I agree with emission. This article is just crap and there’s no “reason to pause”. I’ve been using Panther for awhile now and have not any problems, nor have the majority of people who use it. Sure there are some left over issues, but there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t upgrade.
Have there been some issues? Yes. Do they affect the majority of users? Hardly. Not even close.
Here’s my experience: I have a 700 mgtz iBook and a 17″ iMac. For peripherals, I have a HP 960c color inkjet and a HP 1012 laser printer. I’ve got a d-link wifi router and an external LaCie L2 80GB firewire drive. I’ve done a clean install of Panther on both machines and after 3 weeks or so of use I have exactly ZERO problems. Not a thing wrong. Everything is faster, and all the cool stuff like expose really rock.
I know about a dozen other Mac users with varying equipment. Some have powerbooks, some have powermacs, some have older machines, some have new machines. None of them have had any issues with Panther. They all love Panther and I know they would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone.
For me, it was money well spent. Panther is a great upgrade for OS X — the best yet, IMHO.
I have no doubt it may be of some utility to one of our friends who probably will appear soon to explain how OS X is evil evil evil, but it basically says: I jump on the bleeding edge, while my wife is more prudent. Maybe I should listen to my wife?
Well maybe. Maybe not. Who cares?
The article is not an opinion piece (he loves his Mac), it is not informative (well, we know now that Ms. Warner is of the cautious type), it is not a review.
I bought my first ever MAC shortly before Panther came out. I got Panther and installed it as an upgrade and have had no problems with it. Why should I wait until it has been on the market for awhile first? Let’s face it, if you are going to wait until it is completely stable you will never install it. I can install any version of just about any OS and have problems with some equipment. Using the logic in the article maybe our author would be better off running DOS since it has been out long enough to work out most of the bugs.
Seriously every time some warning comes out like “doing/using X could corrupt data on your machine” it never affects the vast majority of users. I know many people who have upgraded to Panther and 99.9% of them have experienced no problems whatsoever.
As for the RAM, if you buy some cheap generic memory your just asking for trouble. It’s about the equivalent of going into Best Buy and getting some dirt cheap PC, you’ll get nothing but problems. The Firewire 800 drives I can understand being a bit of a problem, but still not worth writting this article… not by far.
Please don’t publish articles like this blaming someone else for your dumb mistakes.
I experienced weird SMB share problems with my FreeBSD 4.8 (now 4.9) file server. Mapped shares would dissapear, and I wouldn’t be able to see or browse the network shares from Finder.
Also, I had a kernel panic. Just one, about a week or so after installing Panther. So far, these are the only problems I have encountered with Panther.
The weird SMB problem has been experienced on both mine and my wife’s iMacs. The upgrade to Panther was basically a disk wipe and clean install on both systems.
I now have 10.3.1 on both systems, and they seem to have stabilized quite nicely.
I’ve had absolutely no problems with Panther and I’ve been using it on my main 800mhz G4 iMac (pre-ordered from Apple) since the day it was released. If you buy cheap memory you are asking for trouble no matter what kind of computer you use.
I experienced weird SMB share problems with my FreeBSD 4.8 (now 4.9) file server. Mapped shares would dissapear, and I wouldn’t be able to see or browse the network shares from Finder.
I have had exactly the same problems with Windows 2000. Shared Win2k folders just do NOT appear in Finder…..I have to explicitly map them as smb:\workgroupfolder. Damn nuisance it is too!
It runs it like a dream ! Of course I got 1 gb of PC133 mem in it and I have upgrade the drive to a 40 gig fast 7200 rpm drive. I also added a 32 mb Radeon 7000 PCI card so that I can take advantage of Quartz with the system. So far I have not notice to much disk thrashing and apps load fast enough to not notice much of lag. Panther has given my old B&W a new lease on life. Of course I will soon be buying one of those accelator cpu’s to bump up my speed to 900mhz. Though I heard they are not supported by OS-X Panther but I have talked to people who say that they run great and with no problems.
for me, SMB feels a bit flaky… I bring my laptop between home and work, and both have SMB shares, if I don’t disconnect them before I unplug, I have lots of problems with the other network… often times I can’t connect, or I get popups saying that it can’t find the network device, i’ve had incorrect directory listings, or I’ve been unable to write to a drive (but still read from it).
I love panther, and i’ve told apple about this issue, but as long as I disconnect the drives first, I have no problems.
I upgraded to Panther the day it was released. I’m running it on a PowerBook 17 with stock Apple RAM. I did an erase and clean install rather than an upgrade. Every Apple OS upgrade generates hundreds of people who complain about problems, many of which I suspect are of their own making (haxies, upgrade rather than clean install, etc…). For those hundreds, there are tens of thousands who upgrade easily and efficiently, but we never hear from them.
“Weird that most PC’s run just fine with cheap memory, maybe the Mac is a bit picky or just bad luck, memory is pretty binary it works or it doesn’t… “
The last thing I would put into a PC is cheap memory. I have tried it before and it does tend to produce errors.
why would anyone buy house brand memory?, don’t go cheap on memory, it just ends up costing you.
No problems whatsoever w/ Panther here.
Although there are issues with Panther, this article was among the lamest this week….
I agree with emission. This article is just crap and there’s no “reason to pause”. I’ve been using Panther for awhile now and have not any problems, nor have the majority of people who use it. Sure there are some left over issues, but there’s no reason why someone shouldn’t upgrade.
Have there been some issues? Yes. Do they affect the majority of users? Hardly. Not even close.
Here’s my experience: I have a 700 mgtz iBook and a 17″ iMac. For peripherals, I have a HP 960c color inkjet and a HP 1012 laser printer. I’ve got a d-link wifi router and an external LaCie L2 80GB firewire drive. I’ve done a clean install of Panther on both machines and after 3 weeks or so of use I have exactly ZERO problems. Not a thing wrong. Everything is faster, and all the cool stuff like expose really rock.
I know about a dozen other Mac users with varying equipment. Some have powerbooks, some have powermacs, some have older machines, some have new machines. None of them have had any issues with Panther. They all love Panther and I know they would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone.
For me, it was money well spent. Panther is a great upgrade for OS X — the best yet, IMHO.
Go for it.
I have no doubt it may be of some utility to one of our friends who probably will appear soon to explain how OS X is evil evil evil, but it basically says: I jump on the bleeding edge, while my wife is more prudent. Maybe I should listen to my wife?
Well maybe. Maybe not. Who cares?
The article is not an opinion piece (he loves his Mac), it is not informative (well, we know now that Ms. Warner is of the cautious type), it is not a review.
????
I bought my first ever MAC shortly before Panther came out. I got Panther and installed it as an upgrade and have had no problems with it. Why should I wait until it has been on the market for awhile first? Let’s face it, if you are going to wait until it is completely stable you will never install it. I can install any version of just about any OS and have problems with some equipment. Using the logic in the article maybe our author would be better off running DOS since it has been out long enough to work out most of the bugs.
Seriously every time some warning comes out like “doing/using X could corrupt data on your machine” it never affects the vast majority of users. I know many people who have upgraded to Panther and 99.9% of them have experienced no problems whatsoever.
As for the RAM, if you buy some cheap generic memory your just asking for trouble. It’s about the equivalent of going into Best Buy and getting some dirt cheap PC, you’ll get nothing but problems. The Firewire 800 drives I can understand being a bit of a problem, but still not worth writting this article… not by far.
Please don’t publish articles like this blaming someone else for your dumb mistakes.
I experienced weird SMB share problems with my FreeBSD 4.8 (now 4.9) file server. Mapped shares would dissapear, and I wouldn’t be able to see or browse the network shares from Finder.
Also, I had a kernel panic. Just one, about a week or so after installing Panther. So far, these are the only problems I have encountered with Panther.
The weird SMB problem has been experienced on both mine and my wife’s iMacs. The upgrade to Panther was basically a disk wipe and clean install on both systems.
I now have 10.3.1 on both systems, and they seem to have stabilized quite nicely.
I’ve had absolutely no problems with Panther and I’ve been using it on my main 800mhz G4 iMac (pre-ordered from Apple) since the day it was released. If you buy cheap memory you are asking for trouble no matter what kind of computer you use.
I experienced weird SMB share problems with my FreeBSD 4.8 (now 4.9) file server. Mapped shares would dissapear, and I wouldn’t be able to see or browse the network shares from Finder.
I have had exactly the same problems with Windows 2000. Shared Win2k folders just do NOT appear in Finder…..I have to explicitly map them as smb:\workgroupfolder. Damn nuisance it is too!
Have you experienced this since the 10.3.1 patch?
I ask because I have not experienced this problem since I installed the 10.3.1 patch.
It runs it like a dream ! Of course I got 1 gb of PC133 mem in it and I have upgrade the drive to a 40 gig fast 7200 rpm drive. I also added a 32 mb Radeon 7000 PCI card so that I can take advantage of Quartz with the system. So far I have not notice to much disk thrashing and apps load fast enough to not notice much of lag. Panther has given my old B&W a new lease on life. Of course I will soon be buying one of those accelator cpu’s to bump up my speed to 900mhz. Though I heard they are not supported by OS-X Panther but I have talked to people who say that they run great and with no problems.
It works like a dream. It’s faster than 10.1 (I skipped putting Jaguar on that machine).
Regards,
Mark Wilson
for me, SMB feels a bit flaky… I bring my laptop between home and work, and both have SMB shares, if I don’t disconnect them before I unplug, I have lots of problems with the other network… often times I can’t connect, or I get popups saying that it can’t find the network device, i’ve had incorrect directory listings, or I’ve been unable to write to a drive (but still read from it).
I love panther, and i’ve told apple about this issue, but as long as I disconnect the drives first, I have no problems.
I upgraded to Panther the day it was released. I’m running it on a PowerBook 17 with stock Apple RAM. I did an erase and clean install rather than an upgrade. Every Apple OS upgrade generates hundreds of people who complain about problems, many of which I suspect are of their own making (haxies, upgrade rather than clean install, etc…). For those hundreds, there are tens of thousands who upgrade easily and efficiently, but we never hear from them.
Weird that most PC’s run just fine with cheap memory, maybe the Mac is a bit picky or just bad luck, memory is pretty binary it works or it doesn’t…
“Weird that most PC’s run just fine with cheap memory, maybe the Mac is a bit picky or just bad luck, memory is pretty binary it works or it doesn’t… “
The last thing I would put into a PC is cheap memory. I have tried it before and it does tend to produce errors.
… Let me see. What company is influencial in Seattle?