I love my G5 PowerPC- works beautifully, but I'm looking to upgrade from the PowerPC chip set to an Intel set, since it appears the software people don't want to support it anymore. I want to know if I can cannibalize my old Power Mac- just install the hard drives and memory into a couple of Intel Mac Pros that I'm looking at. Bottom line: are the memory and hard drives compatible?
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hard drives, memory compatible with Intel Power Mac?
- Thread starter nevermindxntrik
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HDDs yes, RAM no.
http://www.everymac.com or MacTracker can help you see the specs of PowerMacs and Mac Pros.
http://www.everymac.com or MacTracker can help you see the specs of PowerMacs and Mac Pros.
There are still plenty of developers making universal binaries for PPC.. just that the main developers of Apple, Adobe, Mozilla(TenFourFox is better than firefiox 4.0) aren't developing new apps for the PowerPC, but there are literally 1000's of small and minor developers creating apps for the PPC platform. Its not dead yet.
You might even be able to swap the hard drive right into the new Mac and it should boot just fine depending on the age of the Intel if it can run the same software version. This is handy if you don't want to reinstall everything and keep your old settings and files.
Wont the OS 'be PPC', preventing it from booting on intel hardware, and also devoid of drivers? I know the apps included on OS X are UBs, but isn't the 'core' either PPC or x86?
Intel can boot from a GUID(intel) or Apple Partition Map-APM(PPC). Leopard is also universal as it contains all files for both PPC and x86 Macs. All Snow Leopard was basically a stripped down version of Leopard, just removed all PPC support.
I removed a hard drive from my G5 and had it in a USB enclosure and it booted just fine on my 2009 Mac Mini. I was running 10.5.8 even though my Mini shipped with 10.6.
Did someone see my post regarding the minor developers? This is worthy to note as the main ones are leaving the PPC realm, while literally 1000's of smaller and minor companies, such as wondershare and others are still making universal binaries for both intel and ppc - a win win if you ask me.
Not really. Quite a lot of people depend on the big software developers to get work done. Especially people who need to work with people using Office 2007/2010 for Windows, or who happen to need Adobe CS5/5.5, Final Cut Studio 3 or Logic Pro 9 or a myriad of other Professional Applications just to get stuff done. Many people bring work home, and most of the key productivity software for Mac is now intel only. It doesn't matter about small developers as they don't control the blockbuster software, and most people need at least 1 Intel Mac as they are that much more up-to-date than PowerPC models.