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Lack of Roseta is expensive

H

Highland man

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 22, 2012
1
0
Highlands Scotland
My current iMac is running Snow Leopard OS 10.6.8. I was going to buy a new Mac but it would come with Lion. I have just worked out that upgrading all my non lion compatible apps will cost me just short of £2,000!

So I will have to hold on to my 'old' Mac unless someone out there can point me in the direction of a Roseta type workaround for Lion?

Sorry Apple but my purchase of a new iMac will have to wait.

Any suggestions?
 
As the current 2011 iMacs came with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you can use Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on that Mac.
I would do it like this:
Use an external HDD, properly formatted*, connected to your old iMac and install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard onto it, then update it with all you want, then connect the HDD to your new iMac and boot from it, then use CarbonCopyCloner to clone the external HDD to the internal HDD, properly formatted.

Was that understandable?

*
 
If you rely on things that don't work on Lion, then it's pretty simple, don't upgrade.

Edit : simsaladimbamba's suggestion looks good, I didn't know it worked on the latest iMacs. I'll be doing the same with a MBP soon.
 
Highland man said:
My current iMac is running Snow Leopard OS 10.6.8. I was going to buy a new Mac but it would come with Lion. I have just worked out that upgrading all my non lion compatible apps will cost me just short of £2,000!

So I will have to hold on to my 'old' Mac unless someone out there can point me in the direction of a Roseta type workaround for Lion?

Sorry Apple but my purchase of a new iMac will have to wait.

Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

Keeping apps up to date is a 'cost of doing business'. Not keeping apps up to date is a business risk... you may be living with bugs, you won't get great support etc.

Sounds like you've managed to save a packet over the years by keeping running off your old PowerPC based software (which must be at least 6 years old). It sucks that all that upgrading is now going to bite you to the tune of £2k, but really, what did you expect?

Maintaining old code is a cost and a business risk to Apple too... which is why they've ditched Rosetta. I'm sure they're making bigger savings from that decision than the profit they've lost through not selling you a computer.
 
Highland man said:
Sorry Apple but my purchase of a new iMac will have to wait.

Any suggestions?
Click to expand...
We all make those decisions, we need to figure out whether its fiscally viable to upgrade the hardware/software. I'm down a couple of versions on my apps here and there.

Bottom line, if it still works, stick with it
 
Well, your options are:

1. Keep running the old version
  • Cheap
  • Easy
  • Security fixes for Snow Leopard will probably stop once Mountain Lion is released, so keeping your system secure will be more difficult
  • You may have compatibility problems when dealing with others using newer software
  • You'll be dependent on whatever old hardware you have or can lay hands on

2. Upgrade
  • You can take advantage of new features
  • You'll get regular updates and bug fixes
  • Expensive

Your other options are to find cheaper alternative software, which may be less functional.

Or you could switch to Windows, which would be more expensive in the short term, but Microsoft has a leave-no-one-behind approach to backwards compatibility. (You can still run most ten-year-old and many fifteen-year-old apps on a brand-new PC with the latest version of Windows.)
 
I got my MacBook Pro just before Lion came out, so that I could dual boot between 10.6 and 10.7 for this exact reason (although I rarely use Lion and keep it on an external). Unfortunately, if you want Lion (Mountain Lion soon), you'll have to keep your old machine for the ppc apps. I sympathize with the expense problem.

If there is a way to run Snow Leopard in a virtual machine on Lion, that might do the trick. But as far as I know, there is no simple way to do that—only "Rube Goldberg" methods.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
It is quite easy, as posted in post #3.
Click to expand...

Yes, I know how to do that, but aren't you going to have driver issues if you try to run it that way? I think the point is not just that Apple doesn't want you to install an old OS on a new machine, but that they don't provide drivers for the old OS making it almost impossible to run it properly.
 
Just use Parallels or VMware Fusion and install SL that way. When you get a new machine, just copy the folder to the new machine.
 
durija said:
Yes, I know how to do that, but aren't you going to have driver issues if you try to run it that way? I think the point is not just that Apple doesn't want you to install an old OS on a new machine, but that they don't provide drivers for the old OS making it almost impossible to run it properly.
Click to expand...

If you have an early 2011 MBP, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will have all the drivers. If you have the late 2011 MBP, it is the same, as evident by that link: [SUCCESS!]Late 2011 Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard
 
Get a windows PC and save yourself a headache.

I have a mac laptop with several programs that each cost $2500 or more. Of course I new this when buying the apps that they won't transfer to the next version of mac OS, since Apple always drops compatibility, whereas windows programs from a decade ago still work on the latest and greatest PC's.
 
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