I attended MacExpo yesterday in Islington with my good friend Alex. As well as drooling over the G5s and Powerbooks, I picked up a copy of Panther to run on my old iMac. (For those who’ve not been following, I have a very old iMac which I run for testing purposes. I don’t own a usable Mac at the moment, but am planning to switch away from using a Microsoft OS (hopefully to OS X) before Longhorn becomes a nightmare reality).

The upshot of the upgrade to Panther is that I’m now posting this from Safari 1.1. The motivating force in keeping my Mac up-to-date is to be able to practically test compatibility of my work on a Mac – unfortunately this means needing to upgrade the OS when Apple say I should. The good news is that I managed to get a deal at MacExpo and ended up saving around 12% off the price.

Before I upgraded, I ran a little benchmarking tool called xbench to see how my Mac would perform pre and post upgrade. Xbench comes out with a final overall performance score after running a good number of different tests (memory, disc read/write, graphics, UI etc). Keep in mind that a new Mac should comfortably score 100 or more. My mac scored, on average, 33. Boo!

So I installed Panther (twice, coz the first time I missed the Options option), and then ran xbench again. Result – 38! Okay, I know it’s still pretty poor, but it’s still something of a breath of fresh air to install a new operating system that actually makes your computer /faster/ than the previous one. Normally speed is traded off by new features. With OS X you seem to get both – no trade offs. I like that.

Whilst at MacExpo we also saw the new and impressive 20-inch iMacs. Only one question remains – who’s actually going to buy one?