Well, now that the dust is beginning to settle and the celebratory drunken debauchery is merely a happy memory (or no memory at all, if you did it right), one thing has become abundantly clear: while Panther is, in fact, all that and a bag of chips, said bag of chips is not necessarily, say, a jumbo-size bag of Baked Lays. In at least some circumstances, the bag more closely resembles a snack-size vending machine dispensation of soggy Baken-Ets. To put it in a far blander and less snack-related manner, everybody loves it like crazy, but Panther's got problems, and we can hear the wheels turning for a much-needed 10.3.1 update already.

Yesterday we mentioned that less than a day after the installation of Panther on our almost embarrassingly vanilla original 12-inch PowerBook (no third-party RAM, no system hacks, no shareware, and only a few commercial applications installed), the poor thing suffered its first kernel panic ever. Well, now the count is up to two panics in a three-day period, following eight straight months of panicless Jaguaring. Both occurred as we tried to wake the 'Book from sleep, implying that we're looking at a bug, not a fluke. And while it's true that the Panther kernel panic is every bit as sedate as the Jaguar version, a forced reboot and the loss of all unsaved changes is likely to be annoying no matter what it looks like. Indeed, being calmly informed that "you need to restart your computer" is almost more infuriating than the classic vomitous spate of ASCII technojargon and hexadecimal code that used to come spewing through the GUI yelling "OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!!" (After all, if you're going to panic, then panic already.)

Well, a quick glance around the 'net shows that we're not the only ones having "issues" with Panther. MacFixIt is rife with reports of fun little problems like data on FireWire hard drives getting scrambled beyond redemption, FileVault nuking preference settings, and Exposé appearing to play fetch with the family dog but in actuality only pretending to throw the ball and thus confusing the dickens out of poor Fido. Meanwhile, WIRED's Leander Kahney reports having spent the entire weekend on data recovery tactics after the installation of Panther on an iBook went so far south it saw penguins. (Despite the pain, Leander still gushes over how badly everyone needs this upgrade.)

Yikes! Suppose this is what happens when you release software a couple of months before the deadline? Looking back, we're actually pretty darn happy that we plunged headlong into that evil 10.2.8 update without testing the waters first, because the resulting ickiness from that process made us just nervous enough to be able to avoid the nigh-irresistible temptation to Pantherize our main production Macs the very second that black box with the shiny X showed up on the doorstep last Friday. So for now, for the mission-critical stuff (like AtAT production, nuclear facility failsafe design, and Elmo's Keyboard-o-rama) we stick with Jaguar. And watch. And wait.