Poll Results: Panting for Panther? In last week's poll, we asked, "When do you plan to upgrade your main Mac to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther?" It turns out that about half of the TidBITS audience (at least those who respond to our polls) are essentially early adopters, since 45 percent of respondents have already installed Panther, and another 6 percent plan to do it as soon as they get around to it (they must be overworked early adopters). Another large chunk (30 percent) said they'd upgrade once Panther stabilizes: well-publicized problems with FireWire hard drives have engendered appropriate caution for many people. A smaller number don't see Panther as a necessary upgrade: 7 percent plan to upgrade once their work or programs require it, and another 11 percent will upgrade by default once they buy new Macs. And the number of people who don't plan to upgrade at all? A vanishingly small 1 percent, or only 4 people from the total of nearly 700 respondents.

<http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbpoll=82>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07432>

Interestingly, Karelia Software, makers of the Watson Internet searching and reference tool, can track the operating system version of Watson users and found that 62.7 percent were running Panther, 36.2 percent were still on Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, and 1.1 percent were still running Mac OS X 10.1 (codenamed Puma). It's possible that the difference in results comes from the fact that we're actually reporting on Panther's strengths and weaknesses, thus ensuring that our audience is perhaps somewhat more aware of problems than Karelia's users are. [ACE]

<http://weblog.karelia.com/MacOSX/Followup_on_ users_s.html>