Where did you see a price posted? Oh, you made it up.
It's not a very big upgrade. There are no radical changes.
Wait... There ARE radical changes because they're basically rewriting OS X. The feature set is remaining the same.
Actually, there are quite a few radical changes. First, the new stuff - Exchange support, OpenCL, for example. Then the complete rewrite to be able to benefit from > 4 cores. Overall streamlining. Quicktime X. Overall, it's probably as time consuming an upgrade as Leopard, even if it doesn't look like it from the surface.
However, few of those are going to be of any benefit to PPC users (Exchange support, perhaps). So dropping PPC isn't really hurting them much.
According to the web archive you could still purchase a powerPC full line of Mac computer through the first quarter 2006.
Do you stop making a OS that works for machines that are 2.5 years old, especially for Mac hardware?
I find this lazy, and flawed.
If Snow Leopard were coming out today, that would be true. Instead, it's 'about a year' away - which means the newest PPC machines will be 3.5 years old - which is quite a few computer generations.
As for lazy and flawed, how many computer software projects of this size have you run?
Nope. Just Dual Cores and Quad Cores (2xDual Cores).
I have the 2.0GHz Dual Core PowerMac G5, the last gen of PowerMacs, and I have to say I think this is BS to drop PPC G5 support. If anything, drop G4 support. The Dual Core G5 PPC is a perfectly capable chip to run what ever Apple wants to throw at it.
It was 3 years ago. Not any more. The world moves on.
And dropping G4 without dropping G5 wouldn't save anything. Dropping PPC reduces the work required by 50%. Dropping G4 wouldn't save much at all.
Hm. I suppose it is good for some of us, but the people who bought Powermac G5s must be annoyed.
Quite soon for a new operating system, my mac mini shipped with tiger and leopard in november, any idea when this will be released? Macworld? Or this time next year?
Apple has been releasing new versions of OS X every 18-24 months. This one will be on schedule. And as a G5 user, I'm not annoyed at all. I'll just leave the G5 on Leopard and move the other machines to Snow Leopard.
complain about windows as much as you want but we had scientific instruments running on windows 95 working happily in a network with vista machines.
That's a silly argument. Macs running Mac OS 6 can work happily on a network with Leopard machines, as well. Why do you think that's going to change with Snow Leopard?
If apple can afford to dump the PPC users it can afford to dump the 32 bit Intel users (which are far less).
Except that supporting PPC doubles the workload. Supporting 32 bit in addition to 64 bit doesn't add much work at all. Plus, the 32 bit Intel machines are even newer than the PPC machines. Can you imagine the whining if Snow Leopard didn't run on a computer that will be 2 years old at the time?