In the darkness, the panther strikes
Beth and I are considering going to the "Night of the Panther" Friday at the Apple Store in Chandler, AZ, mainly in an attempt to win an iMac :-) I could definitely use a low-end desktop Mac now that the Blue & White has gone back to Westlake. I don't think the 15" iMac they're giving away boots into MacOS 9 though, which is mainly what I need at the moment. I hate rebooting my main Mac to test an app under 9 - that pretty much kills my productivity.
I'm looking forward to Panther. Expose sounds like it rocks, the speed increase on my lowly iBook is noticeable (but not overwhelming), and I've promised myself that I'll give Mail.app a shot instead of Entourage. On the downside, I recall all the little things that went wrong when I upgraded in the past. The printer drivers for my HP OfficeJet d135 stopped working with either 10.1 or 10.2 and required an update from HP (whose Mac support is abysmal), I had to reconfigure Apache each time, and invariably, some of the Unsanity haxies that I love so much stop working. I'm pretty sure that on the first and last fronts, I'm good to go, so I may just go ahead and install Panther. That'll leave me without a 10.2.x install though, so I may wait until I can get a cheap low-end Mac instead.
Comments
Don't be fooled by the iMac thing, like some friends of mine and myself were. We went to the big Jaguar in-store event expecting an iMac giveaway that night, when in reality it's ONE iMac for the whole country. You'll sign up at your local Apple Store, then a few weeks later that ONE iMac will be given away. We were very disappointed.
Posted by: Spencer | October 22, 2003 07:26 AM
Check the new prices for the eMac, the low end model is $799 and boots in OS 9 (at least according to the knowledge base).
Posted by: Kay | October 22, 2003 08:49 AM
Thanks for the advice, Kay. One of the things I neglected to mention in my entry was why I liked having that Blue & White around. I had it hooked up to a USB switchbox so that it didn't need it's own monitor. My office gets plenty warm with the QuickSilver and all the other junk in it. Plus, I could keep the B&W on the floor instead of on my desk. For those reasons, the eMac isn't overly practical for me. The iMac isn't either, but I suspect that the flat-panel model at least has the advantage of running cooler. Dunno for sure though. A headless iMac or eMac - or Cube! - would be nice. :-)
Posted by: Brad Oliver | October 22, 2003 09:03 AM
Hi Brad, I enjoy reading your blog. Keep up ALL the good work.
Re. losing 10.2 when you load up Panther. I bought myself an 80 GByte hard drive a while back. I still have that partitioned into two 40 GByte drives, plus my old original 12 GByte drive, with 10.2.8 on one of the 40 GB drives. I plan to reformat one of the other partitions and install a clean, pure Panther, try it out with my USB ADSL modem and my HP Deskjet and my CF card reader. If all is well I'll run with it. If not I'll still have my unmodified 10.2.8 to option-boot back into until 10.3.1 arrives. I'm really looking forward to XCode :)
-- Alan
Posted by: AlanH | October 23, 2003 01:46 PM