Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Does Require Intel Processors
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Nope, I've got one. I bought it autumn 2006 I think... Core2Duo came out shortly afterwards
Still it's a perfectly functional machine, although it may be time to upgrade for SL.
O-o-oh. I've been learned. Gee didn't realize Intel did this. Still this is a perfect excuse to treat yourself to a new MacBookPro?! Maybe?
@m-dogg How much space does Leopard use now? I've got to check...
System 3.72GB, Library 4.86GB so about 8.5GB (..) does that mean SL will take 2.5GB??
Hey
Although, I am craving my new iMac 24" - not long now.
And hold onto it. Leopard is a great OS and will still be supported. There are plenty of people with older Macs that love them. In a way, I wish I still had my 17-inch Core Duo iMac, but I sold that a while ago. And my old PowerPC 6100/60 workhorse saw 8 years of life! Bought in July 1994 and retired in May 2002. I had the best time with that machine.
Apple would have been better served to preserve it's options to switch back to PPC someday. While Intel has been pretty stagnated on x86 development for awhile, IBM has been moving forward with the POWER chips pretty nicely. Remember how getting past 3 GHz was one of the big selling points of the switch to Intel? How did that work out?
Seriously?
Are you joking? I wouldnt mind that for running old game purposes. Havent seen that said anywhere else.Well, any kind of analogy always can always be beaten by saying "That's different." Of course racism is much more of a serious problem than dropping support for some hardware in an OS, but the point of my comparison was the fact Apple are treating some of their customers like they're worth less. They could have bought their machines 2.5 years ago (right about when I bought my c2d macbook), they could still have them under warranty, yet they are being told "We're afraid you can't use our newest OS, because you have the wrong processor. We're only releasing it for those of our customers that are using Intel machines. It's not that you're machines aren't capable, we've just decided that there isn't enough of you to make it worth for us".
That's where the problem is. How can you trust Apple and buy their machine again after that? You don't know what kind of hardware changes they might go through and how they may develop their software in the future, perhaps some day you will be the one who's in a small minority that gets left behind for the greater good (zombie voices in the background: the greater good...
).I'm not that new to Apple. What you're saying is the opposite of what you're arguing about. Yeah, Apple is known for supporting a small amount of hardware. If Linux developers who support more of it can also support different architectures, then it should be that much easier for Apple!
If you think you need it and have the money, sure, go ahead. But this isn't the thing to rationalise it with, the switch from 32 to 64 bit is mainly important because it lets you use more ram. Apart from that, it doesn't provide any huge performance boosts or anything like that, just because the new number is twice as big .Thanks for the kind words *LTD*
I'm going to hang onto this happy old iMac G4 until it gives up on me one day. It's a marvelous machine and it serves me very well. I think this one is over 6 years old - so it's also had a great life and it's never been repaired or had a single hiccup in all those years.
Praise The Lord! Sanity has retaken the forum. I read the headline and thought "uh oh, G4 owners are gonna start bellyaching how Apple is being disloyal to them." Pleasantly surprised that is not the case .
I'm thrilled at the requirements. We get a leaner, faster OS X for it -- as opposed to the bloat in some other unnamed OS on the market that rhymes with Shista. I'm getting my new iPhone 3GS next Fri, but I'm more excited about putting SL on my Macs.
Now if Adobe would hurry up w/ a 64-bit version of PS...
I'm thrilled at the requirements. We get a leaner, faster OS X for it -- as opposed to the bloat in some other unnamed OS on the market that rhymes with Shista. I'm getting my new iPhone 3GS next Fri, but I'm more excited about putting SL on my Macs.
Now if Adobe would hurry up w/ a 64-bit version of PS...
Not sure if "already" applies here. We're talking 3 years ago, which is an eternity in tech terms. I understand it's a little disconcerting to hear that your hardware will not support the "latest and greatest", but it does happen. Maybe Apple should've included a NewtonOS emulator for the iPhone, huh? After all, it is obsoleted hardware that is still used. I'm shocked Apple would make such a bold move.
Really, it's not like your machine will suddenly stop working when SL is released. I work in an apple retail/support outfit, and I still see the occasional iMac G3 running OS9 come in, and the people use the machines on a daily basis.
The long and short of it is, Apple can't support every machine they've ever made indefinitely. If your machine continues to do what you need it to do running 10.5.x, then it's still a win for you. If not, you should consider upgrading anyway.
All the linux distros can support all the different hardware because, in terms of raw developer resources, they are much bigger than Apple (has a lot to do with being open-source, I figure). You'll also notice that most distros really only support one platform, it's just that there's a lot more porting going on. So, a developer with a SPARC machine will look at a distro and go "Hey, I like that distro. I'm gonna port it to SPARC." Developers can't legally do that with OS X. The hazards of using the most user-friendly, powerful OS on the market, I suppose.
Well if noting else it'll shut up all those people who vilify MS for releasing an OS that requires modern hardware to run (aside from the poor sods who were told it would run on their hardware, a mistake Apple have avoided by being upfront about the whole thing).
Hey,
if you choose Upgrade & Install or whatever it is (maybe Archive & Install?) but it has something to with upgrading, EVERYTHING is kept. It's just your core OS that is updated, no Dock items, Apps, Terminal Prefs, etc. will be lost.
HOWEVER, it is a good idea to make sure Time Machine or similar software is up-to-date just before you hit upgrade, JUST IN CASE
there is very, very, very little chance something will go wrong, but you never know Hope I helped,
SuperMacMan
How can you trust Apple and buy their machine again after that? You don't know what kind of hardware changes they might go through and how they may develop their software in the future, perhaps some day you will be the one who's in a small minority that gets left behind for the greater good (zombie voices in the background: the greater good...
C'est la vie. Out of my control. There's a certain risk and you either accept it or you don't. If you don't, it's just more needless angst.
How do you think I feel as an iPhone 3G user who is locked in to another year of a two-year contract with Rogers? Can't upgrade until August 2010. I could always buy the phone outright, but that's a helluva lot of money. It looks like I won't be getting an iPhone 3GS at all. Rogers used to have a mechanism in place whereby you can break your contract for a fee, but it looks like that's all in the past.
But that's how it is. A contract is a contract, and there's no point in feeling down about what you can't change. Apple moved forward with the iPhone paradigm, and carriers do what they do. Yeah, I guess I'm unhappy about it but there's no point in directing any negatvity toward Apple or my carrier. Who knows, if I bitch at Rogers enough in a few months they *might* throw me a bone. But again, that's more time we're talking about and no guarantee.
Because the Linux distros are mostly volunteer run and don't really have to cope with commercial pressures.
Debian dropped a load of architectures from "fully supported" status a while back because it was delaying their releases too much to make sure they were all supported.
O-o-oh. I've been learned. Gee didn't realize Intel did this. Still this is a perfect excuse to treat yourself to a new MacBookPro?! Maybe?
@m-dogg How much space does Leopard use now? I've got to check...
System 3.72GB, Library 4.86GB so about 8.5GB (..) does that mean SL will take 2.5GB??
Snow Leopard *should* (no promises) work on Core Duo machines... It *is* an Intel processor, which is what Apple states SL requires, right?
Someone prove me wrong............
SuperMacMan
That is part of the reason, but here are a couple of articles describing how the did it. AppleInsider, MacDailyNews
I never said Apple (or anyone else) should support their hardware indefinitely. But everyone should support it until it gets too old.
The Newton platform, according to Wiki was started in 1989 and all development on it officially ended in 1998. The iPhone was released almost 10 years after that. It would make absolutely no sense to have it run 10-20 year old applications, because by today's standards they would be utterly useless. Besides, your comparison isn't really spot on. A proper comparison would be to ask of Apple that iPhone OS would run on old Newton hardware. Everyone knows that would be impossible, because the hardware is obsolete.
The issue we are talking about here is different. Late PPC machines are still very capable of running Snow Leopard, since they run Leopard quite well and SL is said to be more optimised and faster. Apple hasn't stopped working on PPC because it's obsolete and not capable enough for their new OS.
Quite the opposite, really - PPC will become obsolete, because Apple stopped working on it.
He's got a point, the 3GHz mark only became available lately. G5 machines were available in frequencies up to "only" 2.7 GHz, which started to become a problem. The switch to Intel happened and they said one of the main things was PPC's problem of breaking the 3 GHz barrier, which Pentium 4 did easily. But what do you know - Pentium 4 failed and Intel came out with Core Duo chips that worked at frequencies of 1.5 - 2 GHz.
As far as x86 vs. PowerPC is concerned - it's an endless debate, but I agree that Intel has stagnated. PPC is a much more modern architecture that failed, because it wasn't popular and supported enough. If you look carefuly - frequencies are a problem, that's why they are only giving us more and more cores lately (which often doesn't bring that much performance to the average user). Anyway, this is a whole different discussion, let's not make this topic offtopic, open a new one instead.
No, Core Duo and Core 2 Duo are two different things. The first Intel machines from Apple were based on Core Duo, which is 32-bit. Later, they switched to Core 2 Duo, which is 64-bit.Core Duo... As in Core 2 Duo? I didn't think that Intel made any Core Duo processors that were 32-bit only.
Whoa... yeah, in fact, I have a Core Duo black MacBook that's about to turn 3 years old, lose its AppleCare coverage, get replaced with something new (13" MBP is likely) and be handed down to someone else.
Uh... hi. I didn't buy a multicore Power Mac G5, but I bought a high-end configuration of the original one back in 2003. And I use software you can also spend a good bit of money on, like Adobe Creative Suite.
You're talking about people who haven't bought a machine from Apple in almost three years, who had several thousand bucks to blow on a top-end professional machine in 2006, but either can't or won't replace it this fall when it goes out of warranty coverage. I can actually see this being the case for some people, with the economic downturn.
But then you're further narrowing it to those who feel for whatever reason that they must have the latest and greatest OS. Congratulations, you've narrowed your set to "professional users who don't act like professional users at all." Professional users don't buy the latest and greatest OS as soon as it comes out, because as anyone can tell you, there's too much risk of incompatibility with their existing apps, and they can't afford downtime (and loss of income) due to that. I've gone through three versions of Adobe Creative Suite and I'm still running Tiger, because I heard about the problems people had with InDesign on Leopard.
A couple other points you're blissfully ignorant of:
1. Apple continues to release new versions of applications built to support not only old OS versions, but the old architecture. If you have 10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002, you can run Safari 4 on a G3 with Firewire and 256MB RAM, according to the Safari 4 download page. That draws the "unsupported" line somewhere around the original blue-and-white G3 PowerMac, ten years ago.
2. Third-party developers (not Apple, and usually not the big names) are churning out tons of awesome apps that are either Leopard-only, Intel-only, or whatever.
So if Apple continues to release new versions of all its apps for your 3-year-old computer's architecture and OS, and the only "latest, greatest" software you can't run is from third-party vendors, your irritation should be directed at those third-party vendors, I think.
Uh... one tiny problem with this argument. Apple announced the move to Intel processors on June 6, 2005. So anyone buying a PowerMac G5 or XServe G5 in the second half of 2006 had plenty of advance warning that the architecture was going bye-bye.
