uv23 said:
Looks like they're going to leave panther with a crapload of bugs, particularly on the powerbook end of things. Unless they miraculously fix all of them with 10.3.9.
Almost all older releases of OS X have bugs. Some that carry on to this day. A major reason for ME to upgrade beyond the new features (and Tiger certainly has some attractive ones!) is that hopefully Apple is hard at work ironing out bugs. My guess is that at some point they say "Time to focus on the new release" and just dedicate a small team to maintaining the outdated os's. And all you really will ever see from that point on are security updates.
I realize some people don't like to upgrade, but in the computer world, not every "OS" version is patched, sealed, and solid as a rock before moving on to the next one. With limited resources, apple probably just calls it a day, and moves on when its time to dive deep into the new OS.
I think its time for the mac world to move forward however, and unify the user base. Not supporting os 9 is one of the best moves apple has made on the PC side of its business, as that would have led to years of dragging feet due to lethargic / scared users. Now those were drug kicking and screaming into the OS X world, and now they see the light!
But, back on topic, 10.3.9 may well be the last update, or may not. I do not feel that affects the tiger timeline at all at this point, as likely the engineers still working on panther are doing that exclusive from the people plugging away at tiger.
And leaving Panther with a few bugs is far from unusual... 10.0 is no longer under development / being patched, and I would say it has its "Fair" share of bugs :O