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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."
Frankly I think it's worth it. I almost see it as a "montly" subscription to using an OS. It came with the Mac and every year you shell out $129 to keep using the latest and greatest version. Mac OS is steadily improving and improvment costs money. I almost feel like it's payment for a MMORPG where new content is release all the time in the form of patches and free additional features.
Google Toolbar is SPYWARE!
His ideas about the Finder and filesystem are pretty dead on. I wish Apple would bring him on board.
At the very least they could shamelessly steal his ideas. They're there for the taking.
Expose is nice. Good eye candy. Fast user switching works pretty good. But the real bottom line is the speed. Let's face it, the real drawback of X has always been it was just dog slow. Just booting back into 9 was a reminder of how slow X was. Panther is faster on my daughters G3 ibook, my dual G4 and tibook. Is it worth a 130 bucks? Yes. With the cevat: Only if I didn't have to pay a hundred and thirty bucks last year.
Pretty good review all in all. Not sure I completely agree with his finding on the finder. But I do agree that Apple seems to be fumbling around looking for something that clicks on the desktop.
It's backward compatible with everything, I think. It also seems to boot slightly faster. But you might find the memory management to be the most noticable aspect.
Basically, lots of little updates that add up.
Okay. I'll post it this round...
Apple doesn't make money selling software. They make money selling hardware. They don't want you paying $130 for their software.. that's just a little bonus. They want you dropping $2,000 on a new Apple computer. That's where their money comes from.
If they ported it, they'd lose their primary revenue stream.
Got it?
Why should Apple port OS-X to i386, or any other platform? Apple is a hardware company that makes their software to facilitate the purchase and use of their hardware. They have nothing to gain from porting to another platform, especially one as open and varied as the i386 platform, except the mother of all support headaches.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Most changes are under-the-hood stuff and changes to the user interface, who admittedly may not seem as impressing as new applications and massive feature-additions. Still, these are the things that improves the experience every day and in almost all kind of work on the machine.
And the main thing for me is that now i would be sorry to go back to jaguar, and that almost justifies the nasty price tag (+the company pays!).
One feature that i really miss, though: support for exchange-servers from iCal. Its driving me nuts. And it makes it really hard to justify the use of macs in my department, when everybody else in da houze is using winboxes and outlook - and constantly complaining about me and my close colleagues not using the calendar.
Giving up temporarily, I cruise over to /. to see what's new. Of course, what do I find? The OSX review on Ars at the top of the list.
While I've definitely witnessed the slashdot effect trying to follow links from articles, this is definitely the first time that I've ever been caught in the middle of one.
It's kind of crazy, I didn't think people actually read the articles around here...
Wow. Astounding.
Your check is in the mail.
Love Always,
Bill G.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
I'm running Panther on both my G4 PowerBook and my Dual proc G5.
It's certainly nice. But is it better than Jaguar ? To be honest, not that I notice. Expose is kind of nice - but despite everyone else's raving about it I just can't get excited about it. Very pretty and clever eye-candy to be sure, but the only feature of it I use *at all* is the "clear everything and show me the desktop" f11 function.
People get excited about the coloured labels. Huh? Can't say I have - and I haven't used them at all and I can't see myself using it.
Now one thing I do like is the updated Finder. Do I think it's any faster ? Nope. Although it doesn't suffer from spinny-beach-ball-syndrome at all, which is nice. But then i'd call that a bug fix. The thing I do like about Finder is the list of places to go (Home, Applications, etc) that now appeat in their own panel. Although I am still getting used to it, I like that.
I do use the encrypted home directory on my PB and that makes me feel a bit happier (I can now carry those Confidential and Restricted documents on my laptop ;-)
The Journalling file system was a no brainer and I feel very smug :-)
So overall am I happy with what I got for my 114 (one full copy for 99 and another for 15) ? Yes actually I am - doubly so when I see spot the internet machine at work (secure site, so no-one's "work" machine can be connected direct to the 'net) getting clogged with spyware and crashing just because it's now sharing a connection over a wlan I get this warm feeling :-P
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
For those of you interested in the above, go here, click on "ADC Hardware Purchase Program Store," and drool away.
-Brett
My biggest complaint about X used to be that it's latent as hell. It just can't stand up to Linux with the preemptible kernel patches. You'd push the "Increase volume" key on the keyboard at it would lag for over a second before popping the volume icon. If you use the visualizer in iTunes and start messing around with other stuff it's choppy as hell. Basically, whatever application you are not currently using has ridiculous latency and choppiness. That particular peeve doesn't happen anymore.
The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with everything sitting on a Mach kernel I don't think MacOS X will ever achieve the low latency that Linux pulls off. Mach's cool but you pay a price.
They are also doing this thing called "prebinding" which I assume is equivalent to "prelinking" in the Linux world -- performing dynamic linking a single time and saving the intermediate results so that applications can launch faster. If you look through the installation logs for Panther you see that it includes a new dynamic linker and there are many log messages of the ilk: "Prebinding xxx application."
If you look at the process list in top or with ps you see that there are FAR fewer system processes than before. I'm not sure whether this is because they really aren't running, or if the OS is somehow hiding them (which would be very un-UNIX-like).
I don't personally give a shit about the new bells and whistles such as Expose. But the improvement to latencies and the general snappy feel are enough for me to justify a $130 price tag. The improvements are mainly under the hood but as a developer I really appreciate that (heh, and I don't even develop for Mac).
The difference is that Apple's point releases actually *improve* the OS and make it *faster*.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I have no idea either. And why did they start with this nice-looking UI thing, I mean, what can they do I cannot do with emacs in terminal mode?
There are gobs of email clients for OS X for every taste... for home users, corporate users, techincal users, unix users...
I'm not familiar with the F11 feature in WindowMaker. However, I can say that it took me about a day of using Expose to realize that I can never go back. Thus, if any other OS developer wants my money ever they better have an expose-ish feature.
I explained expose to a friend of mine, and he couldn't understand out why it was better than ALT-TAB. Several reasons: first, it is a single click, not cycling through a list of windows, as with ALT-TAB. O(1) instead of O(n). Second, Expose shows you your currently open *documents*, rather than applications, and it doesn't show ones that you might have minimized or hidden. Thus it shows you what you are working on right now, not applications that might be running but aren't in active use.
I also use Expose (F11) to access the desktop (similar to minimize all). The difference is, it isn't minimizing, it is just moving them out of the way so I can access my desktop, maybe drag some files to Finder (You can open other documents/applications while Expose has moved the windows off to the side). It is also easy to restore, just click anywhere around the edge of the screen and everything zooms back to normal (or click F11 again obviously). The most important thing to remember is, you aren't minimizing (or hiding) these windows, so restoring has no effect on windows that you might already have minimized or hidden.
I've used linux as my only desktop operating systems for several years, multiple desktops were my primary way of managing multiple open applications and documents for several different tasks simultaneously. Since upgrading my weeks old mac to Panther not quite a month ago, I have totally changed the way I work, now using minimization, hiding, and expose to effectively manage my tasks. I find the new methods of doing things easier and more efficient then before (after the initial adjustment). Like I said, I couldn't imagine going back.
Not that there aren't any improvements to be made (I just can't think of any, but I'm sure someone eventually will). I have to agree that Expose is one of the most significant recent developments in windowed GUIs. Don't knock it until you've spent enough time with it to get used to it.
-Spyky
How many slashdotters are suicidal?
Not enough, sadly.
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
Sapere aude!
I use my computer about 3,000 hours per year. Even with shipping, that makes Panther cost less than 5 cents per hour. That seems like an amazing deal to me.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Okay.. so last spring, I got my first mac. It was a leap of faith.. for sure. I've always been a low-level systems guy; I like linux, I don't like windows... like most here I guess.
Now, I'm a mac freak. IT's really that good.
Is it worth $129? My first reaction was one of feeling ripped off.. I mean, I just bought this not even a year ago.. shouldn't I get a cheap or even free upgrade?
Well, I bought it. I installed it. Yes, I read about a few quirks, like with firewire, and a warning about filevault.. both of which are not currently things I need.
Panther is better. It's not a quantum leap, it's not Windows 95 -vs- Windows XP, it's still OS X.. it just has some nice improvements, that I'm sure you've all heard about. More than that, it's smoother, works better.. the eyecandy is just the surface. All the unix stuff I have still works fine too.. I had zero adjustment time in getting to use panther. After the install, I just kept working.. "Oh gee, finder looks different". "Hey, Mail is better!". The odd dialog box from the keychain (which mac apps use to store perseonal information, usually passwords), stating that an application that requested access had changed.. that's it.
I've come to realize that macs are not cheap. I didn't keep using OS X, or fall for mac stuff because it was the fastest, or the cheapest.. I did it because it's provided me with a work environment like none I've ever used... and if that means paying apple a couple hundred bucks a year for them to keep churning out stuff like this, I'm all for it.
This one surpised me, and is a *great* improvement if you run X-programs:
X autolauches now.
No more opening up X, and starting a program from a terminal window, just start it from its icon like normal and X starts right up.
Wow, now I've seen everything. An anon copied my earlier post from another story, and didn't even try to get mod points for it. He should have at least plugged my band too!
I installed Panther on my alBook and on my Cube. Using Xbench to run a series of benchmarks on the Cube before the install and after, taking the averages Panther system-wide is 21% faster*.
21% faster for an OS-upgrade. When is the last time that happened?
* The percentage speed faster was much less on the new alBook.
--- I do not moderate.
Mac OS 9 was a fast, strong OS
Umm...as long as you only needed to run one application at a time; were comfortable hand-setting memory sizes for your important programs; had the skill to sort through system extensions and control panels to find problems; had no use for a command line; and didn't need multiple users or serious security on your machine.
Given all those conditions, yes, 9 rocked.
"Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible" -Jacob Bronowski
Anyone who posts this statement has not seen Expose. Or you are willfully ignorant.
Expose performs a vector transform on all your bitmap windows. It animates and scales them using nearest-neighbour interpolation (I'm sure Bicubic is coming in.. er, Ocelot?) and parks them in an arbitrary, non-overlapping arrangement on the screen. Do you get this?
Imagine a stack of photos on your desk hovering up 1 inch and flying out in a neat arrangement, then back again. 1 click.
Tile All Windows is a pale, pale shadow of this functionality.
One of the other perks I love about Expose is you can leave it turned 'on'... if I want to monitor a bunch of webcams, I don't have to laboriously arrange them, I click my thumb mouse button. All windows update live, including quicktimes and DVDs with virtually no lag. I could never go back.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Mac OS has always been evolutionary, yes, but 10.3 is a huge step from 10.2. Apple just uses that goofy naming scheme because they want to keep the roman numeral "X".
10.3 kernel is significantly different from 10.2. They even upped the Darwin kernel number from 6.x to 7.0 for this release. Large parts of the kernel and most of the userland has been synced up with FreeBSD 5.x. Perl has been upgraded to 5.8. Gimp-Print has been rolled in. Sendmail was replaced with Postfix. The whole OS is faster, especially the GUI. The GUI widgets have been tweaked, most of the pinstripes are gone or made more subtle. Quartz has been totally overhauled. PDF rendering (the whole GUI is displayPDF based) is more than 3x faster (try it, open a large PDF in Preview). Features like Expose are now possible. Fast user switching is now possible for other reasons. Lots of changes, both obvious and under the hood.
There's even a new developer suite included in the box!
It's not "OS 11" but it is still is a huge leap forward.
But you are missing my point, OS X is also gaining functionality, and taking advantage of the hardware (Expose is a prime example of this), yet the operating system runs FASTER than previous versions on the same machine. XP is way slower than 2000, which was slower than 98, etc. on the same machine. Obviously it is possible to improve the OS while also making it go faster (Apple can do it) but Microsoft has never done this.
This also is part of the reason why Apple is not obsessed with MHz. For the vast majority of users (assuming you are not sequencing genes or rendering 3D all the time) it doesn't matter. My 800 MHz iMac has displayed even BETTER performance with each point release of OS X. My 1.2 GHz laptop gets worse with each new verion of windows. While it is entirely subjective, I feel the iMac runs a lot faster (both have 1GB of ram)
I don't want to have to spend $1000+ on a machine every 2-3 years if I do not have to. I would rather spend more up front and know that it will be usable for a much longer period of time.
Finkployd