Am I the only one?

L Oquence said:

Who has had almost 0 incompatibilities because of using a powerpc mac?

I can login to school, make music, sync my iphone, use social media, and otherwise use internet friendly stuff just fine.

Where's the issue?

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I'm waaay past school, don't do music, never owed an iPhone, and avoid social media like the plague, but yes my internet and mail work great, so I'm with you on this one.

I mentioned this in Gamer9430's thread on the subject, but I have some specific use cases where doing things on a relatively new Intel Mac is painful enough, much less trying to do them on a PPC.

I use Endnote, a citation management program, a lot with my work and school documents. I'm currently working on something with 100 pages and 120+ citations, and it takes Endnote about a minute to insert a citation on my i5 MBP. Word is a huge memory hog with this type of document, and I've had it crash several times. I started writing it on my Quicksilver, but some of the stuff was just eating up time that I really couldn't use.

If Endnote and Word weren't the half baked pieces of garbage that they are, I could probably still by with only PPC. Truth be told, with something that's a few pages long and has a handful of citations(if any) PPC works fine. For heavier duty stuff, though, I'm afraid I'm stuck with Intel.

Hopefully, this will be the last thing I have to do for a while that involves a document of that length and complexity, and I can go back to PPC for most of my work. For the time being, though, I'm afraid I'm glued to Intel

(typed from my dual core G5)

Everything I own lags when doing certain things. LOL. I really don't care for that reason.

My G5 works perfectly fine for everything I need to do on it with internet, music, email, documents, youtube, etc. My iBook lags to much for me to use it. Internet is too slow, everything gets jammed up with internet running and typing a document at the same time. Music kills it as well. Overall the whole system is too slow. My MDD works well for browsing, music, downloaded videos, and document writing. I haven't fully tossed everything i have at it, but what i have done so far hasn't been an issue.

You could take my MacBook Pro away from me at any time and I'd still be able to do everything I do on my MDD and PowerBook. There are days where I never use my MacBook Pro, and I mostly use it for gaming or watching HD YouTube videos (can't do that on the MDD nor the PowerBook).

Overall the G5 handles most things alright. High quality video can be a problem. Java and Flash used on websites make the using the internet lag quite a bit.

I'm not sure how you get your iPhone to sync with 10.5? I have an iPhone 6 (thus iOS 8) so as far as I know this is not possible.

The lack of dropbox integration is also disappointing. I tend to save a lot of files between my computers in regards to research that I do. Additionally, I can access my work network remotely using VPN/remote desktop (VMWare) which is not compatible with PPC macs. There are some windows specific programs I use for work through this program. I suppose the solution to this would just be using my work laptop, but I don't always bring it home.

I use my Powerbook and my PowerMac for everything and they handle just fine. Audio and video encoding is a bit slow, but then again I can always leave that running over night. Overall I am more than happy using my PowerPC macs, although I am seriously considering buying the cheapest macbook pro I can find as I need to run some windows programs and VirtualPC 7 is too slow with Xp SP3 (hmm... decisions, decisions)

A.Goldberg said:

Overall the G5 handles most things alright. High quality video can be a problem. Java and Flash used on websites make the using the internet lag quite a bit.

I'm not sure how you get your iPhone to sync with 10.5? I have an iPhone 6 (thus iOS 8) so as far as I know this is not possible.

Click to expand...

I think iOS 5 and earlier will sync with Leopard provided that you have the most current iTunes version that will run on Leopard(10.6.3). iOS 6 requires iTunes 10.7, which only run on Snow Leopard and newer.

iOS 8 requires iTunes 11.4, which still will run on Snow Leopard. iTunes 12 deprecated 10.6 support, however, so I would guess that future iOS versions will leave Snow Leopard users out of luck(I'm typing this from my new Mini running SL).

The sad thing is that iTunes 12 will still run on Windows XP, which was released about a month after OS X 10.1. Of course, it does require XP SP3, which was released in 2008(when Leopard was still Apple's current OS), but still you would think that Apple could throw older users a bone when trying to sync iOS devices with their own hardware.

Of course, I guess the flip side of that is that Apple has a vested interest in selling iOS devices to as many non-Mac users as possible, as well as a vested interest in getting Mac users to upgrade to newer hardware.

bunnspecial said:

iOS 6 requires iTunes 10.7, which only run on Snow Leopard and newer.

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There are some caveats here (there always are).

The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S can sync with 10.6.3 under Leopard when running iOS 6.

However, and this is the gotcha, upgrade the 4 and 4s to 7 (or above) and you will indeed need iTunes 10.7. Apple did this as a way to force product upgrades.

The iPhone 5 and above running iOS 6 or above cannot sync with 10.6.3 on Leopard. Note that you CAN use PhoneView, which is NOT syncing but does allow a certain limited access to the file system.

Basically however, if it uses a lightning cable to charge then you are correct. No syncing with Leopard and 10.6.3.

L Oquence said:

iCloud website and iTunes match

Click to expand...

Interesting solution but not exactly a complete answer for me.

eyoungren said:

There are some caveats here (there always are).

The iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S can sync with 10.6.3 under Leopard when running iOS 6.

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I stubbornly kept iOS 6 on my 4S until I upgraded to a 6 last month. Now that you mention it, I did sync it to my G5 once primarily to see if it could be done and I recall it working.

For a change, that's what I get for researching before answering. I spent a while reading while typing that post last night. As Abraham Lincoln once said "not everything you read on the internet is true."

bunnspecial said:

I stubbornly kept iOS 6 on my 4S until I upgraded to a 6 last month. Now that you mention it, I did sync it to my G5 once primarily to see if it could be done and I recall it working.

For a change, that's what I get for researching before answering. I spent a while reading while typing that post last night. As Abraham Lincoln once said "not everything you read on the internet is true."

Click to expand...

Wish I had my iPhone 5 back on iOS 6. Sigh…

Apart from video that uses Flash, which TFF doesn't support for security reasons, no. Some stuff takes a little longer to render, but on any of our three PPC Macs -- the G4/550 Pismo, the 1.47 GHz G4DA or our 12" Aluminum 1.33 GHz PBG4 -- we can do almost anything else, albeit a bit slower than our newer Intel Macs can do it. I "surf" on our PBG4 in bed almost every night before I fall asleep.

bunnspecial said:

I stubbornly kept iOS 6 on my 4S until I upgraded to a 6 last month. Now that you mention it, I did sync it to my G5 once primarily to see if it could be done and I recall it working.



For a change, that's what I get for researching before answering. I spent a while reading while typing that post last night. As Abraham Lincoln once said "not everything you read on the internet is true."

Click to expand...

Abraham Lincoln never said tha... Oooohhhh!

Heh

eyoungren said:

Wish I had my iPhone 5 back on iOS 6. Sigh…

Click to expand...

When I was trying to migrate my 4s to my 6, I ended up upgrading it to iOS 8.

I still keep the 4s around the house and charged, as it has zero resale value(the power button doesn't work, so none of the commercial buyers will touch it) and use it to check email and other things like that. It works fine for that as long as it's on WiFi.

Even when I retired it, it was still pleasantly useable with iOS 6. With iOS8, it's painfully slow. Now that I've migrated it, I'd go back to iOS 6 in a minute if I could.

Heck, I'd run my 6 on iOS 6 if there was a way to

For me using a PPC has been slowly dying. I've been using my MBP for pretty much everything and the G4s and G5s of mine sit around collecting dust. I'm almost to the point where that is the only machine I need and since I'm working full time (45 hours per week) I have literally no time to mess with computers like I used to.

However... I do use one PPC regularly. This is my 14" 1.42GHz iBook G4, it's my college class trooper that I use for notes and some lightweight web browsing at school, which also eats up my free time to work with computers

3 months ago i could've said that i use ppc's for everything but now it's half and half. i have a couple 2.13ghz macbooks that i now use for most of my internet usage and ripping of dvd's. but i play movies, use iphoto, and rip and play music and a few games on my g4 imacs. i don't see any changes coming anytime soon.

L Oquence said:

Who has had almost 0 incompatibilities because of using a powerpc mac?

I can login to school, make music, sync my iphone, use social media, and otherwise use internet friendly stuff just fine.

Where's the issue?

Click to expand...

jbarley said:

I'm waaay past school, don't do music, never owed an iPhone, and avoid social media like the plague, but yes my internet and mail work great, so I'm with you on this one.

Click to expand...

I agree with you both 100%. And I as well am way past highschool. When I was in high school PowerPC was still used and supported the Intel switch happened while i was in high school however the entire school still had eMacs i Books and 1 PowerMac. It was a QS PowerMac. It was used with ProTools, ran OS 9 and didn't have internet connected to it. One teacher had a PowerBook G4, One had a Windows laptop, and one had a iBook G3. Other than youtube, I can do everything on PowerPC macs here in 2015 as i could back in 2004-2008. I will never get a Intel mac unless its a MacPro and When i can honestly do everything i do on windows, I have no specific use or purpose for Apple's at all. I got the 2 I have because they were cheap and were purchased for the sole reason to replace the failing windows computers I had. I use my PPC Mac's because they are dependable. I knew from the start that buying them in 2012 that I would have to use outdated software, Coming from running Windows 2000 and a few flavors of Linux, I never minded it.

Sorry for the rambling post.... Point is: PPC Macs do exactly what I need. I have no use for a Intel mac nor do i have a use for anything better. I can do the same thing on every computer i use regardless or platform, brand or OS.

I have almost 0 issues on my PPC.

I can do text document editing, web browsing, play music, and videos.
I do have to use older versions of some software though(OpenOffice, VLC).
For Android file transfers, and newer versions of some software, I boot into Linux.

I can barely log onto my school's site, I can't sync my iPhone 6, I don't use social media much, all of my software (Xcode 6, Coda 2) doesn't work (older versions, yes, but need the new versions for reasons).

I have no problems with the exception of Google Docs due to its constant desire to refresh the page. That's horrible on Firefox on PPC. I can do everything else I need to do.