The frigid temperatures weren’t enough to keep the crowds from lining up for the release Apple’s newest operating system upgrade, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther.
The Palisades Center store, located in West Nyack, is one of the New York metropolitan area’s most popular Apple stores and regularly draws standing-room only crowds for product releases, keynote speeches and special events.
Panther though seems have drawn more than the regular crowd, with more than two-hundred people linking up for their chance to get a copy of the latest-and-greatest OS update ever.
Chris Minassian came from work to get his copy. “I’m upgrading. I’ve always upgraded on the first day.” Like many others, Minassian is looking forward to the much-hyped new features, Expose, iChat, and of course the new Finder. Minassian is happy to pay the retail price for his new copy. “It’s fine with me, it’s worth it.”
“I’m excited that the Finder is enhanced. It might sound trivial though, but I’m looking forward to fast user switching,” explains Minassian who shares his G4 iMac with his girlfriend. “Every time she’s done, I make her log out. Now I can leave all of my windows open and have them there when I log-in.”
Jason Barcoff, Manager of the Tenafly outlet of Piermont Bicycle Connection has come to evaluate Panther and the Mac for a possible retail switch. Barcoff, who uses his 12-inch PowerBook at his shop every day, because “my Windows PC is so slow and problematic that I have to use my Mac for everything but our POS (Point of Sale).” Barcoff, who already shows his customers the company’s website on his Mac is now looking into the possibility of replacing the aging Windows boxes with a Mac solution, tied directly into their ecommerce efforts.
Brad Wild has come to the Panther release to learn a bit about the new operating system before he upgrades from 9.1. He’s here with Sal Sabaj, a long-time Mac user who has shown up to purchase Panther, and is working as a digital Sherpa for his upgrading friend. “I’m just learning,” says Wild of his OS X knowledge. “I need to know about it for a job.”
Sabaj is a Mac veteran, having owned a Mac since his first SE. Sabaj is looking forward to Panther, but he’s looking more to regain some features he feels Apple dropped with OS X. It took no more than five minutes for Sabaj to pick up his copy of Panther and glow over the look of the box.
Still, Sabaj can’t wait to get his hands on the power of 10.3. “I’m really excited. There are 150 new features in Panther, and that gives me 150 reasons why I’m here.”
Rob Pizzolato and his friends from Yorktown (about an hour drive from the store) have come to purchase Panther, despite the fact that Pizzolato has been running a copy of a previous beta build of Panther for some time. “But I’ll still buy the real version to support Apple,” he explains. Pizzolato has been a Mac user for a year-and-a-half, having switch from the PC when he saw a friend’s iBook. “I saw it and it was so cool. It did everything I wanted. I went to the Apple store and started to fall in love.” Pizzolato brought his brother Nick (a Mac user for the last two months), and Nicks’ two friends.
By 9:30 the lines outside the store had dwindled, but not so the enthusiasm inside the store. Wil Chase presented a Panther demonstration that had crowds riveted to their seats. Live demonstrations continued into the night, with the theater continually full of anxious customers getting up to speed on Panther’s newest features.
Brisk sales continued too, with countless systems, peripherals and bundles of software moving out of the store along with new copies of Panther.