Apple offers developers new Panther, Tiger builds

Note to Apple: Early April is 3 months into 2005. Your promise of "first half" lets you push Tiger up to 6 months into 2005. Don't you think April is a little TOO early? You'll scare people!

April sounds too good to be true, but my pre-order is in and my fingers are crossed.

Cant wait for apples april developer mailing

I dont think that Tiger will be included in the april developer mailing, because on the first April it is only the announcement... And typically Apple will be waiting until Tiger's final release is in stores with shipping it to its developers!
So, you can expect that in the May Mailing Tiger will be included\

I'm still not 100% convinced that Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" will be released anytime soon...I'm still looking for public-verifyable signs from Apple before I'll be convinced. The 10.3.9 reports sound reasonable to me.

So do I. One would think that Apple would have sent out press invitations by now to make the April, 1 spot.

My guess is a release date sometime around or shortly before WWDC. Gives them a little more time to finish hardware upgrades.

The list of supposed 10.3.9 feature enhancements on macrumors.com appears to be identical to the 10.3.8 feature enhancements. The list on cafemac.com is different, and if true, will be very welcome while we're waiting for 10.4.1 -- which is when I'l move to 10.4.

It all makes me laugh. Come on, Apple, let's see that upgrade! People will think it's like Longhorn--

Whoo. Oh, it's coming sooner. AAAH! You'll scare people!!!!

Um, this is nearly two years since Panther. They've taken a lot longer with Tiger. Granted, there are a LOT of big upgrades in this.

Apple started shipping Panther on October 24 2003, so about 17 months ago.

they list:
- updated font management
As one of the final imporvements in panther.. I wonder what they have done there. As some of you may read I'm not happy with the world of fonts.
flick.

Press invitations? I don't the the announcement of the release date will be more than a press release.

The current Tiger build is very stable and feature complete. Furthermore Safari 1.3 and Safari 2.0 are supposed to have identical rendering engines, and since Safari 1.3 is included in 10.3.9 I expect 10.3.9 and 10.4 to be announced/released around the same time.

given the status of QT7 I wonder if Tiger will ever ship

And Panther came very quickly after Jaguar in September 2002. There were those who expected Tiger's release in the fall of 2004. It's slowed down.

Here's a logical way I can see the assembled nuggets of info playing out:

1) 10.3.9 is released anytime between now and up to and including April 1.

2) 10.4 *may* be announced on April 1, possibly with an advisory to upgrade to 10.3.9 to achieve a graceful install of 10.4 (no info here, just a hunch) -- 10.4 will not actually ship until at least the 3rd week of April, and maybe not until the later part of May.

3) In any event, 10.4 needs to be officially announced by the NAB Conference Apr 16, due to the need to fully pitch all the HD video and H.364 video niceties that come with 10.4.

I believe that realistically, some time must elapse between the release of 10.3.9 and the shipment of 10.4. It makes no sense to have the rollout of 10.3.9 overlap the 10.4 extravaganza.

Apple doesn't want a 10.3.9 update to confuse *any* potential 10.4 purchasers that they can get any part of 10.4 via a free update, and thus miss out on the revenue. I think there is also the possibility that the reason that 10.3.9 has not shipped previously (it's been reported as "Real Soon Now" for quite a while) is that it will contain "grease" to allow 10.4 to slide in as an update to 10.3.9 -- 10.3.9 may be a prerequisite to an "upgrade install" of 10.4.

In any event, with 10.3.9, there is a certain implied message that ".9 is here, it's the end of the line for 10.3", encouraging at least some of those laggard users who generally don't upgrade until absolutely forced to, to get with the program and go 10.4.

I pre-ordered Tiger from Amazon. Okay, I'm crazy. At any rate, the "expected shipping date" was one thing yesterday -- sometime in April -- but is now May 23. For whatever that means.

I picked up my copy of Panther at the local Apple store last time on the day it came out. It was pretty cool. It was a mass of Apple people with the occasional peecee person stopping by wanting to know what was going on. People were absolutely giddy with positive Apple energy. The only thing missing was someone serving Kool-Aid.

I'm looking forward to joining the line down @ the Apple Store the night it's released - maybe they'll have one of their "surprise" sales that night (like they did w/ Jaguar) & I'll pick up a Mac mini & the Logic 7 upgrade, too.