*Much faster is both more than 2 seconds and more than 10 percent. The pattern that emerges for the G4 Cubes is that Pan

ther is much faster in 2D graphics and in finder operations. Startup in our G4s is also much faster with Panther than with Jaguar.

The dual 2-GHz Power Mac G5 tests also confirm a significant speed up in finder operations running Panther over its special version of Jaguar--10.2.8(G5)--but not much else. There is also a strange anomally with the Let1kWindowsBloom test and the G5 running Panther that we can not explain--we ran it several times under a variety of circumtances and got the same result.

In summary, Mac OS X 10.3 is much faster than its ancestors in 2D graphics running on a G4 and in Finder operations on G4 and G5 Macs. The speed-up is subjectively obvious in all window operations, including the genie effect of Mac OS X's dock. We are especially pleased that OS X Mail is much faster than previous versions--downloading messages and displaying them works at a reasonable speed now. The only issue with Mail is that it's Junk filter has been capturing a lot more non-junk than the previous version.