alan little’s weblog

panther – yes

24th November 2003 permanent link

I upgraded my iBook to Panther at the weekend (having first carefully backed it up to an external firewire drive which I then unplugged. I have to say I’m impressed so far. Nothing has broken yet. The look, on my severely small and cluttered laptop screen, is generally cleaner and easier on the eye – font rendering in particular is much better. Even leaving aside the wonders of Exposé, the performance improvement in basic windowing operations is enough to make a significant difference in ease of use.

And, as every Mac advocate always says, when was the last time a new Windows version was faster on the same hardware? Particularly when the hardware in question is an obsolescent and rather underpowered little low end laptop. Of course, for a long time Microsoft could put out increasingly sluggish bloatware and rely on Moore’s law to save them, whereas Apple couldn’t because Moore’s Law didn’t apply to Motorola. Those days, one hopes, are over. What is not over is the look of Aqua getting steadily cleaner and better, whereas Windows sinks ever further into blue-and-orange blotched amateurish ugliness. When I first saw Windows XP I couldn’t believe that anybody would actually ship something that looked like that except as a joke.

I just noticed the standard python version is now 2.3. That’s nice too.

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