Apple promised to deliver Panther — the next major upgrade to Mac OS X — by the end of the year, which to my mind meant that we’d be lucky to see it by early December. Imagine my surprise when they announced that it would ship as soon as 24 Oct — just a little over two weeks from today — and that it’s available for pre-order immediately. When I heard this, I started getting excited in the way that one might get excited for a long-awaited movie release, or a new album from a favorite band; the anticipation suddenly took on a tangible quality, and I started imagining myself actually sitting in front of a computer — maybe even a new computer — and actually using, rather than reading about, this software.

Geek factor aside, it occurred to me that this is exactly what Apple should be doing; building up momentum by regularly releasing significant improvements and upgrades to its software. After all, it was only a little over a year ago that the current version of the OS, Jaguar, was released. In effect, they’re following a consumer sales cycle that’s closer to casual software purchasing — like video games, for instance — than traditional operating system sales. Such frequency improves revenue and generates real excitement, making Apple seem much scrappier than Microsoft, which seems to be on a much longer update cycle with its Windows software.

I’m willing to bet that this activity also drives hardware sales… I started thinking seriously about upgrading my hardware almost immediately after I realized that ‘tomorrow’s Mac’ would be here before the end of the month. With the end of both the calendar year and our fiscal year at Behavior coming up soon, it’s not outside of the realm of possibilty that I could be running Panther on some new hardware before too long — certainly sooner than I promised myself I would wait until. Maybe Santa will look kindly upon me in December.