Woohoo! I’ve just placed my order for the new version of OSX, codenamed Panther. I qualified for the special upgrade offer for new Mac owners, and I got it for 14 pounds! This release (10.3) adds quite a number of new features, such as Expose, improved Finder, better Unix support, improved Preview for PDFs and PS files, overall improved system performance, and many more. I will wait a while before I install it though, I want to see other people’s experiences first, although Panther has gone through extensive testing and tons of people have already been using it for months.

I must point out, as many others are already, this is probably the first OS update I have seen by a company which actually improves performance relative to its predecessors. Each successive release of Windows, for example, required more processing power, more RAM, more HD space, etc. But Panther improves the experience for a lot of folks, from G3 iBook owners to G5 owners This is quite an achievement.