Implications of Lion

Xcode 3.2 was released with Mac OS X v10.6 "Snow Leopard" and will not install on any earlier version of Mac OS X.

XCode 4.1 is in beta right now and requires Lion. Presumably it will be required for iOS 5 development too.

You better start planning on getting a Core 2 Duo or later MacBook.

 

When Leopard was released, the minimum requirement was a machine with a 867 MHz G4 or better. The installer blocked it from installing on a machine that was lower. However, with a little bit of work, you could install it (with some caveats, depending on the machine).

So it's entirely possible that someone will release a hack that will allow Lion to run on unsupported machines.

 

Snow leopard was a universal binary that included Intel 64 bit and Intel 32 bit architectures. No amount of hacking could get it working on a PowerPC Mac. Similarly, Lion only includes system components and applications that are 64 bit, so no amount of hacking will get it working on a 32-bit machine.

It will have been almost 2 years since Snow Leopard was released when Lion is available. However system requirements only will have moved 11 months into the future (the last mac to go 64-bit was the MacBook in November 2006) Lion therefore has more generous legacy support than Snow Leopard did.

 

One of my development computers is such Core 2 Duo MacBook @ 2GHz I bought in Feb 2007. I have Snow and SDK 3.2.6 on it and I wonder if its screen is too small for Xcode 4. Is anyone here running latest Xcode on 1280 x 800?

 

I often feel cramped with 1440x900 but I find it workable. Then again I am also probably spoiled with my 27" monitor that I'm over sensitive when away from it.

 

For some time I've been thinking that MacBook Air will be my next notebook, but I'm not so sure anymore. Apple is the only PC company that understands mobility with the sole exception of Xcode team it seems.