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Jaguar Fat, Slow, and Deeply Flawed?

Dirk Pilat - 2002.09.04

Hi everyone!

Well, it has arrived: Jaguar is now resting on my iBook's OS X partition after an excruciating long install that took about half an evening of anxiously checking whether the install process was still happening.

After the reboot - now for the first time without the happy Mac icon (and which was only marginally faster) - it still looked like OS X. There were a couple of new icons lying around in the "Application" folder, windows opened up a bit zippier, and, as you all know, the beach ball from hell is now a bit prettier.

With other words, the whole Jaguar experience so far was quite underwhelming.

To check out the new networking gadgets like Rendezvous and iChat, I fired up the Internet Connect Panel, and - excuse me? - for some weird reason, my Alcatel Speedtouch modem did not show up anymore on the list of available ports. A quick check on the Web using Classic, just like in the good times, confirmed my worst fears: Jaguar does not support my modem, and although Alcatel has issued drivers somewhere, they have not made it to the New Zealand site, adapted to the local connection prefs. I have to admit that I have my doubts whether they will make it, though, as Alcatel NZ unfortunately has been not very supportive so far.

So now I'm back using Classic, which still seems to have a significant speed-advantage and at least lets me surf in style and speed. Suspicious that 10.2 is not really the big step forward we all hoped for, I received a little email from Germany, in which my friend Sven made me conscious of the fact the author of "Tinker Tool" blamed Apple for releasing Jaguar at least one month to early (Jaguar: Tinker-Tool-Entwickler konkretisiert Vorwürfe in German), quoting numerous bugs in Mail and the OS.

Mmh. One update is already out; I wonder how long it will take for the next update to be released.

Is Apple copying Microsloth's policy of releasing immature, bug-ridden software that only works after the fourth update?

Sorry guys, so far this expensive update is much ado about nothing, or, to be more concise, Jaguar seems to be more like Garfield - fat, slow, and deeply flawed.

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