Apple Announced Mac OS X Panther ships in a few day (October 24th to be exact). I’m excited, but I doubt I will upgrade very soon. In all honesty, I just moved to 10.2 rather recently. Why you may ask? Because I value my stability, and upgrading always introduces new issues. My system is running great, I don’t get to use it that much (on this Wintel laptop during the week)… So why upgrade?
Mac OS X 10.2 is really good. I love it. The performance is good, so is the stability. As long as I can patch it to meet my needs, it stays.
Not to mention 10.3 isn’t officially supported on my Beige G3 server, and I don’t feel like using unofficial patches at this time. My B&W G3 could take it, but I don’t see a clear advantage to upgrading at this time.
Perhaps Apple would realize that it would be better to do more incremental free upgrades, rather than charge $100+/year to upgrade to the latest. Smaller upgrades to less damage. Giving it’s clientele an OS that’s always updated with no costs is very attractive to home users, especially with MS doing all this “Activation” and licensing stuff.
Home users aren’t very inclined to upgrade, it looks technical. So if it costs money… They don’t want to bother. Leaving users running several versions of OS X, and making work harder for developers.
Free smaller upgrades are more attractive, as they encourage people to upgrade. Making the Mac OS community more consistent with OS version, hence more attractive to developers.
It’s less work to support just 1 version, than several. Keeping users as close to this as possible would be more beneficial, than the current method. Not to mention free OS is very enticing to potential Wintel converts.