[Ti] X 1.3 upgrade from marketing?

[David]

On 1/25/04 1:07 PM, "Daniel Rubinstein" <shardaeek at fmail.co.uk> wrote:

> Like many others i was eagerly awaiting the arrival of "Panther",
> counting the seconds on the Apple website, looking at the tantalizing
> screen shoots and reading the reviews of the lucky ones who got their
> hands on the upgrade before everyone else. I was expecting something as
> spectacular as the upgrade from X.1 to X.2, which made me recommend OS
> X to everyone who didn't make the move yet.
> And yet, three month after the smooth transition to X.3 i am feeling
> that i took part in an event of mass self-hypnosis, as the hype sinks
> down, what remains is a big hole in the place where the enthusiasm and
> anticipation used to reside.
> 
> Is it only me, or others too find X.3 relatively useless upgrade? I
> been working daily on my PB 550 with 768 RAM every day since the
> upgrade, and I don't find myself using most of the new features that
> X.3 was celebrated for. Sure there are some nice things, for one I now
> type this message in Mail, which became my favorite email app. and
> Entourage is not raising its slow and ugly head any  more. But the
> price of a system upgrade for a dissent email application? it is a bit
> rich even for a MAC enthusiast.
> On the down side, my scanner (Canon 9900F ) now works only when logged
> in as an administrator which is annoying and disrupting to my workflow.
> Canon tech support are telling me the the drivers for OX X.3 are not
> released yet, which is fair enough, but i didn't have this problem with
> X.2
> The only use i have for the celebrated Expose is exposing the finder
> without moving windows around. Something you can do in Windows OS by
> simply pressing the Windows button and D, since Win95. And yes, the
> finder is more useable now, but it only makes me feel that i was
> participating in Beta testing all along.
> My partner has a G3 ibook, and wile it was running reasonably under X.2
> with the pre-installed 127MB of RAM, after installing  X.3, it is  in
> dire need of a 512 stick, which will add another £100 to the price of
> the upgrade. Which means paying extra just in order to keep the old
> functionality.
> Apple's shameless slogan for X.3 was "it is like having a brand new
> mac" - what a lot of rubbish! Clever marketing for a mostly cosmetic
> upgrade.
> 
> Hardly surprising, of-course, Apple is as much about profit as any
> spaghetti-O manufacturer, and why should they try to give me good value
> for money if Flash animations and strategically placed advertorials
> will make me part with my cash anyway.
> 
You have just learned an important lesson - YMMV - your mileage may vary.

Do I consider Panther money well spent? Yes. The Finder is more responsive
and doesn't hang when I try to manipulate a large number of files -
something I do on a regular basis. The new folder ledge of the Finder
windows has proven to be invaluable to my work flow. The way this integrates
with the file selector almost makes an add-on like Default-Folder
unnecessary. If you use Apple's built in CD burn capability you'll have
noticed it is faster - though no less wasteful of drive space in its use of
a disk image to simulate a CD. And lets not forget the sparse disk image.
Not new but easier to create for the non-techie.

If your partner has been using Jaguar happily with only 128 MB I fail to see
how Panther would be any less usable. That is truly the minimum usable - it
actually falls under the category of criminally insane usage as far as I'm
concerned. But hey, I consider 256 to be the minimum and with that amount
Panther is happier than Jaguar was.

Let's see. Desktop printers are finally back. The entire print center seems
more responsive and I see much less printer flakiness than I used to. You
might find Expose' less than valuable but not every does. And while I'm not
thrilled with how labels look, I'm thrilled to finally have them again. For
me Panther is more stable than Jaguar but most of that comes from the Finder
flakiness being gone.

Nope - my experience is completely different from yours. For me, Panther is
insanely great. But hey - as I said at the onset YMMV. Another reason to
hang back and let others do the beta testing.

david


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