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Mac OS X 10.6 to Drop PowerPC Support?

scorp888 said:
My family had a diesel-powered Volvo a few years ago. Great car, built like a tank. The only problem w/ it is in the winter, the diesel actually gelled up and often and to get towed or something. Don't know if there's any comparison w/ Intel/PowerPC.
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Not sure that you can attribute that with diesel. One of the major reasons the Russians were able to push the Germans back was because their tanks ran on diesel fuel and were thus able to cope with the extreme cold better. Hows that for a derail eh?

Anyway back on topic and having skipped the vast majority of the thread I would have to say that the sooner PPC support is dropped the better. Back when Apple switched to PPC, 68k support was around for far too long meaning that the OS was much more bloated than it needed to be. It took Apple till 8.5 (possibly even 9) to sort out the problems with the OS.

Now Mac OS X does not seem to be suffering the same problems but if developers could concentrate fully on Intel applications then the chances of us seeing increased uptake of the new 64bit features of Leopard I think are vastly increased. As developers no longer need worry about making sure their applications work on both platforms.
 
Xpostfacto is great. I still use my 300 mhz Wallstreet quite a bit on the latest 10.4. If 10.5 drops G3 support it may just be a "lock" that needs to be cracked, not like incompatible code or anything. Can any Wintel laptops from 1998 run Vista? Decently? Don't think so

My everyday machine is my 1.5 ghz Sawtooth G4 (450 mhz originally).
 
Cromulent said:
Anyway back on topic and having skipped the vast majority of the thread I would have to say that the sooner PPC support is dropped the better. Back when Apple switched to PPC, 68k support was around for far too long meaning that the OS was much more bloated than it needed to be. It took Apple till 8.5 (possibly even 9) to sort out the problems with the OS.
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I think with the classic OS those problems were because some of the OS was 68k code being emulated for PPC, which is not the case with OS X. OS X is based on UNIX which all of the code for is portable, so it just has to be recompiled for a different architecture so you will not have the same problems as the classic OS.
 
Cromulent said:
Not sure that you can attribute that with diesel. One of the major reasons the Russians were able to push the Germans back was because their tanks ran on diesel fuel and were thus able to cope with the extreme cold better. Hows that for a derail eh?

Anyway back on topic and having skipped the vast majority of the thread I would have to say that the sooner PPC support is dropped the better. Back when Apple switched to PPC, 68k support was around for far too long meaning that the OS was much more bloated than it needed to be. It took Apple till 8.5 (possibly even 9) to sort out the problems with the OS.

Now Mac OS X does not seem to be suffering the same problems but if developers could concentrate fully on Intel applications then the chances of us seeing increased uptake of the new 64bit features of Leopard I think are vastly increased. As developers no longer need worry about making sure their applications work on both platforms.
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From what has already been said on here by more informed persons than I, the inclusion of ppc code is not exceptionally difficult.
I do have the the intel mbook, but also have a number of ppc macs including a G5 protools workstation.
I think those of us with ppc workstations have more to lose by elimination of the ppc code and I think Apple knows this is a big deal to us.
They would lose many pro clients on this one.
As was mentioned, this is not yet an issue yet. This may be Apple's way of testing the waters, but 2009 is too early imo.
 
-hh said:
I'd agree, if it wasn't for "outside forces" with money, such as DARPA.

For example, its not the Intels, IBMs or AMDs who's currently paying the big bucks for chips to do hyperspectral imaging and analysis: its the Government. As such, whoever DARPA selects to do this research will invariably have a leg up on their competition when it comes to its commercialization spin-offs. And the simple facts are that Intel does not have 100% of these research contracts.

They may, particularly in certain specialized fields, such as General Purpose CPUs. However, this doesn't mean that they're leading in every field across the board. An example of this very well may be exotic material semiconductors:

We can stop right there: upon what basis are we making the assumption that Intel has made an independent foundry investment that's equal to what IBM (or others) have done, either on their own, or with Government sponsorship?

My point is that with the research that is occuring, I expect that we're going to see a change in base semiconductor material coming out of the foundries within the next few years. As such, there's going to be early adopters who have the potential for a "transformational" lead, at least until the other players are able to make the parallel investment.

As such, the implication is that if Company A has a 80GHz chip, and no matter how "inefficient" its design, simple brute force is going to trump Company B's highly elegant ... but only 8GHz ... product, at least for some applications.
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It was a hypothetical. I can only assume that Intel will throw money at a technology like this once it is economically feasible to put it on the market. Otherwise they would get left behind. I imagine that once another chipmaker has the technology to create vastly superior chips, using diamond or nanotubes, Intel will be in an excellent position (they have huge, huge amounts of money) to get their own diamond/nanotube chips out as fast as possible. They could also be in the best position to exploit the new technology, and take it further, faster than anyone else.
I shouldn't think DARPA would be too happy about IBM having exclusive rights to technologies like these. After all, they are the guys that are going to be paying for it. And if DARPA decides they want a 50 GHz, 128 core nanotube 32nm Larrabee from Intel for some reason, then suddenly Intel's got the knowhow to start making 50 GHz 32nm Sandy Bridges.

By today's paradigm standards, agreed.

But some technologies are paradigm-shifts, and therein lies the rub.

For a (poor) analogy, consider an aircraft jet engine vs a piston engine: the jet runs hotter and has a higher RPM, all of which make it a poor candidate for flying low and slow. But for a transcontinental flight, do you want to go low and slow? Probably not. Since piston aircraft have a fairly difficult time exceeding 25,000ft and 300mph, which technology would you rather have for your next intercontinental flight?
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Tut tut. S.I. units please :)

How about high bypass turbofans then? Turboshafts? All different ways of making a new technology completely supersede an older one, or making turbojets perform better at lower speeds and improving efficiency. Something tells me I've missed the point of your analogy.
 
10.6 seems really too soon to drop PPC support. There are a lot of G5s out there that are still going strong.

10.7 may drop PPC support, I'd be very surprised if 10.6 will. It would upset a lot of existing users, and businesses.
 
Any G5 machine should be able to cope with the next version of Mac OS.

I think it would be a really easy way to define the system requirements - PowerPC G5 or Intel based Mac.

G4 support would seem a bit too much though.
 
There's no technical reason to drop G4 support unless Apple suddenly decided it has to be 64bit to be compatible. That however would also drop support for some of the earliest Intel hardware, therefore it is very unlikely they'd pull a stunt like that.

If they drop G4 support it is going to be 100% marketing.
 
It's more likely that all the third party developers will drop PPC before Apple do. It's already beginning to happen now.
 
dynamicv said:
It's more likely that all the third party developers will drop PPC before Apple do. It's already beginning to happen now.
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Yep, and it's too bad. Apple made it very easy to deliver Universal Binaries and imo every 3rd party developer should support that kind of greatness. Why is it that for every great technical breakthrough there's also an equal amount of stupidity floating around, thus making the breakthrough null and void.

Money talks, I suppose. If it's marginally cheaper to deliver Intel-only code, then I guess it means death to Universal Binaries. Sadly.
 
Dropping PPC would make sense. I'd say 10.6 is at least 18 months away and the switch to Intel was 2 years ago.

As an enthusiast - I've ditched finally ditched PPC with the purchase of this MacBook Air. If my living depended on it, I would have done it months ago.
 
CalMin said:
Dropping PPC would make sense. I'd say 10.6 is at least 18 months away and the switch to Intel was 2 years ago.
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So? That would only make it 3.5 years of Intel-hardware sales. The G5 PowerMac was also available for almost a year until being obsoleted with Mac Pro. That makes it only about three years of Intel-only hardware when the 10.6 is supposedly released. Make it 4 years to be on the safe side.

Now how many of us throw Apple hardware away in 3-4 years? Sure, some of us are privileged enough to get new hardware every 18 months, but "most" customers use the gear for very much longer periods - because it just keeps working as it should. My relatives for example use their hardware for 6 years on average, and I do know that some companies get even more juice out of their investment. It is not that uncommon to see 10-year-old Apple hardware on production! If it works, why replace with a new one?

Anyway, my experience is that Apple hardware is "5 years old on average". Should Apple only cater for their new customers? I think not. I expect 10.6 still have PPC support, because Apple just cannot afford losing customers. Keeping the support isn't that expensive but dropping would cost very much. No, I don't see them dropping PPC support just yet. Maybe when G5 PowerMacs are not able to keep up with the workload of latest systems, but we're not there yet.

Eidorian said:
Leopard on a PowerPC 750? I'd like to see. :)
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Works well, but doesn't shine. Just like Leopard on Dell hardware.
 
JFreak said:
Now how many of us throw Apple hardware away in 3-4 years? Sure, some of us are privileged enough to get new hardware every 18 months, but "most" customers use the gear for very much longer periods - because it just keeps working as it should. My relatives for example use their hardware for 6 years on average, and I do know that some companies get even more juice out of their investment. It is not that uncommon to see 10-year-old Apple hardware on production! If it works, why replace with a new one?
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Dude - It won't stop working when 10.6 comes out. My G4 iMac probably won't run Leopard very well, but that doesn't mean I have to put it in the bin. It just won't run the latest software and have all the latest features. To me, it's reasonable that a computer that I bought several years ago can't run cutting edge software.
 
dynamicv said:
It's more likely that all the third party developers will drop PPC before Apple do. It's already beginning to happen now.
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Aye, that could drive Apple's decision more then anything. If the significant majority of the user base has migrated to Intel by the time serious effort needs to be expended on 10.6, it might be worth just coding it for Intel.

However, chances are Apple is deep enough into coding 10.6 at the moment that keeping PowerPC support is not a burden and they can wait until 10.7 to formally end support.
 
Don't forget that Apple is already half-way to dropping PPC. Leopard won't run on any G3, and its G4 requirements are 867 MHz and up, which eliminates a lot of machines. By an informal check of apple-history.com, it looks like Leopard, released in 2007, won't run on any Mac released in 2002 or earlier, and even some 2003 machines aren't supported. So that establishes a machine age of 4-5 years as a likely cut-off point.

If 10.6 doesn't ship until late 2009 (which would be a year and a half from now), or 2010, then the newest PPC hardware would be the late 2005 PowerMac and G4 PowerBook... both about 4-5 years old. Given the benefit of not having to code and test for a whole second architecture, I honestly think it's a no-brainer that 10.6 goes Intel-only.

Sorry if that's not what you want to hear, but I think it's highly consistent with Apple's established behavior. In the last decade or so, they've become a lot less heroic with efforts to support old hardware in new OSes (cynics would say they use software requirements to drive hardware upgrades... your cynicism may vary).
 
invalidname said:
Don't forget that Apple is already half-way to dropping PPC. Leopard won't run on any G3, and its G4 requirements are 867 MHz and up, which eliminates a lot of machines.
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Yep, but there's a _technical_ reason behind that. Dropping something for the sake of it is another thing, but this one is reasonable.
 
Well, for the record, Leopard will boot on a >867 G4 Mac. And if you don't believe me, stick a Leopard installation DVD into an otherwise-unsupported G4-class Mac and see what happens when you try to boot.

Now, installing Leopard, admittedly that's a whole other matter. But it does boot.

My suspicion is that PPC is considered internally at Apple's most senior levels to be already a dead architecture. I would be willing to bet 10.6 will not support PPC at all. I'd also be willing to bet that, if it did continue to support PPC, then that support will only extend back to the G5s.

I mean, why support two architectures when, based on Apple's customer database, they know they don't really have to? There's no new PPC hardware coming out of Apple, and whatever other PPC hardware there is still being made outside of Apple is probably so alien that Mac OS X wouldn't, in the normal course of events, support it anyhow. Besides, do you really want to have to test your code on more architectures than you really have to? If it were me, I wouldn't.

Now, speaking as a current PPC-using Mac owner, while I still feel a certain affection for PPCs (and probably always will), even I recognize the need to move forward.

In fact, people, why are we even having this discussion? I'm not saying as MacRumors members we shouldn't discuss things of interest, or that we should suddenly abandon our frequently-touted First Amendment rights, but what I am saying is what is the real source of interest here? What is the agenda? And what do you folks hope to gain by keeping this up?

We all know the PPC architecture, based solely on technical merits, has a theoretical future in front of it. We all know code can continue to be developed for it, and that it's capable of functions, features, and degrees of efficiency never achieved on it during it's official lifetime. I mean, look at the Apple // platform, nevermind the Apple ][gs. Or, better yet, look at the primitive hardware on the Voyager I and II craft, and the kinds of things they were made to do which even their creators didn't know/believe/realize were possible. It's an old story. But it's also the past, and frankly it's more than time enough already to move on with our lives.

I don't continue to own and run an iMac G4 800 15" as my primary (and in fact sole) workstation out of some misplaced sense of loyalty or affection. I use it because I haven't yet budgeted sufficiently to replace it with an Intel-based iMac. But when I do, I can assure you all I will instantly embrace the Intel architecture, the performance gains and the functional capabilities added, with open arms. And as for my old iMac G4, well... I'll possibly nuke-n-pave it, set it up with the (then) current version of Debian, and make it into a server, just like I've done with my "beige" PowerMac G3/300 desktop.
 
Why have Apple been selling Universal Applications in the respect of how easy it to compile an application to run on G3, G4, G5 and Intel architecture.

It can't be very hard for them to code for both still as they reckoned that they were coding the Intel version of Mac OS for some time before they even anounced the swap over.
 
makes sense, by the time apple releases os 10.6 in 2009 ish the PPC will be totally obselete by then, especially with everything switching up to 4 and 8 cores...i mean seriously less than a ghz single processer in 2 years??? that seems insane!
 
mbrydone said:
makes sense, by the time apple releases os 10.6 in 2009 ish the PPC will be totally obselete by then, especially with everything switching up to 4 and 8 cores...i mean seriously less than a ghz single processer in 2 years??? that seems insane!
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For the average consumer, I think a Dual-Core is STILL over-kill.

Also, it really depends on what you mean by obsolete. I mean the G5's are no slouches. I edit with one almost everyday. I come home to my Mac Pro and i don't see a significant difference.

I see the G4's being phased out, I mean everyones got a MacBook Pro/MacBook by now..Then again, I don't know how many G4's are still in use.

I think the requirements will be a 1.25 ghz G4 with a gig of ram...unless they really ramp up the bloatness and graphics, etc.
 
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