I agree that this is a trial balloon, and while its probably aimed at developers,
it is strategically a bad idea right now in the context of the current consumer market.
Specifically, there's a ton of consumer market share sitting on the fence, asking themselves the old
"will I get screwed if I change from Windows to Mac?", so for Apple to even tolerate any suggesting of dropping of legacy support at this time is
strategically damaging.
True, which means that the real question here is what is the specific and tangible benefit (and to who!) for the dropping of legacy support. People will understand & be more willing to accept change if they can see how they'll benefit from it (if not immediately, but in the future). To this end, a vague hand-waving of "no benefit to PPC" isn't a good enough justification: Apple will need to be very concise in providing real-world examples of what insanely great things the OS could do, if it were not being 'held back' by legacy PPC support.
Personally, I'm not aware of any specific examples of these great new features waiting in the wings (nor, admittedly, have I been looking for any), so perhaps somone could provide some examples of very tangible benefits?
True, but consumers are emotional beasts. For example:
We've seen this sentiment expressed several times already in this thread, and while it isn't true...
...this also drives to the core of another issue:
Some consumers may choose to buy a Mac in part because they remain better machines for longer. This is a classical lifecycle cost management statement...ie, pay more upfront but save money in the long run.
As such, while many of the consumers
here may be of the personal opinion that 4 years is an acceptably long lifecycle, they do not speak for the entire marketplace.
(Personally, my newest tech Mac is 4 years old right now, and I expect that while it may be superceded by a better machine next year, it won't be retired out the door - - I expect it will remain on my network until it is at least 7 years old, just like its predecessor did).
To this end, if we look at
a typical marketshare tracking website, we see that those (cough)
"PPC's that haven't been sold in years" still remain a huge portion of the total share of OS X Mac's in use: they're still more than half (54%)
And while there's sure to be upgrades over the next two years so it will become a smaller portion of the whole, the underlying question is how small of a portion of the total does it need to become before its worth 'abandoning' the retail sales potential for that segment?
For example, my rough SWAG is that PPC is washing out at around 20% per year, which means that in 2-3 years, there will still be 1 PPC consumer for every 3 or 4 MacIntel consumers. As such, an OS update that doesn't support PPC means that roughly ~25% of the consumer base can't buy it.
Sure, but there's reality of support and then there's the consumer
perceptions as to what "support" means...to them. Again, this is an opportunity for the nay-sayers to sharpshoot, so from a politically strategic position, it needs to be countered in easy-for-the-consumer-to-not-get-confused language.
Given how this is frequently an emotionally-loaded topic, I think a clear corporate policy would be very beneficial. My personal suggestion would be to strive for 10 years of support, with a promise of a minimum of 7 for things such as hardware spare parts, OS currency, etc. IMO, Apple has done pretty well historically in this regards and can lay it out in a marketing campaign to break into the conventional Corporate marketplace.
Agreed.
And therein lies the dilemma...the share of MacIntel will hopefully be quite good, but there will still be the higher grade G5's that are plugging along just fine that represent a core that haven't been replaced.
What's missing from this question is what percentage of Macs are still in service after 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ... 10 years.
Not necessarily still in their original role, but merely in some useful capacity, as hand-me-downs and repurposing is common: there's that 8-year old G4 Sawtooth that's been running as a file/music server down in your closet, for example, or that 4-year old G4 iMac that your high schooler is using to do their homework assignments on (and that it is a poor game platform is, if you think about it, actually a feature).
-hh
