Got my OSX Panther order in and am expecting delivery tomorrow before I go to Apple's Night of the Panther Party - 8 pm at the Apple stores. I still can't decide whether to go to Emeryville or Burlingame. They are both about 40 minutes away. Definitely going, though. I had a blast at the party last year and everything in the store was 10% off. Bought a whole new system.
The Panther Power I'm talking about is a very noticeable speed increase. Although my big iron - PowerMac dual 867 - runs as fast as I want. My Powerbook 800 doesn't. If I can get a speed boost, I'll take it. I want to nurse this Powerbook along at least until the 2 year mark - around May 2004. See how budget-minded I am? No, actually, it's that I'm a little broke. The darned Bay Area economy has been a nightmare for a couple years now is only starting to fire back up.
David Pogue has a good Panther article today in the NY Times and he pointed out a Panther feature I hadn't heard of but really like. My favorite and free writing tool, Textedit, has been upgraded so it can open, edit and save Word documents. This is going to make the need to open up Microsoft Word even less necessary than before. I've gotten tired of humongous and complex office programs like Word and Excel. They are charging an arm and a leg for these upgrades that seem to do more harm than good and it's been downhill for years from my point of view. They need to rewrite these things from scratch and make them sleek and simple. Since that probably aint gonna happen, I'm cheering for all the new kids on the block with alternatives to Microsoft Office.
If you want to see why I'm so excited about Panther, check out my Panther Post on the front page of my tokerud.com site. If you want my opinion on when to upgrade, see Is there a Panther in Your Future? on my Mac Observer page.