So Panther is officially here (or it will be, in just a few hours), and after much hand-wringing and Order Status-checking, we've finally got our own Family Pack in our hot little hands. The goods have been delivered, the credit card has been charged, and there's no way to cancel the order anymore. In short, this transaction is done, done, done.

So this is a good time to weigh the pros and cons of whether or not Panther is worth the price, right?

First? What do you mean we were supposed to do that first?

Huh. You learn something new every day. Today we learned that it's best to consider the cost-benefit factors of a product before you actually buy it; yesterday we learned that Close-Up gel on saltines makes for a refreshing and cavity-fighting mid-afternoon snack; the day before that we learned that jamming a fork into an electrical outlet makes you see a dark tunnel ending in a serene white light of endless purity and peace. Life sure would be easier if they'd put all this stuff into new Schoolhouse Rock! segments.

Anyway, the San Francisco Chronicle cites IDC's Roger Kay as one analyst questioning whether Apple is "asking too much of its small but loyal base of customers to buy four upgrades in three years." (Four? Were there people who actually paid for 10.1 instead of grabbing a free CD-ROM at retail?) Says Roger, "there may not be that many people who take every upgrade; not everybody is going to want to take something like Jaguar and turn it into Panther. Jaguar is pretty good. Just a few months ago, they were saying it's the best thing in the world."

Well, uh, yeah, Roger... that's because Panther wasn't out yet. A few months ago, Jaguar was the best thing in the world; now Panther is. This isn't rocket science. Or do we need to commission Bob Dorough to explain it in a catchy kid's song set to primitive animation?

That said, Roger's got a point. Heck, we're certain there are plenty of people out there still running 10.1; even we're still running it on one Mac. But we think the Panther sales will go something like this: nine out of ten people who shelled out for Jaguar will also shell out for Panther, because hey, that's just the kind of people we are. Then the question just becomes, who else will buy a copy? What about people with newish Macs that came with Jaguar preinstalled? Or folks who have been stubbornly sticking with Mac OS 9 for whatever reason-- will Panther finally get them to make the jump?

Meanwhile, Mac users who were counting on Panther to deliver a serious boost of speed to their systems may be disappointed. We know we were skeptical about AppleInsider's report of "sluggish" Panther performance on older supported Macs, but now Bare Feats reports that, short of a 15% speed gain in Unreal Tournament 2003, "after running all our real world tests on the Dual G5, we measured no speed gain over Jaguar." That's a little disillusioning, since we really expected at least the G5s to score a little extra pep.

In the end, though, we don't think Apple has to worry much about winding up with warehouses full of unsold copies of Panther. The depth of the feature set is scads more impressive than any Mac OS X upgrade to date; Apple's director of Mac OS X marketing Ken Bereskin says, "for a small amount of money, it's like having a new Mac all over again"-- and unlike when Steve tried to pull that "like getting a new Mac for $99" crap with Mac OS 8.5, this time it's actually kind of true. Given that Panther has topped the Apple Store sales charts for ages now, customers seem willing to believe it.

And we haven't even mentioned the biggest reason why Panther is worth the $129: the box. C'mon, the X is shiny, fer Pete's sake! Ooooooooooo!