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Consumers with Older Macs Experience Panther Sluggishness

The official release of Apple's Panther operating system is still 3 days away, but that has done little to stop early adopters. Last week Apple provided thousands of its premier and select developers with the final release of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther for personal, professional and testing purposes.

A number of users have written in to express slight frustration with speeds of the new OS when installed on slightly dated Apple computers, and those that do not meet the requirements for Apple's Quartz Extreme technology.

One of the primary complaints is poor window redraw speeds across the board. Users of G3 based and older G4 systems are citing multi-second delays during application switching. Apple benchmarks show that Quartz Extreme equipped G4 machines perform about 40% faster than those which support basic Quartz rendering.

The issues are not just limited to renderings, users say. One AppleInsider reader, running a Dual 500MHz G4 with 1.5GBs of RAM, claims that fast user switching requires almost a minutes wait. Emptying half a gigabyte of files from the trash on the same machine was said to take nearly 5 minutes.

"This isn't quite ready for prime time," exclaims the user. "Wasn't this supposed to be faster?"

While only a handful of reports have voiced unsatisfactory results with Apple's new Panther OS, we are eager to hear additional user feedback on the final (build 7B85) of the OS. When submitting a report, please include your system configuration.

View Panther 7B85 User Feedback
Feedback will be published to this log as it is received.