I'm planning to "switch" to Panther around the end of this week.
Mine was delayed en route and is due by then.
But it's a pricey process, especially since I've got a "family pack" ordered to take Marianne's machine on a step as well!
I was definitively turned on to Panther by the Apple Expo here this year, less because of the speed some people rave about -- though it obviously is faster -- than by some aspects of the revised user interface, which is better than Jaguar's.
Panther is also a significant upgrade from the Mac developers' point of view and that side of our gorgeous machines interests me more and more.
That said, I see absolutely no reason to rush into Panther unless you want to or "need" to. Before going to a major change in OS these days, I tend to weigh up the cost of it. Jaguar brought a few unwelcome surprises regarding third party applications.
If you're using applications like Toast 5 or iView Media Pro, I'm not sure that it's indispensable to upgrade them -- their home sites and FAQs are vague about this -- but the manufacturers nevertheless seem to recommend that you'd do better to do so.
That's already a further 100 dollars to shell out at the very least...
And so on.
The other thing about upgrading is the old adage made famous by several TSers: "If it ain't broke..."
Jaguar has been, for me, such a darned good OS -- reliable, stable and adaptable -- that it's mainly curiosity and the developer side of Panther that induce me to install it. Few people I know, but there are some lucky souls here, have successfully upgraded through the various incarnations of Jag to 10.2.8 without a very serious glitch or two on the way.
Including a good number of us whose internet connections went down, for instance, with 10.2.4. The trouble surrounding Apple's first release of 10.2.8, indeed, has been only too well and painfully documented on the Net.
It's pretty scandalous when Apple releases something into the wild that causes so much hassle and is apparently so inadequately tested ahead of time, but those wretched people at Cupertino do it so often these days that I will no longer risk an automatic upgrade of any major change they make.
Instead I systematically use the download-to-desktop option and check the Web, here and elsewhere, for other people's tales of woe before again screwing up my own system.
From what I've read to date, Panther is -- almost surprisingly, given the recent track record -- bug-free.
But I'm not going that way without a complete back-up of Jag first, while the easy install over Jag option is a decided "no-no".
I'll archive and install.
