Apple Touts Special In-Store Events For Friday's Panther Release

by , 2:15 PM EDT, October 23rd, 2003

Apple is touting in-store events at all 65 Apple Store retail locations during tomorrow's "Night of Panther" event. The promotional event is being conducted to bring in the official release of Mac OS X 10.3, or Panther. The event will include "free gifts, great savings, theatre demos, and a chance to win a Mac," according to the company's press release.

Apple has had great success with such in-store events for Jaguar and hardware releases during the past two years, often attracting a thousand or more people to each store. In addition to promoting new Apple products, the company has found that such in-store events also bring enormous direct sales. From Apple:

Mac OS X version 10.3 "Panther," the next major release of the world's most advanced operating system, will go on sale tomorrow night at 8:00 p.m. at participating Apple Authorized Resellers and Apple retail stores throughout the U.S. All 65 Apple retail stores will host "Night of the Panther" kick-off events with free gifts, great savings, theater demos and a chance to win a Mac.

Panther delivers more than 150 breakthrough new features including a completely new Finder that provides one-click access to a user's favorite files and folders; Exposé, a revolutionary new way to instantly see all open windows at once; and iChat AV, a complete desktop video conferencing solution for business, education and consumers.

Apple will also release Mac OS X Server version 10.3 "Panther" at the same time. Based on the same core technology as the desktop operating system, Panther Server integrates leading open source and open standards software with easy-to-use management tools that make it easy to deploy popular server solutions for Mac, Windows and Linux clients.

Pricing & Availability
Mac OS X version 10.3 "Panther" will be available on Friday, October 24 beginning at 8:00 p.m. through The Apple Store (www.apple.com), at Apple retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of US$129 for a single-user license. The Mac OS X version 10.3 "Panther" Family Pack is a single-residence, five-user license that will be available at the same time for a suggested retail price of US$199. Volume and maintenance pricing is available from Apple. Panther requires a Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G3, G4, G5 processor; built-in USB; and 128MB of physical RAM.

Mac OS X Server version 10.3 "Panther" will be available beginning on Friday, October 24th at 8:00 p.m. through The Apple Store, at Apple's retail stores and through Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of US$499 for a 10-client edition and US$999 for an unlimited-client edition. Panther Server works together with Apple's powerful Xserve rack-mount server hardware and is designed to run on Power Mac G5, G4 and G3 computers with a minimum of 128MB RAM, 4GB of available disk space and built-in USB.

The standard Mac OS Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a new Mac system on or after October 8 that did not have Panther included; customers who purchased a Power Mac G5 regardless of purchase date that do not have Panther included; customers who purchased a new Xserve on or after October 8 that did not have Panther Server included; and customers who purchased the Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" or the Mac OS X Server version 10.2 "Jaguar" retail products on or after October 8, for a shipping and handling fee of $19.95 (US).

You can find more information on Panther at Apple's Mac OS X Web site. You can find more information on Apple's retail locations at the company's retail Web site. You can also order Panther directly from Apple.

The Mac Observer Spin:

The Apple Store