The Need for Panther?

[Punani]

Looking at the feature progression from Jaguar to Tiger, I have to wonder...was the release of Panther really necessary?

Comparing Jaguar to Panther, I feel that the underlying system did not change, but rather everything just got wrapped in a new Aqua look and a few neat features like threading in Mail.app, Exposé, FileVault, etc. While these features are certainly interesting and useful, no one would have thought it cheap of Apple to wait and include them in Tiger. And right now, Tiger does not have as many eye candy features leading some to tag it as a rather bland release.

 

[Blue Velvet]

As well as the things you listed, the most important thing that Panther bought was speed to the Finder...

I have a bootable partition on one of my HDs with Jaguar and very occasionally I boot from that... It's slow and horrible.

Fontbook was a useful addition although imperfect.

I think we'll see GUI improvements in Tiger -- hope they're holding them back till eventual release.

 

[saabmp3]

expose!!!

 

[Punani]

expose!!!

Would you have needed this if they didn't release it?

What I'm really trying to say is, yes, the speed refinements are great, but they probably could have done with a minor upgrade though. Just like the Windows service packs. I mean, they kept the clunky polling Finder because they were working on Spotlight...