So, I’ve upgraded my TiBook to Panther, and, in a word, woah.

My machine now runs, easily, 30% faster. I didn’t really see that on Cynthia’s Pismo or Matthew’s iMac DV, but my machine is definitely snappier and more responsive. Apps start faster, menus pop, the whole user experience seems smoother.

There are a number of sweet things about the upgrade, functionality-wise, to love as well. Expose is very cool. The speed at which preview renders and walks PDFs is amazing. The new Finder is very clean, usable, and navigates networks much easier than Jaguar.

There are tons of small touches that I continue to find as time goes on. For example, the volume-up and volume-down keys work much better than they did under Jag. Closing the system preferences window actually quits the app (which is usually what is intended). Most “you don’t have access to do that” dialogs now include “authenticate” buttons, letting me temporarily authenticate as a user with higher access, instead of having to log out and log in.

Overall, my experience with the new OS has been very positive. I’ve seen the reports floating around the ‘net about various problems that people are encountering, but that’s to be expected. It was the same with Jag, and with Cheetah before that. All I know is that Microsoft is demoing their new OS (code-name: Longhorn) this week, it won’t ship until 2006 according to most estimates, and it’s still behind. By then, OS X will be another 2 or 3 major revs down the road.