Mac OS X 10.6 to Drop PowerPC Support?

[winterspan]

it WILL be supported

So what? Someone who bought a fully souped-up G5 quad in 2005, which wouldn't have been cheap, has every right to expect that their machine will be supported for a damn sight longer than 4 years.

It technically will be supported, as software will still work and security updates and other minor updates will surely be issued to 10.5 for a long time to come.
You just won't be able to run the latest os upgrade. Not that big of deal; by the time software arrives that requires 10.6 the computer will be 6+ years old. PLENTY of time.

 

[winterspan]

lawsuit? WTF

Hmm. I smell class action lawsuit when 10.6 is released. This happened with Jaguar, or Panther, when Apple didn't support the G3 initially. Someone was unhappy about it and Apple continued to support the G3 for X updates.

If 10.6 doesn't support PowerPC, I may just upgrade my PC and jump into Vista, unless an AMD Apple PC is out and for sale.

Class action lawsuit??? WTF? God.. only in America. Since when can you sue someone for products strategy decisions??? ANYONE that starts a lawsuit because Apple won't support their old computer with a new operating system needs to get a *** life and get out of the mac ecosystem. Go buy a POS windows machine.

 

[winterspan]

Business don't want the latest bug-prone OS

**** --- should be Business "doesn't" want the latest bug-prone OS

What people forget if decides to terminate PPC support with 10.6 or later and have an x86 only OS it would not only be a hugh negative for pro-users, however also business who have invested in PPC due to lack of support of pro applications and in-house applications that run on the PPC.

Another problem is that when Apple only made the PPC version of OS X open to the public and an x86 version in secret, it was securing its future on any consumer computing architecture. Having support for only x86 would certainly be cheaper, however it is also a strategy of cornering oneself with no alternatives. I believe PPC and x86 will live on, however it all depends on what will release and sell to the public.

Apple only chose x86 for mobility/power consumption ratio, if for any reason the x86 hits a wall as did the PPC, would be left with no alternatives. Having support PPC and x86 is planning for the worst case scenario.

No one said Apple won't continue to develop PPC in secret in the lab. It will NOT BE bug-free nor will it be optimized and no features will lag behind. They will not devote a TON of resources for this.

Secondly, the "business" customers you talk about are generally NOT interested in having the latest and greatest operating system which mostly will add consumer features. They favor STABILITY to a MUCH HIGHER DEGREE.
The OS 10.3 or 10.4 or 10.5 will still be rock solid and Apple will still support these customers with security updates, bug fixes, minor patches, etc.

 

[Yvan256]

Let me know if you'll be selling your G4 mini...I've been looking for one...at the right price...to replace an old 8600.

Why do you think I'm looking for a G4 mini? Many old 68K games run fine on it -hh

Just FYI, it's a G4/1.42GHz with 1GB RAM, 80GB @ 5400 RPM (upgraded both the RAM and HD myself), no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth.

Send me a private message just so I don't forget in a month or two. My company is keeping me busy these days. Talking of which, if I sell my Mac mini and you buy it, I'll throw in a CinnaMount mini Silver Edition for free.

 

[winterspan]

Moron...

I miss the good old days when apple was a good computer company(ohh say 2004). Now they are mass producing crapy electronics instead of making soild well build computers/computer software. I am going to miss you APPL. I guess this was expected when Apple Computers Inc. became Apple(I stick iPhone up my but for a living) Inc. GoodBye Apple and your crappy products.

Apple doesn't make well built computers or computer software anymore? Thats news to me. If that is truly your opinion and not just a bunch of **** to start cause controversy, then WHY the F**K are you on this forum??

 

[QuantumLo0p]

Intel 3.2 Ghz will relegate 3.0 obsolete...

Yeah, I know it's ridiculous but perspective seems to be the casualty, here. Processor speed has been somewhat stagnant the last couple of years. You have to admit that most of the gains have been in multiple cores NOT in speed. This does absolutely nothing for apps that are not multi threaded.

When Apple offers a quad socket ZillaMac featuring a 64 bit octo core processor per socket, don't be surprised if the cores clock at a paltry 3.5 Ghz and you are surprised that many apps do not run noticibly faster than it did on a core 2 duo.

That said I hope Apple will support Power for a while longer because there is still a lot of horsepower to use.

That is, unless you think the Intel 3.2 Ghz will relegate the 3.0 totally obsolete. Personally, I can wait 10 seconds longer when processing files instead of shelling out another $2500.

 

[winterspan]

True, but at that point, intel macs had been selling for 7 months and they had been anounced well over a year. If you buy at that point, you know what you're getting into and obviously don't care about having the latest and greatest. Anyone who's OK with getting hardware on the way out is likely not going to care that much about staying on an OS after a newer one is out.

Yes, and not everybody needs the newest OS either. Those with older computers can just stick with the older operating system.

Wow, what were you thinking? Are you posting this in an attempt to get pity from us?

For your sake, I REALLY hope you're joking. If not, you're going to be extremely disappointed. Sorry. If you wanted long term support, you should have bought an intel machine - were those refurbs? Intel versions of those models had been selling for months, you bought machines that had been discontinued and probably had to jump through hoops to even find new versions of those models at that point.

And what OS did you end up with on that machine? OSX 10.0? 9? Even 8? Nope, not supported by apple. So you used it for seven years and THREE major OS releases happened in that time that you couldn't use. And yet this time around you expect support that long? Did you just forget that you went years being multiple OS updates behind?

It's not forced obsolescence, it just means you can't always have the newest OS on an old machine. That doesn't mean the old machine can't still be useful.

+1

 

[0007776]

i would think that since they will be continuing development for PPC they would be more likely to drop support for all non 64bit CPUs which would leave the G5s which the last ones sold would only be 3 years old if 10.6 comes out in 2009. I'm guessing that 10.7 will be the one that finally drops support for G5s.

 

[winterspan]

Your numbers are off, but not to the side you think of.

When I buy a Macintosh, I except to have a machine with a very long useful life. Especially if I buy a top of the range Mac, like a dual core or quad core G5 was not very long ago, I except that machine to be useful for very long. It may be rotated to a user with lesser requirements at some point as new, more powerful machines are bought, but I expect it to work.

Lets say in October 2009, 10.6 is released and I still have four G5 machines running.

Scenario 1: Leopard runs on G5. I say fantastic, Apple is a company I can rely on, I throw these four old machines out and buy four eight core Intel boxes as replacement.

Scenario 2: Leopard doesn't run on G5. I say bugger, can't count on Apple to support old machines, we have a look who delivers machines that last longer, meanwhile we make do with our existing Macs (G5 and Intel) on Leopard as long as we can.

So which one makes more money? Lots of people are posting here and they don't give one second thought to what customers want.

Leopard already runs PPC for sure.

 

[QuantumLo0p]

A bit more serious note

I think Apple will drop support in relation to time after Applecare of the last G5's expire. Perhaps a year after Applecare lapses?

Support dropped for four year machines does seem to be a popular number.

 

[winterspan]

The Crappy Electronics God Has spoken!!!

I am still waiting for the China knockoff, with more features for less price.

yes, since more features (lemme guess you want a game emulator) for the price
vs Apple's wonderful software and hardware. A TOUGH CHOICE INDEED!

 

[winterspan]

Arrogance? No. Rich? Nope. Smart choices? Yes.

So you are willing to donate the money to get those people to upgrade?
It really truly amazes me at the arrogance of some people on this board. You do realize that the cheapest Mac laptop is 4 figures...right and in many cases the G4 Powerbooks could run rings around even the cheapest Macbooks that are missing all kinds of features that are on the Powerbooks.
Yep just upgrade. Because all Mac users have a couple grand laying around. Gah.

I am not an arrogant person, nor am I rich. I was stating that IF YOU WANT TO RUN THE LATEST AND GREATEST OS UPDATE THEN YOU NEED TO UPGRADE!!!

If you don't have the discretionary income, then you will have to be happy with your old PPC machine running THE NEXT GREATEST OS EVER i.e. 10.5.

I don't have that problem because I work in the computer industry and so I make sure I save enough money to upgrade every 3-4 years or so. A good mac will cost you what like ~$1500? so that is close to $350 a year to save if u assume new mac every 4th year. $350/12 = $30 a month.
For most who want to be able to upgrade to the newest OS everytime, you need to save $30/month. Pretty good deal for me.
It means replacing starbucks with some folgers...

If you can't afford $30/month, then again you'll have to be happy with the next-best.

 

[winterspan]

Heck SSE4 in the Penryn (with additions in Nehalem) has a good chance to erase aspects of the only real remaining advantage that the G5 (AltiVec).

remaining advantage compared to what? Altivec vs SSE1 SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 ?

 

[pohl]

HA .. PPC until 2012??? you are so dreaming. Yes, MICROSOFT supports many generations of legacy operating systems! And THAT IS PRECISELY THE PROBLEM! Is it any wonder why Vista took 6 **** YEARS TO COME OUT?!

It was a much bigger problem back when a lot of operating-system code and application code was architecture-dependent -- and that issue has carried forward all the way to Vista, true. But OSX isn't even byte-order dependant, let alone architecture-dependent. It has a bevy of well-abstracted APIs. Moving forward with the operating system at this point, while carrying the PPC port should never cause Apple to paint themselves into a corner like Microsoft did. While what you say is historically true, it's less of an issue with software that was written to be portable in the first place.

So don't go imagining that Apple would somehow liberate themselves to innovate by dropping PPC support. It's simply not true.

 

[Kendall015]

This may be slightly off-topic, but I read that 867MHz is the new minimum spec for running Leopard. Will my Gigabit Ethernet Powermac G4 (2 x 450MHz) work with Leopard or not? I'm guessing no, I just wanted to make sure.

 

[Derwood]

Hmmm...

...the whole thing very much depends on what Apple's strategy is with regards increasing market share.

Macs hold their resale value to a much greater degree than equivalent grey-box PC's and there's a couple of reasons for that I suppose: the aesthetics and design are certainly a contributory factor (take a look at how much you can still get for a low-spec G4 iMac on eBay), but I think people are much more likely to fork out for a second hand Mac than they are a second hand PC because there's a level of assurance around usability, viruses etc. that means a PC of a similar age simply can't compete. Sure, you could pop a new hard drive in an old Windows box and start over but most folk just want to buy something and have it fulfil their expectations without too much faffing around.

People always throw around the phrase "...it just works" in reference to Macs, and its indicative of a reputation that, in my experience, is largely deserved. What is really amazing though is when that phrase is equally applicable to a four or five year old machine as it is to a brand new Intel-based machine.

All those G4/G5 machines that are out there can still provide a perfectly reasonable user experience for your average person who wants to do little more than MSOffice/iTunes/internet. For many, they will be a great low-cost introduction to OS X. Take a look at eBay; people are buying lots and lots of second hand PPC Macs. Many of those purchasers will have a wonderful time playing about with Panther/Tiger and will one day move to an Intel machine. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are plenty of potential switchers and not all of them will be buying their first Mac brand new off the shelf.

 

[jhu]

Well, there is always better and cheaper hardware to run linux and bsd, isn't it?

indeed, but it also depends on what your computing needs/wants are relative to your budget.

 

[winterspan]

Wrong

Yeah, I know it's ridiculous but perspective seems to be the casualty, here. Processor speed has been somewhat stagnant the last couple of years. You have to admit that most of the gains have been in multiple cores NOT in speed. This does absolutely nothing for apps that are not multi threaded.

When Apple offers a quad socket ZillaMac featuring a 64 bit octo core processor per socket, don't be surprised if the cores clock at a paltry 3.5 Ghz and you are surprised that many apps do not run noticibly faster than it did on a core 2 duo.

That said I hope Apple will support Power for a while longer because there is still a lot of horsepower to use.

That is, unless you think the Intel 3.2 Ghz will relegate the 3.0 totally obsolete. Personally, I can wait 10 seconds longer when processing files instead of shelling out another $2500.

Jesus did you even read the thread?? I mentioned what I am about to REHASH AGAIN twice already in different forms:

Why does everyone fall into the megahertz myth? Is it just ignorance of how processors function? I honestly don't get it.. so let me explain in VERY simple terms.

Processor clock speed is ONLY one part of the equation that determines how many operations per second the processor is able to calculate. This has been well known in the marketplace by most informed consumers for maybe 10 years now. Even in the early days of AMD's success they use to use a "comparison" number to compare their processors to Intels processors on something other than pure clock speed vs clock speed because they had the superior architecture. Likewise, you being a mac fan, I find it hard to believe you don't remember when Apple use to make this argument as well.

As for the current situation, I'm assuming you say "speeds have stagnated" in that you could buy a 3.8ghz Pentium 4 years ago and now "ALL" you can get is a 3.0 or 3.2 Xeon. Well if you could disable one of the 2 cores of the 3.2ghz core architecture Xeon (or just run a single threaded application), you will see that it very EASILY knocks the *** out of the P4. why is this? because the processor *architecture* is much improved. The Core architecture is much better than the Netburst architecture of the P4 generation at the SAME CLOCK SPEED. This is due to many technical details. And even this neglects the major improvement in memory bandwidth of the chip and the Front side bus (FSB) speeds... blah blah blah... for anyone still confused:

Clock speed is not directly comparable from two generations of processors

 

[72930]

As long as it has nice new scroll bars I don't care about PPC support

 

[10th Wonder]

I got a question I hope i meet the the requirements for Leopard because I don't plan to upgrade this year. But sometime next year I will be doing that so I can take the full advantage of 10.5.

My 12" PB:
1.5ghz PPC G4
768mb ram(for now, soon 1.25gb)
60gb hd along with a 320 HDD
GeForce FX Go5200
VRAM (Total): 64 MB
Vendor: nVIDIA (0x10de)

 

[QuarterSwede]

I doubt they'd drop PPC that quickly but I do think it'll definitely happen before 2012.

Processor clock speed is ONLY one part of the equation that determines how many operations per second the processor is able to calculate. This has been well known in the marketplace by most informed consumers for maybe 10 years now. Even in the early days of AMD's success they use to use a "comparison" number to compare their processors to Intels processors on something other ...blah blah blah

This is true. Although in my experience with PPC and Intel architecture, PPC (G4 +G5) is much more stable than any Intel machine I've used (x386 to current). I'll be sad to see PPC go but it will happen.

 

[winterspan]

Performance optimizations

It was a much bigger problem back when a lot of operating-system code and application code was architecture-dependent -- and that issue has carried forward all the way to Vista, true. But OSX isn't even byte-order dependant, let alone architecture-dependent. It has a bevy of well-abstracted APIs. Moving forward with the operating system at this point, while carrying the PPC port should never cause Apple to paint themselves into a corner like Microsoft did. While what you say is historically true, it's less of an issue with software that was written to be portable in the first place.

So don't go imagining that Apple would somehow liberate themselves to innovate by dropping PPC support. It's simply not true.

You are absolutely correct. It wasn't my intention to somehow equate the two operating systems and their respective legacy support issues. I was just responding to the guy (maybe you? can't remember) who was touting the "great" things about Microsoft having such great legacy support for the business community and how apple would never become the industry standard.

I actually am kind of glad Apple isn't the standard as I think it would limit their innovation and fast pace of development.

On the point of Apple dropping PPC not allowing them to innovate to a greater degree, I guess you are probably right. But in regards to time and resources spent testing, bug-fixing, and optimizing for performance, I would think it would allow them to move faster and bring out updates quicker. I don't have enough experience with the underlying Darwin/Mach/UNIX architecture of OSX and compiler architecture/support (everything is GCC?) to truly understand the limitations or lack thereof of code portability and capability to optimize to each architecture. I need to look into the proper use of Altivech, SSE1, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, etc to understand the optimizing compiler limitations, manual optimizing, etc.

 

[winterspan]

Totally Agree.

...the whole thing very much depends on what Apple's strategy is with regards increasing market share.

Macs hold their resale value to a much greater degree than equivalent grey-box PC's and there's a couple of reasons for that I suppose: the aesthetics and design are certainly a contributory factor (take a look at how much you can still get for a low-spec G4 iMac on eBay), but I think people are much more likely to fork out for a second hand Mac than they are a second hand PC because there's a level of assurance around usability, viruses etc. that means a PC of a similar age simply can't compete. Sure, you could pop a new hard drive in an old Windows box and start over but most folk just want to buy something and have it fulfil their expectations without too much faffing around.

People always throw around the phrase "...it just works" in reference to Macs, and its indicative of a reputation that, in my experience, is largely deserved. What is really amazing though is when that phrase is equally applicable to a four or five year old machine as it is to a brand new Intel-based machine.

All those G4/G5 machines that are out there can still provide a perfectly reasonable user experience for your average person who wants to do little more than MSOffice/iTunes/internet. For many, they will be a great low-cost introduction to OS X. Take a look at eBay; people are buying lots and lots of second hand PPC Macs. Many of those purchasers will have a wonderful time playing about with Panther/Tiger and will one day move to an Intel machine. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are plenty of potential switchers and not all of them will be buying their first Mac brand new off the shelf.

I think you're absolutely correct. Limiting support of 10.6 to Intel will in no real serious way limit the resell value of older macs. Eventually when the times comes when some applications will require 10.6, it will have been so long that it probably wouldn't even be worth it performance-wise if you could run a 5-6 year newer program. I wouldn't imagine that with the pace of system performance increase we've seen lately that it would even be feasible to run a 2010/2011 application on a 2005/2006 system.

 

[Abstract]

It seems like a logical step to me. If Apple releases 10.6 in 2 years then the last Power PC computers will be 4 years old.

Exactly. I don't want OS X to be like in Microsoft's situation with Windows, which supports stuff from the 1980s.

If the last PPC computers are "stuck" with OS 10.5.10 or whatever, it's certainly fine with me. It wouldn't be a bad OS to be stuck with, and I don't really expect even the newest PPC computers to support any of the new features anyway. How many people still use Windows XP? That's ancient, and most people still use it.

It's not like before with the G4, when all Apple did was slight speed bumps every 6-8 months. Right now, they're making rather huge leaps in speed, thanks to Intel.

 

[w_parietti22]

The difference between 10.6 and 10.5 will not be major. 10.4 to 10.5 is the biggest update sense OS X was introduced.

I could see people being upset about 10.5 dropping PPC support but 10.6, common.