Jaguar Pounces On MacWorld

Code-named Jaguar, the OS brings more than 150 new features and applications, including improved Mail, Address Book and Finder capabilities; Rendezvous, a new networking technology; Sherlock 3, a revamped search tool; and QuickTime 6, which supports the MPEG-4 standard.

Mac OS X 10.2 is slated to ship Aug. 24 at a retail price of $129, according to Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple. Also due to ship that day is a server version of Jaguar, Mac OS X Server 10.2, which is priced at $499 for a 10-client edition and $999 for an unlimited-client edition.

"Jaguar is really going to be what a lot of people have been waiting for," said Scott Schaefer, president of Techknowsphere, a New York-based Apple solution provider. "There are a lot of things that have been cleaned up, there are better hooks, and things run a lot more smoothly."

The Jaguar upgrade should help Apple transition Mac users from OS 9 to OS X, said Matt Cohen, principal at TekServe, a New York-based Apple specialist. "It's been a slow process, but I think with Jaguar it's going to heat up a little bit. Hopefully, Jaguar will be the product that everyone will want to adopt."

In a keynote speech at Macworld, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that during the past year, the number of active OS X users has jumped to 2.5 million from 500,000.

"We think we're going to double that number to 5 million active users by the end of the year," he said. "That's the fastest OS transition that we know of."