world is useless if it's an insecure, cobbled-together OS that can't multitask without barfing.

Regarding 10.3, I didn't notice a speed increase from 10.2.8. XBench reported increased scores in text scrolling (definitely a plus) but that's about it. The killer feature of 10.3 is definitely expose - worth my $69 (academic), for sure. The new mail client is nice, too.