1.) Heavy not typical. And I envy you as you skipped the Windows years I had to slug through.
2.) and 3.) We're in harmony then.
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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Drops PowerPC Support
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1.) Heavy not typical. And I envy you as you skipped the Windows years I had to slug through.
2.) and 3.) We're in harmony then.
1) Besides the HAL PPC and Intel leopard share like 80% of code, so in short NO.
2) It's very different. Windows supports old ass APIs written in the 16 bit era.
You mean as in "why don't they double the size of their development team and have half of that team spend all their time perfecting OS X for a dying breed of discontinued computers?" That's probably the worst business decision I've heard since the A&R guy who rejected the Beatles.
Image from LogicielMac
LogicielMac publishes a screenshot for the system requirements for Mac OS X Snow Leopard which was seeded to developers this week. The requirements list the following:
- An Intel Processor
- An internal, external, or shared DVD drive
- At least 512 MB of RAM
- Display connected to an Apple-supplied video card
- 9GB of disk space, or 12GB for developer tools
Developers received an early copy of Snow Leopard at WWDC this week. As this is an early version, requirements could change in the future, but the dropping of PowerPC support has been long rumored. MacRumors can independently verify that these are the current requirements for Snow Leopard.
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Who need Power PC support? I just bought an iMac and I'm running OS X and Windows XP - I just came over to the dark side...
- It's just prudent for Apple to sever it's ties to Power PC and concentrate on the future.
Then why no official announcement to the Developers? This is probably the biggest indicator that PPC support is at least still an option. Developers won't want to waste time and money trying to get things to compile into universal binaries under Snow Leopard if Snow Leopard isn't going to support PPC.
"Complete idiots"? Them's banning words. Calm down. There's no need for name-calling.
That Vista runs on 8 year old hardware, whereas Leopard doesn't, and Snow Leopard certainly doesn't.
I can't tell if you're joking, but if you're not ... no, that would be a really bad idea. "Classic" MacOS on PPC emulated 68k until the end of its life (in fact, even under Classic in OS X up until the recent transition), and there's no reason that Rosetta couldn't do the same. Yeah, the app might run slower, but (a) with better hardware, apps may actually eventually run faster than they did on any available PPC hardware (believe it or not, this happend with 68k -> PPC, though, of course, the PPC was probably a lot better than the 68k by the point of that switch, anyway...but maybe in a couple years), and (b) it's really the user's choice to use a PPC app on Intel, and running non-natively is better than not being able to run at all for no reason--the technology is already available.
Keeping support for being able to run PPC apps on Intel will in no way lessen your ability to run Intel apps in an optimal fashion (much like how same-sex marriage will not destory heterosexual marriage, but I digress
).Running Vista on 8 year old hardware provides no benefit over running XP, its just a useless achievement.
I agree - any performance gains in 10.6 will be independent of whether or not the release supports PPC.
Except for one thing - all the talk of a "smaller footprint" is in part due to Apple increasingly going to SSD devices on laptops. Look at the maximum capacity of those and their cost. Saving 9 or 10 GB on the installed system would be a definite win. Unfortunately part of the trade-off may be angering some of their high-end PPC customers, but apparently they are expendable.
Just because the iPhone SDK may still run on PPC does not mean that it will be released Universal. Just as Apple has always developed Intel builds of OS X and Apple Apps alongside PPC builds even for there were Intel Macs, Apple will continue developing PPC builds alongside Intel builds. That doesn't mean that the final release will be universal though. Making a universal build may be fairly easy, requiring just a checkbox in XCode, but the problem is supporting it. If Apple were to officially support a PPC build, they would have to go through months of testing and optimization, which would probably take longer than the equivalent process on Intel too since there have been more different PPC models released than Intel. When Apple doesn't officially support PPC builds it's not the checkbox that they want to avoid it's the time consuming testing. Even if everything turns out to be hunky-dory, they still need to go through the motions to verify that, so it's not it's a process that can be short-changed.iPhone SDK is also Intel only. It runs fine on PPC.
And the Applications folder from Snow Leopard is complete filled with Universal apps (PPC/Intel).
As far as I know the extensions are also universal and also aware of loading 32 bit or 64 bit.
So no mather which specs you are reading now: this system or preview will run on a PPC based Mac. That's for sure!
Eventually the iPhone SDK, when it's out of beta, will also be available for both processors. It's just not making sense that Apple is releasing Universal beta after beta from the iPhone SDK just for releasing it eventually only for Intel?
That's just crazy
That is similar to Snow Leopard. Perhaps the applications may still be universal, possibily because they may want to port some back to Leopard. But there is no guarantee that they've kept the PPC kernel in place or retained support for booting using Open Firmware in PPC Macs compared to EFI in Intel Macs. Even if the PPC kernel is still there, if it isn't seeing further development and testing, it could be very unstable especially when additional technologies are layered on top.
How many Dual G5s are still in use? Those are the only PPC Macs that would actually benefit from Snow Leopard.
Sebastian
Sebastian
Just to be clear, the problem is that one year from now in June-ish 2009, Apple will no longer release updates for an operating system that was released in April of 2005? I can hardly fault Apple for this, though your point is taken. I maintain however that there's a greater likelihood Apple's policy will be more lenient since they know some of their end users CAN'T update... which is different then those users who choose not to.
(For those that are wondering, Tiger's most recent security update was November 2007 I believe, one month after Leopard's release).
I can't tell if you're joking, but if you're not ... no, that would be a really bad idea. "Classic" MacOS on PPC emulated 68k until the end of its life (in fact, even under Classic in OS X up until the recent transition), and there's no reason that Rosetta couldn't do the same. Yeah, the app might run slower, but (a) with better hardware, apps may actually eventually run faster than they did on any available PPC hardware (believe it or not, this happend with 68k -> PPC, though, of course, the PPC was probably a lot better than the 68k by the point of that switch, anyway...but maybe in a couple years), and (b) it's really the user's choice to use a PPC app on Intel, and running non-natively is better than not being able to run at all for no reason--the technology is already available.
Keeping support for being able to run PPC apps on Intel will in no way lessen your ability to run Intel apps in an optimal fashion (much like how same-sex marriage will not destory heterosexual marriage, but I digress
I'm only partly joking. It was in response to this
If PPC support is hampering performance and stability and those are your main goals why not eliminate the PPC translation/emulation as well and force developers into Intel native development to enhance performance and stability on the application end as well?
I can maybe see keeping Rosetta around for one more iteration, but there's no reason to keep universal binary support if the OS is no longer going to support PPC. If you want to develop PPC apps use a prior OS to ensure maximum compatibility.
Can't you use the age argument as well that if an application has not made the transition to universal binary/intel code in the four years since the Intel announcement there's no reason we should keep supporting it?
WWDC is still going on at the Moscone Center, who says there was no official announcement? Apple has 2 main channels of communication with developers: the Mailing Lists and WWDC itself.
Sebastian
Mine is going strong even as its 5th birthday approacheth!
For the record, the iPhone SDK is allegedly for Intel Macs only, but it is a trivial matter to get it to work on a PowerPC machine.
I wonder if Snow Leopard WON"T WORK on a PPC Mac or if Apple WON'T HELP you if you manage to install it on a PPC machine and you have problems. The term "supports" is somewhat ambiguous.
The PowerPC brand may not be dead, but the specific processors used in the last PowerPC Macs probably are. Or at least, IBM/Motorola don't make them anymore.
Personally, I'm mixed. G5s are very powerful, but then again, it'll be a lot easier if there was only one platform to support. The average developer can just click a button to make an app Universal, but what about the developers at Apple who have to make the developer tools, compilers, platform specific stuff? They have to write the programs that actually compile the same code, but for different platforms. Kind of difficult. I'd like to see the PowerPC supported for maybe another 5 years or so. Plus, have Apple take at least 2 years between upgrades. That way, they can add new features, optimize them & get all the bugs out.
Although this is probably not much of a big help to the PPC people, when Snow Leopard does come out, the last PPC mac would've been discontinued about 3 years ago, the only people that would've bought a PowerMac right before the switch would be the kind of people that don't really know Leopard has come out...
Anyone who bought a G5 PowerMac in post-Macworld 2006 is silly, it was obviously aging hardware and was on the way to being upgraded.
Anyone who bought a G5 PowerMac in post-Macworld 2006 is silly, it was obviously aging hardware and was on the way to being upgraded.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Just because the OS is no longer universal does not mean that the OS can drop universal binary support. Software is often programmed for more than one OS, so an Intel only 10.6 OS still needs to support UB since the same application like Photoshop CS4 will also likely need to support 10.5 and probably 10.4 too. That is true even in 10.7 since there will still likely be quite a few PPC users on 10.5.
Yeah, but the numbers are not in favor of PPC, if too few PPC Macs would actually benefit from it, Apple has no reason to continue supporting them, and with everything we know about Snow Leopard so far, the biggest changes are Grand Central and OpenCL, and only Macs with more than one core/CPU will be able to benefit from Grand Central. If OpenCL uses any of NVIDIA's or ATI's tech and just abstracts it for developers, than only recent Macs will be able to benefit from that and only those not using an integrated graphics chip, CUDA doesn't work on older cards and ATI's tech... well I can't even remember the name of it so no comment on that.
Sebastian
Well OS9 is definitely obsolete, sorry. It is definitely crippled for modern-day use, even as a "good web browsing computer" for mom or whoever as it is sometimes suggested for. There are no longer any browsers being developed for it. Safari on the iPhone/Touch is even a much more comfortable and modern browsing experience.