Mac OS X Lion: Drops PowerPC Emulation, Adds QuickTime Pro Features, Much More

[wickedking94]

also, so far I haven't seen a decent reason to upgrade to lion.
Unless they make it insanely faster on my mid 2010 Macbook pro and have it take less HDD space, I'm not buying.

 

[!¡ V ¡!]

Thanks apple. no rosetta means i cant play halo trial, or any of my other games anymore.

I guess i'm not upgrading to lion this summer, which will save me 130$ anyway.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Its called a partition for your PPC delight. Its not the same as the transition from PPC to x86 hardware. This is software based. All the whiners are making excuses, don't upgrade if you do not want to.

 

[Mistrblank]

You realize that you can partition your HDD to install SL and Lion right. If you have the need to play a game or work on some PPC application, log into the SL partition. Why is this problem?

The partition solution may not work with newer machines that were never shipped with anything but Lion.

Honestly Lion is just starting to sound like garbage cleanup to get rid of the things Apple just doesn't want to support anymore.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Allocation of resources. If a 3rd party developer did not take the time or has no interest to port they software or plug-in to x86/x64, then its not fault. Trust me I know, I had several 3rd party applications that were running under Classic and guess what I learn to find alternatives even if they did not function the same. I will have the same issue with PPC, however I have already begun the search for replacements, if not write an email to the developer to get they act in gear to support x86/x64.

and 5 years is not a very long time.

This sets a very bad presidencies as well for Apple. I could easy see them starting to force updates of software in older than 4-5 years. I could easy see them forcing stuff to work on OSX threw the App store.

It is Apple fault they are forcing updates of older software. I could understand the drop of classic but dropping a processor emulation is an issue.
It just emulating a older processor and that is really not that hard to do.

Like I said MS supported emulating 16 bit processor threw all versions of 32 bit windows.
Who not to say in few years Apple dropping support for all 32bit applications. Not that addressing 32 bit is that hard on X86-64 CPU since the CPU can switch between them. Other wise it would be a much larger forced issued.

 

[wickedking94]

partition?
Oh good! that means i can waste HDD space on two operating systems and i get to keep switching back and forth just to play games!

thats so convenient! its just like using bootcamp!

 

[Warbrain]

The partition solution may not work with newer machines that were never shipped with anything but Lion.

Honestly Lion is just starting to sound like garbage cleanup to get rid of the things Apple just doesn't want to support anymore.

Which they should do. There's no good reason to support dead architectures. Do you want OS X to be like Windows, containing support for so many worthless machines that it's a horrible mess?

 

[skellener]

Video has been removed.

If QTPro X finally brings back the FRAME counter (not timecode, but FRAME counter) and allows you to get the darn controller OFF the viewing window, I'll dig it. If not, it's still useless. You can't use that thing with the controller taking up the entire lower third!!! It would also be nice if QT could display color profiles properly, but that has never worked.

 

[wickedking94]

At least keep the option for people to install rosetta!

 

[andyljohnson]

Tasks

It appears as though tasks are gone from iCal and Mail. Can anyone confirm if tasks will still be part of the OS?

 

[Warbrain]

At least keep the option for people to install rosetta!

For the 20 people who use it? Upgrade your apps.

 

[!¡ V ¡!]

The partition solution may not work with newer machines that were never shipped with anything but Lion.

Honestly Lion is just starting to sound like garbage cleanup to get rid of the things Apple just doesn't want to support anymore.

Chances are that if you have been a Mac user for a few years now, if not presently you have SL installed on your Mac, right. When you upgrade, there is nothing stoping you to partition your new Mac to have Lion and SL on it.

If you are just entering the Mac eco-system and do not have a Mac now and Lion will be your only entry point into this eco-system, guess what chances are that you will not have PPC software anyhow.

So the point is that people love to complain over nothing.

Guess what I will be doing on release of Lion, partition my HDD i the developers that had PPC compliant software have not made the transition. Why cry over nothing. I am more concerned over the hardware side of the house.

 

[skellener]

and 5 years is not a very long time.This sets a very bad presidencies as well for Apple.

Apple has always done this. It is nothing new. I'd like to see them continue to offer the emulator. But this does not surprise me one bit. They discontinue support for technologies ALL the time.

 

[Warbrain]

It appears as though tasks are gone from iCal and Mail. Can anyone confirm if tasks will still be part of the OS?

Tasks are still in iCal.

 

[hfletcher]

"This video has been removed due to copyright infringement by Apple"
Bah!

Honestly, is it really that top secret that people can't show youtube videos of it?

 

[pubwvj]

"PowerPC (Rosetta) emulation is no longer offered."

Apple keeps abandoning old technology. Yet they expect us to buy content from them such as iTunes, Apps and iBooks. BUT I don't know that I'll be able to read my books in ten years if I buy them from Apple. That is a very bad move on Apple's part.

Frankly it is trivial for them to continue to emulate the old systems (e.g., PPC, OS9 and even Apple I, II, II, Lisa) and continue to support the old software and content. There are a tremendous number of great software programs and the content that went with them. It's not being produced for OSX. Apple's losing by doing this.

 

[coleridge78]

Sadly, and with great reluctance, I moved on from Eudora long ago.
(I use Thunderbird now... but its not nearly as nice as Eudora was.)

But I'd still like to be able to run Eudora and other legacy applications!
Somewhere I still have an old Eudora database of mail messages and
dropping Eudora from Lion will make it very awkward to access those
messages.

Sure wish Qualcomm would just set the Eudora codebase free so some
community-minded programmers could resurrect it as a free application.

Is the new Mail application any good (as compared to Thunderbird)?

I know that people get emotionally attached to the tools they use all the time, and this was especially true of Eudora. At the time, for POP3 access, it was really, really nice.

But (as an e-mail server and application developer, and once-upon-a-time e-mail second- and third-tier mail support guy) Eudora is horridly buggy and broken when it comes to IMAP and SSL. If you really want to use POP3 and be insecure, it's still great, but otherwise... you should have moved on years ago. Aside from the general bugginess that leads to mail corruption, there are exploitable holes that will never be fixed. It hasn't seen an update in five years, and never will. And they were pretty darn sporadic for a while before that, too.

It's just a bad, bad idea to keep trusting software like that for your mail, of all things.

And yes, as of version 4 the worst bugs are gone from Apple's Mail, and it's now much more stable than Thunderbird. Apple employees have for a few years now been active participants in the IMAP server development community. Mozilla prefers to spend their time on adding maddeningly useless and buggy tabs to their IMAP client instead making it actually, you know, work.

 

[manu chao]

Honestly Lion is just starting to sound like garbage cleanup to get rid of the things Apple just doesn't want to support anymore.

As if Apple had not dropped support for older hardware consistently every two years (or even less initially).

 

[paduck]

Looks like I have to find another application to replace Quicken 2007, with all the same functionality (investments, scheduled transactions, tax exporting, etc.)

Yep, Intuit has only had something like five years to adapt their software and they have failed miserably. I say this as someone who has used (and is still using) Quicken for 19 years. I'm a huge fan of Quicken as a product, but Intuit has allowed it to wither on the vine for a long time now. Maybe Quicken Essentials 2.0 will be what the 1.0 version should have been? Only four years too late. I'll probably hold off on my Lion upgrade until the next version of Quicken is out and hope that all the features I'm interested in are there - it really is the killer app for me despite Intuit's lack of attention.

Quicken Essentials is "Essential" only to the extent that it has the most basic of features. I'm not the most robust poweruser of Quicken, but 2007 gives me the ability to report on cost-basis for investments and manually enter everything in a checkbook like format. Intuit's ability to bring any features forward is shockingly bad.

For example, the most recent version of Quicken Essentials trumpets the fact that you can use the "+/-" keys to increment check numbers. There's an innovation. They had that in the 1992 version of Quicken. But apparently not in the original rollout of Essentials. You can now also do a "paper-tape" calculator within the register. Again, thanks for implementing a feature you had in 1995.

Now, what about investments and reports. Well, they just added the feature to allow manual entry of investments - how was it that didn't make it into the initial release? It was available around 1998 in their old version. And - say you wanted a report to show you where your money was going - hey, you can do that now too!

I hope with Apple's surging home market share that Intuit invests in this product. Given Bill Campbell's background with Apple & Claris, you'd think he would be putting more into this platform. For that matter, you'd think they might be investing in the iPhone and iPad...

 

[Warbrain]

"This video has been removed due to copyright infringement by Apple"
Bah!

Honestly, is it really that top secret that people can't show youtube videos of it?

Anyone who runs it is under NDA.

"PowerPC (Rosetta) emulation is no longer offered."

Apple keeps abandoning old technology. Yet they expect us to buy content from them such as iTunes, Apps and iBooks. BUT I don't know that I'll be able to read my books in ten years if I buy them from Apple. That is a very bad move on Apple's part.

Frankly it is trivial for them to continue to emulate the old systems (e.g., PPC, OS9 and even Apple I, II, II, Lisa) and continue to support the old software and content. There are a tremendous number of great software programs and the content that went with them. It's not being produced for OSX. Apple's losing by doing this.

Stop complaining. This is technology. Things change. Would you rather have them keep support for so many worthless configurations that their OS becomes bloated like Windows XP or Vista?

Apple has always done this. It is nothing new. I'd like to see them continue to offer the emulator. But this does not surprise me one bit. They discontinue support for technologies ALL the time.

And they need to. You can't support everything forever.

 

[Hurda]

PPC is so 2005.
Welcome to the second decade of the century, Mac!

 

[Stiksi]

Apps that are PowerPC:

Silverfast
Spyder2Pro
CanoScan
Half of CS4 fringe apps

Estimated cost of upgrading to Lion (without update price):
New scanner software: 300 €
New screen calibrator: 150€
New scanners: 600 €
CS5: 900 €
New printers that stopped working in SL for lack of drivers: 200 €
________________
1950 €

Yeah, I'm sticking with Leopard and SL.

 

[!¡ V ¡!]

and 5 years is not a very long time.

This sets a very bad presidencies as well for Apple. I could easy see them starting to force updates of software in older than 4-5 years. I could easy see them forcing stuff to work on OSX threw the App store.

It is Apple fault they are forcing updates of older software. I could understand the drop of classic but dropping a processor emulation is an issue.
It just emulating a older processor and that is really not that hard to do.

Like I said MS supported emulating 16 bit processor threw all versions of 32 bit windows.
Who not to say in few years Apple dropping support for all 32bit applications. Not that addressing 32 bit is that hard on X86-64 CPU since the CPU can switch between them. Other wise it would be a much larger forced issued.

No one here can really define how long is too long or too short for that matter when it concerns support. You say should support PPC for another 5-10 years and that 4-5 years is too short to drop all PPC support. While someone else might say why not support it for 15-20 years. It is the company who writes, develops and support for the user base and they decide how long is too long and so on. If has done they research and figured that PPC support is getting in the way of other advancements and that only a minority of its users and developers are still using PPC software, then its either time for the developers to update they software or other developers to create this shortfall and users to either partition they HDD or seek alternatives.

You are not forced to upgrade to Lion. My concern is not software based, its more hardware based. Worst case scenario, learn Cocoa programming and develop your own apps.

 

[Fraaaa]

That video shows that Apple is unifying OS/X and iOS where it's possible (eg: Launchpad and new Mail).

It seems clear to me that they are preparing OS/X for future Macs with touchscreens! ;-)

As a user and also a developer, that's what I want! A MacBook Air/Pro or even an iMac where I can "turn" the screen and use it as an iPad, running the same Apps.

Nonetheless I believe that will take about 1 or 2 years to happen due to business/commercial strategy. In the last years Apple has shown that they like to keep some innovations in their pockets and do little improvements on each new version, to sell more devices each time they are launched.

But I believe that convergence is the inevitable path...

Don't you know? They already have done it!

They also sell wrist-support accessory. Jobs said that these accessory are "Huge" in the last finance report, in fact they got their own figures shown up in the chart!

 

[Warbrain]

Apps that are PowerPC:

Silverfast
Spyder2Pro
CanoScan
Half of CS4 fringe apps

Estimated cost of upgrading to Lion (without update price):
New scanner software: 300 €
New screen calibrator: 150€
New scanners: 600 €
CS5: 900 €
New printers that stopped working in SL for lack of drivers: 200 €
________________
1950 €

Yeah, I'm sticking with Leopard and SL.

Don't bitch to Apple, bitch to the lazy companies who didn't do proper development.

 

[AidenShaw]

progress

Lion looks like it has some nice features. I like the implementation of the iPad aesthetic throughout some of the apps.

FWIW, Vista/Win7 x64 systems have dropped 8086 (the 16-bit Intel instruction set) virtualization.

Your DOS and Win3.1 apps won't run on Windows x64....

(yawn)