Macintosh OS X 10.3 - Panther - A First Look

Allen Harkleroad October 30, 2003   Apple OS X 10.3 Sweet, Juicy and Full of Pep! I could reiterate all the marketing hype regarding Apple's latest release of OS X 10, but I think a quick and straight-up examination of Panther (OS X 10.3) is in order. Apples marketing machine touts the fact that OS X 10.3 has over 150 new features. I personally havent seen a 150 new features, but I do know that OS X 10.3 is faster on my G4 (single processor, 1ghz, with 1 gigabyte of ram) than the previous versions of OS X. Even though I have been in graphic design for nearly 15 years I rarely used a Macintosh. I guess you could say I am a Mac OS greenhorn to some extent. I previously have had a little experience with Mac OS 8 and 9 and really liked the interface and speed of Mac OS. On my G4 I upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 and the upgrade was uneventful for the most part, no surprises whatsoever. After the upgrade I noticed that software launched faster (Photoshop, CorelDraw, Painter, etc.), I mean a LOT faster. The system itself seems a lot more responsive and there are quite a few must haves that I really haven been quite taken with. The printing subsystem is much nicer and has more options than previous versions of OS X. Also file sharing between my Mac and my Windows based PCs is a lot more mature and very easy to use. My Mac finally plays well with Windows on our network. No more hair pulling trying to configure Mac/Win file sharing. Finally Mac has found a place as one of my daily use operating systems. I would have to say that for ease of use 10.3 has all previous versions of OS X beaten hands down. Of course there is a lot of new eye candy in 10.3 but overall usability has improved greatly. I guess my first impression of the new operating system is one of high regard. I dont really care a lot for the flash and glitter that is OS X 10.3, but with the flash and glitter comes a very streamlined and responsive operating system that suits my needs very well. Of course I could gush about all the great features of the updated operating system, but most of them the average user will never see. I like the improvements I see in networking, file sharing, and printing. I do have to admit the font book application is great, I just wish I had waited before I bought a font manager a few months ago. Apple keeps building great applications into the operating system and has improved on quite a number of applications that were originally in OS X 10.2. The finder application has a nice fresh look and is more intuitive than ever and does help you to find items a lot faster. The side bar in finder displays your hard drives as well as your image folders, document folders, etc. A very nice improvement, indeed. Expose is also a really nice addition to the operating system as well, allowing you to see windows that may have been covered up by the active application; it is a smooth and well thought out addition to OS X. Apple also updated the DVD player, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes. Not a lot to speak of although the DVD player interface is nice and smooth. The Preview application is faster than a scalded cat when launching previews of images, PDF's, etc. All in all everything that has been updated in Mac OS X 10.3 is mature, smooth and well thought-out. I find a lot of the new features easy to use and intuitive. In regards to speed, I did a bit of informal testing myself. I used my Dell Precision 650 (Dual 2.0ghz Xeon Pentium 4 processors) with a gigabyte of DDR ram and an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro with dual output to two 20 flat panel LCD panels and running Windows XP (all the latest updates) as the PC test machine. And for the Mac side of things I used my single processor 1.0ghz G4 with a gigabyte of ram and everything else was stock, even down to the 17 Apple studio display and running OS X 10.3 (Panther). Mainly I wanted to see the difference is application launch speed, as I seem to spend a lot of minutes just waiting for stuff to launch. My results are below. Photoshop 7 Mac OS X 10.3: 6 seconds Windows XP:     7 seconds CorelDraw 11 Mac OS X 10.3: 10 seconds Windows XP:     11 seconds Adobe Premiere 6.5 Mac OS X 10.3: 26 seconds Windows XP:     26 seconds Adobe Acrobat Reader Max OS X 10.3: 3 seconds Windows XP:     9 seconds Just by looking above at the application launch times you can see that OS X 10.3 running on the slowest G4 does in fact load applications faster than my Dell Dual Processor system. Of course the above is an Apples to Oranges comparison, but it does give credence to the fact that OS X 10.3 is faster than its predecessors and I personally like the look and feel of OS X 10.3. Even with OS X 1.3 costing over $100.00 to me it was worth it to get that extra speed boost but also the updated OS X applications. I personally did not spend a lot of time with the fast-user switching and such because I am am the only one that use the G4 in my office, so I don't have a lot of use for that but the improved networking, printing applet, font book and Expose window management is outstanding, and with that I take my hat off to Apple on OS X 10.3 - Panther. Great job, Apple!   Pricing $99.00 and up (depending on where you buy it) System Requirements Windows Not applicable     Macintosh - Power Mac G3, G4 or G5 iMac - eMac - PowerBook G3 or G4 - iBook computer with 128 MB of RAM - Built-in USB Company Website: Apple Website Copyright 2003, Allen Harkleroad, All Rights Reserved