I had just got a Imac G5 at the time that had PowerPC and I was SO angry guys...
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Did anyone else feel hoodwinked when the Intel switch was announced ?
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The switch itself, no not really but what would’ve upset me was dropping PowerPC support just three er four years into the switch. That’s a tough pill to swallow - buy a PPC Mac in 2005 & have support drop with SL in 2009 & Rosetta by 2011. I can definitely understand the hurt consumer feelings over that.
It's 2024. This happened in 2006. Have you been stewing about it for 18 years?
Did I feel hoodwinked when the switch was announced?
No - I wasn't even a Mac owner/user at the time but the crash in prices for PPC machines as many people abandoned their computers in favour of Intel models was to my benefit and lead to me picking up a Power Mac G4 pretty cheaply and besides, universal binaries were available for several years.
Way back in the early 80s I read a feature about computers that warned the reader to brace themselves for the inevitability that soon after you purchase your computer, a superior model will be unveiled - and usually by the manufacturer of your very machine.
That warning has continued to hold currency right up to the present.
No - I wasn't even a Mac owner/user at the time but the crash in prices for PPC machines as many people abandoned their computers in favour of Intel models was to my benefit and lead to me picking up a Power Mac G4 pretty cheaply and besides, universal binaries were available for several years.
Way back in the early 80s I read a feature about computers that warned the reader to brace themselves for the inevitability that soon after you purchase your computer, a superior model will be unveiled - and usually by the manufacturer of your very machine.
That warning has continued to hold currency right up to the present.
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Leopard had patches until 2011 - the real issue was how quickly most third party software dropped PPC. I suspect it was a function of user base really - Mac sales skyrocketed with the move to x86, and the percentages between Intel and PowerPC were likely ugly.
The switch to Intel within itself didn't upset me, but Leopard did. It was so much less performant on my PPC and early Intel machines than Tiger, so that was annoying. I ended up retrograding to Tiger.
I was disappointed that all of the fixes to Leopard made in Snow Leopard weren't available for my PPC machines.
What really ticked me off years later was when support for the early 32-bit Intel machines was dropped. To make things worse I had a lot of reliability issues with my Core Duo iMac, then with the replacement Core2 Duo iMac. After all of the frustration with the PPC to Intel switch, then the 32-bit Intel to 64-bit Intel switch I gave up on Apple for a while and built a PC running Linux, Windows, and OSx86 and lived happily once again.
I had been buying and using Apple products since the 80s. After experiencing all of the issues in 2006-2009, it was several more years before I bought real Macs again.
I was disappointed that all of the fixes to Leopard made in Snow Leopard weren't available for my PPC machines.
What really ticked me off years later was when support for the early 32-bit Intel machines was dropped. To make things worse I had a lot of reliability issues with my Core Duo iMac, then with the replacement Core2 Duo iMac. After all of the frustration with the PPC to Intel switch, then the 32-bit Intel to 64-bit Intel switch I gave up on Apple for a while and built a PC running Linux, Windows, and OSx86 and lived happily once again.
I had been buying and using Apple products since the 80s. After experiencing all of the issues in 2006-2009, it was several more years before I bought real Macs again.
I'd just bought a brand new iSight iMac but I got a good few years out of it so the switch didn't really affect it.
But I was slighty bemused how for years Apple had been trashing intel chips then come the switch turned that completely around - of course in fine Stockholm syndrome tradition, the fanboys whooped it up!
But I was slighty bemused how for years Apple had been trashing intel chips then come the switch turned that completely around - of course in fine Stockholm syndrome tradition, the fanboys whooped it up!
Not for many years afterward. My 733 G4 tower (stock parts including Ye Olde GeForce 2) was running Leopard with the preference hack I made grafted into the installer package. 9 was a separate partition.
I could even play WoW for a really long time on that same tower. I remember playing Wrath on it. What got me to upgrade to my “Trusty Rusty” mini was the fact that software stopped PowerPC support…which was due to XCode dropping PowerPC support.
That mini was a good system and still is in Win 10. But I can feel its age and it is time to get a new mini.
I could even play WoW for a really long time on that same tower. I remember playing Wrath on it. What got me to upgrade to my “Trusty Rusty” mini was the fact that software stopped PowerPC support…which was due to XCode dropping PowerPC support.
That mini was a good system and still is in Win 10. But I can feel its age and it is time to get a new mini.
Technology was changing at a very rapid pace from ca. 2000 to 2010. So any computer you bought, be it PPC or Intel P3 or P4 was obsolete after just a few years. Looking back from 2024, the harder part for me to stomach was the very high price premium Apple hardware cost, despite having a useful life of only a few years; expensive and disposable. I bought an iMac G4 at ca. $1500 in 2002 ($2540 in 2024 dollars) and a 17 inch Powerbook G4 for over $3000 in 2003 ($4967 in 2023 dollars). I was young, single, stupid, had money to waste, and didn't understand how rapidly technology was changing and how short lived these systems would be. I should have just put the money in an index fund or AAPL stock and just held on to it...
I couldn't imagine dropping that kind of coin on Apple hardware today. I think I'm not the only person, seeing how Apple's Macintosh sales are slowing down. My mantra in middle age is if you NEED a new computer, go ahead and buy one. If you WANT a new computer, then stick with the one you have until you NEED one.
I couldn't imagine dropping that kind of coin on Apple hardware today. I think I'm not the only person, seeing how Apple's Macintosh sales are slowing down. My mantra in middle age is if you NEED a new computer, go ahead and buy one. If you WANT a new computer, then stick with the one you have until you NEED one.
No. I felt something, but it wasn't anger or betrayal.
In 2006 I was two years in to a 14.5 year job and the PowerMac G5 the boss had bought was a year and a half old. My own Mac (then, a TiBook 400) had been a Christmas present. It's not until December 2009 that I'm actually buying my own Macs.
My first Intel Mac was 2013, the first Intel my then boss bought for work was also 2013. I did not fully convert to Intel for my own personal use until May 2020.
So, basically, when Apple switched to Intel I shrugged. Whatever.
I did laugh though. Apple had spent years publicly shaming Intel and now they were using Intel chips. It taught me a good lesson when I started buying the iPhone. Apple only cares about Apple and they'll say whatever they think people want to hear to sell you something. Just like any company. Now Apple still makes (IMO) a better product, but nowdays that's not saying much anymore.
I'll stick with Apple until they themselves force me out.
This post entirely typed in on a 2009 MacPro, which makes it 15 years old.
In 2006 I was two years in to a 14.5 year job and the PowerMac G5 the boss had bought was a year and a half old. My own Mac (then, a TiBook 400) had been a Christmas present. It's not until December 2009 that I'm actually buying my own Macs.
My first Intel Mac was 2013, the first Intel my then boss bought for work was also 2013. I did not fully convert to Intel for my own personal use until May 2020.
So, basically, when Apple switched to Intel I shrugged. Whatever.
I did laugh though. Apple had spent years publicly shaming Intel and now they were using Intel chips. It taught me a good lesson when I started buying the iPhone. Apple only cares about Apple and they'll say whatever they think people want to hear to sell you something. Just like any company. Now Apple still makes (IMO) a better product, but nowdays that's not saying much anymore.
I'll stick with Apple until they themselves force me out.
This post entirely typed in on a 2009 MacPro, which makes it 15 years old.
I think the assumption for many was that PPC would get SL at least and then fade away which did not happen. While I dont have any hard feelings about Leopard, I think the majority appreciated the optimizations in SL and when that did not happen for PPC, folks got bent. It does make great sense how market pressures would drive dev of x86 apps and not PPC as that was where the growth and market was headed. Not at all an easy landscape to navigate for Apple and Jobs at the time, however I would have liked to see a Universal SL. If my own ethos is the judge, leaving PPC at 10.5.8 was just bad. Then again, if you had the market growth that Apple had with the shift to X86, Ipod, and Ipad/Iphone on the horizon, it obviously was an alienation of a customer segment that Apple was ok with losing.
Mind you I did not own my first Macintosh computer until a few years later in 2007 when I picked up my Intel 24" white imac used, so my perspective is through the lense of an observer on opinions of the time by PPC Apple users that I've read over the years.
This post made on an 2008 unibody aluminum macbook running Ubuntu 22.4
The more and more I use modern versions of MacOS, the more I appreciate older versions, Leopard and Snow Leopard in particular but mainly High Sierra and Mojave for me.
As many here (and you probably) know, I much prefer Leopard over Tiger primarily because of how it functioned in a mixed Mac/PC network. My time with Snow Leopard was brief and encapsulated in one 17" MBP that never saw anything more than personal use. It was frustrating that my 17" PB could get TenFourFox updates but the MBP was stranded (until much later).
But on this end of things, my frustrations with a work issued M2 MBP and 2015 MBP seem to outweigh these old frustrations. There are simply things I cannot do with the M2 that I can with older hardware and software.
I'm going to cite one specific example…
In my profession, I deal a lot with secure PDFs. Primarily this is because some companies think their content is valuable and should not be repurposed. But there tends to be stuff like logos and such that I need out of these PDFs. It's extremely easy to break the lock. All you need to do is open the PDF in Preview (not Acrobat) and save a copy. The copy removes all the locks.
Guess what Preview on MacOS Ventura and Sonoma can't do? Break a locked PDF by saving a copy. But the 2015 MBP that is still running High Sierra can. So can my MacPro running Mojave. And then so can all the tools I used to use to do this on my PowerMacs.
The more Apple 'progresses' the more they regress.
No. It was clear PPC was a dead platform: Motorola wasn't really interested in competing in the desktop space any more, and IBM wasn't going to make a G5 which could fit in a laptop without setting it on fire, so Apple had to do something. And when I got my 2010 Mac Pro I was amazed at how fast it was compared to my Dual G5. It's still under my desk, running Linux, 14 years later.
I feel like Apple's ARM-based chips are what PPC should've been. They're fast, efficient RISC chips which Apple controls. No worrying about the whims of partners.
I feel like Apple's ARM-based chips are what PPC should've been. They're fast, efficient RISC chips which Apple controls. No worrying about the whims of partners.
That's not a regression. That's fixing a huge security hole. That's like complaining someone changed the router's password from Password123.
On the topic of the thread, I was well aware that Apple were close to the end of the road with the PPC and had to move on to progress, particularly with laptops. I had a G5 DP2.0 of my own and it was clearly getting stupidly power hungry (and hot). Looking ahead, it was going to need a miracle, or a switch to the mundane - and we got the mundane.
I wasn't in the slightest concerned about ongoing 'support', since the last thing I was interested in is what has become (and was beginning to be visible then) the race to complexity and complication. I never did much like the addition of new features and the UI changes, and as it was then, MacOS didn't have enough complexity to have security holes being exploited, so what my Macs came with out of the box was largely the way they stayed, simply adding software to do the work I needed.
What was inside the system was not of consequence as far as I was concerned, in any way except in functionality. My first MacBook Pro couldn't even have existed without the transition away from PPC architecture, and it provided a big leap in performance over the G4 iBook I'd used before.
Computers are just tools.
I wasn't in the slightest concerned about ongoing 'support', since the last thing I was interested in is what has become (and was beginning to be visible then) the race to complexity and complication. I never did much like the addition of new features and the UI changes, and as it was then, MacOS didn't have enough complexity to have security holes being exploited, so what my Macs came with out of the box was largely the way they stayed, simply adding software to do the work I needed.
What was inside the system was not of consequence as far as I was concerned, in any way except in functionality. My first MacBook Pro couldn't even have existed without the transition away from PPC architecture, and it provided a big leap in performance over the G4 iBook I'd used before.
Computers are just tools.
Very well then, a security hole. And one I am grateful for and will continue to leverage in order to do my job.
My 1st Mac was a 2006 CoreDuo Mini and buying a PPC was never an option before.
Now I use a AS Mac have 2 Intel Macs while drowning in PPC stuff.....
Now I use a AS Mac have 2 Intel Macs while drowning in PPC stuff.....
What is your job? Secure PDFs are required to be that way for legal reasons--financial results, personal medical information, etc. What is your job such that clients are sending you PDFs without sending you the passwords?
I'm a graphic designer. For 19 years I was in newspapers and since 2019 I've been working for a company that designs golf scorecards and yardage books.
Typically the customer will have a scorecard designed by another company. One particular company likes to lock their PDF proofs. But often I need the logo from that because it's usually vector art. The customer themselves has usually provided a lo res jpg for their logo, so getting the vector logo out of the PDF is a better option.
Or, I will have been instructed to reproduce the card or some element for a yardbook. I can't do that if I can't dissect a PDF using Illustrator or Photoshop to find out what CMYK colors were used or to extract other elements.
Some companies believe that any work they do for a customer is proprietary, but the customer's logo in a golf scorecard and various other elements are not proprietary to the previous design company. The customer owns that stuff and now they are doing business with us.
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And I'm assuming that whoever's niece or nephew designed the thing can't send you the AI file.
Often the customer is clueless as to what they've been sent by someone who's designed anything for them. They don't know the difference between raster and vector, CMYK or RGB and so on.
I'll get instructions to use the same colors, or the same fonts or to 'mirror' the scorecard, etc. There's a good chance the customer doesn't even know the PDF they sent us is locked. On top of all that, we are dealing with people in a multi-million dollar industry (golf) who do things on golf time. Newspapers has it's own set of troubles with customers.
So yeah, getting anything out of the customer is often a trying experience.
I updated a yardbook for one of Disney's golf courses a few months back. They kept sending me jpgs of Mickey Mouse with a golf club then complaining that he looked lo res. This is a media company! Eventually they got me an EPS.
And that's just dealing with Disney!