Mac OS X Panther (version 10.3) is the fourth major release of

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, Apple's desktop and server

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. It followed Mac OS X Jaguar and preceded

Mac OS X Tiger Mac OS X Tiger (version 10.4) is the 5th major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Mac computers. Tiger was released to the public on April 29, 2005, for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Inc ...

. It was released on October 24, 2003, with the retail price of

US$ The United States dollar (Currency symbol, symbol: Dollar sign, $; ISO 4217, currency code: USD) is the official currency of the United States and International use of the U.S. dollar, several other countries. The Coinage Act of 1792 introdu ...

129 for a single user and

199 for a five user, family license. The main features of Panther included a refined Aqua theme, Exposé, Fast user switching, and a new Finder. Panther also included

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

as its default browser, as a change from

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

in Jaguar.

System requirements

Panther's system requirements are: * PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor (at least 233

MHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), often described as being equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in terms of SI base u ...

) *Built-in

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

*At least 128 MB of

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM most commonly refers to: * A male sheep * Random-access memory, computer memory * Ram Trucks, US, since 2009 ** List of vehicles named Dodge Ram, trucks and vans ** Ram Pickup, produced by Ram Trucks Ram, ram, or RAM may also ref ...

(256 MB recommended, minimum of 96 MB supported unofficially) *At least 1.5 GB of available hard disk space * CD drive *Internet access requires a compatible service provider; iDisk requires a .Mac account Video conferencing requires: *333 MHz or faster PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor *Broadband internet access (100

kbit/s In telecommunications, data transfer rate is the average number of bits ( bitrate), characters or symbols ( baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are mu ...

or faster) *Compatible

FireWire IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony a ...

DV camera or web camera Because a New World ROM was required for Mac OS X Panther, certain older computers (such as beige Power Mac G3s and 'Wall Street' PowerBook G3s) were unable to run Panther by default. Third-party software (such as

XPostFacto XPostFacto is an open source utility for Mac OS 9 that enables the installation of PowerPC versions of Mac OS X up to Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger), and Darwin on some PowerPC-based Apple Macintosh systems that are not officially supported by Apple. I ...

) can, however, override checks made during the install process; otherwise, installation or upgrades from Jaguar fails on these older machines. Panther still fully supported the Classic environment for running older Mac OS 9 applications, but made Classic application windows double-buffered, interfering with some applications written to draw directly to screen.

New and changed features

Apple advertised that Mac OS X Panther had over 150 new features, including: * Finder was updated with a brushed-metal interface, and given a new live search engine, a customizable Sidebar, secure deletion, colored labels (resurrected from

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

) in the filesystem and Zip support built in. The Finder icon was also changed. * Fast user switching was introduced; it allows a user to remain logged in while another user logs in, and supports quickly switching among several sessions. * Exposé is a new feature that helps the user manage windows by showing them all as thumbnails. *

TextEdit TextEdit is an open-source software, open-source word processor and text editor, first featured in NeXT's NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. It is now distributed with macOS since Apple Inc.'s acquisition of NeXT, and available as a GNUstep application fo ...

is now compatible with

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

(.doc) documents. *

Xcode Xcode is a suite of developer tools for building apps on Apple devices. It includes an integrated development environment (IDE) of the same name for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It w ...

developer tools have faster compile times with gcc 3.3. * Preview has increased speed of

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

rendering. *

QuickTime QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...

now supports the Pixlet high-definition

video codec A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...

. * Font Book is a font manager which simplifies viewing character maps, and adding new fonts that can be used systemwide. The app also allows the user to organize fonts into collections. *

FileVault FileVault is a disk encryption program in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther (2003) and later. It performs on-the-fly encryption with volumes on Mac computers. Versions and key features FileVault was introduced with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, and could o ...

is a new app that has on-the-fly

encryption In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...

and decryption of a user's

home folder A home directory is a directory (file systems), file system directory on a multi-user operating system containing computer file, files for a given user (computing), user of the system. The specifics of the home directory (such as its name and loc ...

. * iChat AV now has built-in audio- and

video conferencing Videotelephony (also known as videoconferencing or video calling) is the use of audio signal, audio and video for simultaneous two-way communication. Today, videotelephony is widespread. There are many terms to refer to videotelephony. ''Vide ...

. *

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

: Compatibility for applications based on the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

, commonly used for UNIX applications, is available through an optional install, found in the install disk. Mac OS X Panther is the first

version to officially support

. It utilizes

Quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The Atom, atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon–oxygen Tetrahedral molecular geometry, tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tet ...

to provide hardware accelerated graphics and is based on the

XFree86 XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free software, free and Open-source softw ...

implementation of X Window System. *

is a new

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

that was developed to replace

Internet Explorer for Mac Internet Explorer for Mac (also referred to as Internet Explorer for Macintosh, Internet Explorer Macintosh Edition, Internet Explorer:mac or IE:mac) is a discontinued proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform to b ...

when the contract between Apple and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

ended, although Internet Explorer for Mac was still available. Safari 1.0 was included in an update in Jaguar but was used as the default browser in Panther. *

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

interoperability improvements were made, including out-of-the-box support for

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...

and SecurID-based

VPN Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not c ...

s. *Built-in

fax Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other out ...

support. Sending a fax can be done using the native Print dialog. To receive faxes, users must pre-configure in

System Preferences System Settings (known as System Preferences prior to macOS Ventura) is an application included with macOS. It allows users to modify various system settings, which are divided into separate Preference Panes. The System Settings application ...

on how the system should handle an incoming fax, with options including selecting a folder to save the incoming faxes, to automatically email to an address or to print via a selected printer, upon receiving of the fax. *Secure Empty Trash is a feature added in Mac OS X Panther to ensure, through the use of

data erasure Data erasure (sometimes referred to as data clearing, data wiping, or data destruction) is a software-based method of data sanitization that aims to completely destroy all electronic data residing on a hard disk drive or other digital media by ...

techniques, that deleted files cannot be recovered. *Panther added support for WPA and WPA2 level security on wireless networks (with the

AirPort An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial Aviation, air transport. They usually consist of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surf ...

4.2 software update).

Release history

Timeline

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mac OS X V10.3 3 Products and services discontinued in 2007 PowerPC operating systems 2003 software