Mac OS X Snow Leopard Drops PowerPC Support

[johnnyjibbs]

My main problem is that people only upgrade things when it looks like they're getting something. People won't spend $129 for the same features, even if it is twice as fast. It won't sell.

It's a bit like upgrading your Playstation 2 to a faster Playstation 3 but then not ever buying any games for it.

 

[batchtaster]

After reading some of these posts, you'd think it was the end of the world for some PPC users.

Actually, I've been surprised at how calm people seem to be; I was half-expecting excremental precipitation (ie: a sihtstorm) in here.

Most people seem to be able to acknowledge why Apple would want to drop PowerPC support, even if they don't agree with them doing it "now" (aka, "about a year"). Likewise, most of those who are for the move seem to recognize that this is bad news for some users.

The discussions also seem to be countering valid points (eg: first Intels vs last PowerPCs) with other valid points (eg: Leopard still useful).

 

[gnasher729]

My main problem is that people only upgrade things when it looks like they're getting something. People won't spend $129 for the same features, even if it is twice as fast. It won't sell.

I guess you were not here when Connectix sold their infamous "SpeedDoubler" software. (Installed it on my 60 MHz PPC which could really do with some speeding up. Well, it's speed doubled when I uninstalled the software )

Anyway, how is more stability and more speed not "getting something"? Every time Apple upgrades the speed of a MacBook from 2.0 GHz to 2.01 GHz there are hundreds of people here posting how unhappy they are that they have to sell their MacBook and buy a new one.

Right now, Apple is keeping OS X running on: ARM, PPC and x86. That's a tremendous amount of work.

Also, there's a monumental difference between secretly making sure every version of Mac OS X ran on x86 hardware and it actually being useable.

It's not like Mac OS X has always been at the state where they could just install it on an Intel machine and go. Before Mac OS X 10.0, NEXTSTEP was running on x86 machines. The Unix underpinnings (FreeBSD) in every version of Mac OS X have been primarily developed for x86 machines.

In all likely hood, one or two core OS team members would make sure any Apple specific code clean compiled without any endian issues under x86 and then package it all together. That's it. That's not very time consuming, because it's not active development.

Keeping things running on three processors (plus two more if you count 64 bit PPC and Intel) isn't much work at all. I have about one million lines of code, with about ten or twenty lines that I had to write different for Intel and PowerPC. It is no work at all once developers are educated about the issues. And I can't figure out what makes you think that keeping code portable to two or three processors is easier when you do it in secret and hundreds of developers have no idea that their code is supposed to run on an Intel processor, than it is now when all the developers know what they are supposed to do.

It takes a lot of work to keep the OS going for two architectures. It's not just a simple source code recompile, it's far more work than that.

Please explain to us how it is much more work. Seriously, I would like to know that. Myself, I've written plenty of code where I didn't even _know_ what kind of machine it was going to run on. Now getting things to work on different OS versions, like everyone would have to if there is no 10.6 for PPC, that _is_ work.

 

[stephenli]

I like the people that say that if you bought a Quad/Dual G5 in 2006, your an idiot.

Do you guys not remember what it was like back then? The pro apps were barely intel compatible, Adobe hadn't come out with an Intel Optimized version of their apps, and there wasn't many companies at all with Universal Versions of their apps.
I witnessed lots of editors opt for the Quad G5 instead of waiting it out for the rumored Mac Pro, simply because the software wasn't ready for Intel yet.

yes. as a quad G5 user purchase on 06 Apr, I really know that Professional intel mac (even dont know it is called Mac Pro) is coming but the problem is, I have to use Adobe CS2 at the time!!!

I also have softwares not written as universal binary
do I have to purchase all of them again?!

I want to keep using them at highest speed, highest compatibility and highest stability, thats why i need the most powerful, last generation PPC mac. By the time, i have been trying Adobe CS2 on intel macs, and the speed under rosetta is just.....terrible.

okey. i will keep using it for several years and run on Leopard. I expect a 5-year life for my machine.

My main problem is that people only upgrade things when it looks like they're getting something. People won't spend $129 for the same features, even if it is twice as fast. It won't sell.
It's a bit like upgrading your Playstation 2 to a faster Playstation 3 but then not ever buying any games for it.

Upgrading PS2 to PS3 is good even not too many games are in the market at its launch. Your PS2 game will be bumped to 1080p, with faster loading time, too.
So, a system optimization for a speed increase is a nice release. Its far better than just selling a fancy interface but higher hardware requirement and lower performance right? Take a look at Vista.

 

[Kaptajn Haddock]

Great move by Apple.

No reason to whine. The reason why Apple will not add any new features, but only focus on speed and stability in 10.6 is that PPC users will not feel left out in the cold. They will have all the same features in Leopard as you can find in Snow Leopard for at least 2 more years (the one year until 10.6 comes out + at least one year until 10.7 comes out). For all Intel machines and all new OS X features this is a blessing since Apple will be able to focus solely on Intel coding. This will as Apple states make a smaller OS footprint on your Mac + make it speedier and more stable. And as long as they keep updating Safari for PPC and Windows no one will be left behind on that front.

 

[Manic Mouse]

So, what percentage of Macs out there are dual (or quad) G5's? 5-10%, if even.

Exactly, Apple made the right decision. All you whiners are just bitter that Apple aren't making stupid business decisions to make you, as an individual, happy. Leopard was released on PPC because it could run on G4's, which make up the majority of PPC machines. Snow Leopard may only run on G5's, which are a tiny proportion of the Macs out there. Also, the improvements in Snow Leopard will only really benefit Intel machines, so even were there enough G5's to warrant development it would STILL be pointless.

So your 3 year old, dead architecture computer that you bought after the Intel transition was announced wont run the latest and greatest OS. Surprise!!!! The number of people that will be affected by this (G5 owners) will be a tiny percent of the OSX base, and since Apple makes most their money off computer sales (and not OS upgrades) I don't think Steve will lose any sleep.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

So, what percentage of Macs out there are dual (or quad) G5's? 5-10%, if even.

So you're saying all the speed/efficiency and memory footprint improvements in Snow Leopard are all multi-processor based??? Give me a break. Their OpenCL environment is only ONE aspect of the improvments hinted at. Again, most of you ignore their purchase of a PowerPC licensed semi-conductor company and the very real possibility that iPhone 3.0 or an as-yet released new gizmo in the works will use PowerPC processors for reasons yet undisclosed (iPhone 1.0/2.0 use ARM CPUs, but if they can make OSX for ARM, they can certainly keep making it work with PPC as well). Some of you draw conclusions WAY too easily based on limited data. A rumor gets out that Snow Leopard won't support PowerPC chips and you immediately start apologizing or justifying for Apple when you don't even know for sure what the final Snow Leopard build will support. Conjecture doesn't bother me. But people who act like they KNOW the future before it arrives does rub me the wrong way. Sure the Intel users would like to write off the PPC machines if they THINK it will benefit them. That's called self-serving thinking or otherwise known as greed, not facts.

Exactly, Apple made the right decision. All you whiners are just bitter that Apple aren't making stupid business decisions to make you, as an individual, happy.

This statement proves what I said above in the last two sentences.

 

[powerg5]

OOOOHHHH No More Problems....!!!

Noooooooooooooo

I buy last week two Used Mac one G5 4 processor... and One xServe G5....

$ 2000

 

[Manic Mouse]

So you're saying all the speed/efficiency and memory footprint improvements in Snow Leopard are all multi-processor based??? Give me a break. Their OpenCL environment is only ONE aspect of the improvments hinted at.

The speed improvements are probably coming from a variety of areas, few of which may be relevant to PPC users. Multi-core improvements and SSE optimisation come to mind. Snow Leopard may also use Intel only technology like virtualisation. Most PPC optimisation has, in all likelihood, already been done, since the OS has been running on them for years. Further PPC optimisation would probably be very hard to do, and frankly not worth it considering no new PPC machines will be released in the foreseeable future.

Again, most of you ignore their purchase of a PowerPC licensed semi-conductor company and the very real possibility that iPhone 3.0 or an as-yet released new gizmo in the works will use PowerPC processors for reasons yet undisclosed (iPhone 1.0/2.0 use ARM CPUs, but if they can make OSX for ARM, they can certainly keep making it work with PPC as well). Some of you draw conclusions WAY too easily based on limited data.

iPhone will not be using PPC, ever as it isn't the most power-efficient arch (G5 powerbooks?). It will run on ARM with co-processors.

A rumor gets out that Snow Leopard won't support PowerPC chips and you immediately start apologizing or justifying for Apple when you don't even know for sure what the final Snow Leopard build will support. Conjecture doesn't bother me. But people who act like they KNOW the future before it arrives does rub me the wrong way. Sure the Intel users would like to write off the PPC machines if they THINK it will benefit them. That's called self-serving thinking or otherwise known as greed, not facts.

This isn't a rumour, the developer seeds of 10.6 are Intel only, when for previous operating systems they've always been universal. They could add in PPC support later, but it seems an odd move to release Intel only initially.

All I'm saying is that G5 users make up a very small proportion of the current Mac install base, and will make up an even smaller proportion when it comes time for Snow Leopard to be released. Apple dropping PPC support is not going to affect a whole lot of people in the grand scheme of things. Heck, they aren't even adding in any new features for PPC users to miss.

 

[kolax]

When Snow Leopard it is released, it'll have been 5 years since the last PPC Mac was released, and 3 years since Apple switched to Intel.

I'm looking forward to having OS X fully optimised for Intel and all the performance enhancements.

 

[KindredMAC]

HA! Yeah, I wonder how many people realize that PowerPC is the brains behind all the current-generation game consoles.

But remember.... it's a dead and horrible CPU according to a lot of people on here.....

I really wish the Cell processor that is in the PS3 would have taken off better....

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Is this really:

1) A shocker?

2) A big deal?

Does this mean PPC Macs will stop working? Of course not.

Should Apple let a minimum 5 year old machine slow down development of its OS for newer machines? That's just silly. You don't get progress by developing to the lowest common denominator.

For the record I own a 6 year old G4PB. It's not my main computer, but I do use it nearly every day for mundane tasks. When 10.6 comes out I'll still keep on using it. Obviously I won't be installing 10.6 on it or any s/w that requires it. After 6 years I don't think I should expect to do so anyway.

Bottom line: Get Over It. OS 9 is dead. PPC is dead. And brace yourself... there will come a day in a few years when even original Core Duo Macs will be obsoleted.

 

[avkills]

iPhone will not be using PPC, ever as it isn't the most power-efficient arch (G5 powerbooks?). It will run on ARM with co-processors.

You've just shown your ignorance to the PowerPC community. You think IBM is the only company making PowerPC chips? How fast is that ARM? 620Mhz; A PowerPC chip at that speed would be just as efficient as the ARM; and there are already companies selling PowerPC SOC packages. Just google it.

-mark

 

[Sgt Pepper]

Damn! Now that I wont be able to run Snow Leopard next year Safari no longer seems so snappy!

PS. Is this the nearest the Mac community gets to Civil War - 24 pages of ill-informed speculation?

 

[avkills]

Bottom line: Get Over It. OS 9 is dead. PPC is dead. And brace yourself... there will come a day in a few years when even original Core Duo Macs will be obsoleted.

The really sad part about this statement is the fact that the x86 based architecture should have been killed off about 5-10 years ago. Well you can't blame Intel for not trying... *cough* Itanic *cough* I mean Itanium.

-mark

 

[ktlx]

Grand Central: Until we see more of what Apple's talking about here, I'm skeptical this will be anything more than finally fixing their scheduler to correctly handle more than four cores and providing developer API support for NUMA in the 2009 Mac Pros.

I read a blurb about Grand Central that describes it differently from someone who says they have seen it. He sounds like he's breaking his NDA, so I won't link to it here.

According to him, Apple realized most of their developers have not written multi-threaded code because its hard to develop and debug. So they're writing a framework to make it easier to write multi-threaded applications. He said it's really nice looking, but if you've already got your app working with either the POSIX threads or NSThread objects, he said Grand Central doesn't appear to offer anything to justify ripping the existing code out. It sounds like it's akin to the Accelerate framework which helped developers who hadn't already been writing AltiVec and SSE code take advantage of the vector units.

 

[KindredMAC]

I couldn't agree more. It was not until CS3 was out for a couple of months that I bought my first intel mac, the iMac in my sig. Until that the point was: Why get a new system when CS2 (my main work software) won't run a great deal faster than on my PowerBook and crash more often?

Apart from that, everybody seems to go "well lets just cut off the old stuff". So, why not make 10.6 intel AND 64 bit only? Let's just screw those idiots who bought first gen MacBook Pros, MacBooks and iMacs. They knew 64 bit intel chips were around the corner and still bought their old tech crap. Or even better, lets make it intel, 64 bit AND quad core only, after all, we know quad core mobile chips are coming in 2009, so aren't we all who bought any Mac except the Mac Pro just plain dumb?

Who finds sarcasm can keep it.

oh my God...... delicious..... sarcasm... num num.... me wants some more?

Most of these posters on here that say to just drop PPC obviously either have never owned a PPC Mac (aka BandWagoneers of the "cool and hip new Intel Apples") or don't use a Mac in a pro environment (graphic design, video prod, etc...).

Sorry but when you rely on Adobe CS products for your paycheck, some of us HAD to buy PowerMacs before the Mac Pros came out. I'm pretty up to date on rumors from this site and even MacRumors, ThinkSecret and AppleInsider were hearing that MacPros wouldn't be coming out until December/January of 06/07. I HAD to buy my PowerMac G5 in Feb 06 for a major website relaunch that took all of that year to complete. I COULD NOT wait until the new year for a MacPro to come out. That PMG5 came with Tiger. I now have Leopard. What part of being able to only upgrade the OS ONCE do people not understand?!?!?!?!?!?! THAT is why I'm not happy with this crap.

 

[unwinded]

I like the people that say that if you bought a Quad/Dual G5 in 2006, your an idiot.

Do you guys not remember what it was like back then? The pro apps were barely intel compatible, Adobe hadn't come out with an Intel Optimized version of their apps, and there wasn't many companies at all with Universal Versions of their apps.

I witnessed lots of editors opt for the Quad G5 instead of waiting it out for the rumored Mac Pro, simply because the software wasn't ready for Intel yet.

Was there ever any indication that the software would not be ready eventually? You are saying that there were people that bought a Quad G5 because they did not want to wait. Well, thats what they get for being impatient. From June 2005 onward, I seriously doubt Apple were selling a lot of hardware.

 

[glennyboiwpg]

Huh? In what warped sense is this Apple's "Vista"???

Vista was a bloated, ginormous eye-candy filled piece of **** that was coded so poorly that you had to have the very best hardware just to make it run slowly...

Snow Leopard is a lean, trim, mean massively multi-cpu aware OS that requires multiple cpus. To keep it lean and trim, they are shaving off PPC support...

How in the WORLD is that the same?

amen

 

[Infrared]

Snow Leopard is a lean, trim, mean massively multi-cpu aware OS that requires multiple cpus.

Oh, is it 2009 already? How time flies...

 

[atszyman]

Apple won't ignore PPC owners and will build apps for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, and thus the apps will help buffer the transition to all Intel (SL will have few if any new features) but I doubt SL will be for PPCs. Apple may also want to encourage short-term development for Universal Binaries because many programs may have a large PPC install-base that will not go past OS X.5 and many developers probably won't want to lose their customers. This may also help PPC owners make the transition, but I believe Apple is also be indicating the future for OS X.

I can understand this but why have no developers revealed that Apple told them that they are dropping PPC support? If you have a version of the app that is stable and well optimized for PPC and Snow Leopard gives you new avenues to improve it on Intel, would you want to waste time and money making sure that the versions you compile for Snow Leopard are stable and fast on PPC? If PPC support were being dropped why not tell the Developers so a conscious decision can be made whether or not their newer code needs to include PPC compatibility or if they want to freeze their own PPC support at their current version?

I'm really not understanding why people are thinking this. At this point Rosetta is for older applications that are not ported and won't be ported. Why do they need to continue PPC support in Mac OS X to keep Rosetta?

The PPC only apps are at least as old as the newest PPC computers and were done before or near the time that the Intel switch was announced. If the new OS isn't going to support the PPC processor, why should it also support these old applications? It's another way to increase speed/size/stability since everything will run natively and you don't have to deal with the Rosetta software at all so it's size and potential stability (if there are bugs in Rosetta) that are gained. It will have been 3-4 years the writing was on the wall, Intel is the future, at some point Rosetta will be dropped, if they haven't updated to Universal by now, then they probably never will. Rosetta is unnecessary if we're looking to the future in this OS update. It's not like Leopard with Rosetta will magically stop working if you need to run PPC only applications.

It takes a lot of work to keep the OS going for two architectures. It's not just a simple source code recompile, it's far more work than that.

Right now, the OS team is stretched thin between Leopard and the iPhone, and it shows. Removing the monkey on their back that is PPC will be a huge help.

And once again I ask, if it's such a pain to keep optimizations running for two processors why have the developers not revealed an official announcement that PPC support is being dropped?

Agreed. If you can do right now what you need to, then what's the problem anyway?

But as quoted above, the only advantages are featureless; it's performance.

Maybe Apple should include the currect PPC code of Leopard in the DVD and then have a tickbox when you install it.

"Choose your processor"​

Choose PPC, get the 10.5.X code for PPC, only. Your system may run quicker without the Intel code (no idea on this).

Choose Intel, get 10.6.0 and your system runs a little faster because there's no PPC code and it's optimised for your processor.

The placebo works.

The idea that lacking PPC code will make 10.6 faster is wrong. Anything that's intended to be PPC code won't run on Intel, and anything that's intended to be Intel code won't run on PPC. You can optimize the compiler to put out more efficient machine code for each processor, and you can improve function calls for each processor to take advantage of the architecture, but if the code is intended for PPC or Intel it won't run on the other. Think of the OS as a universal binary, it has both a PPC and Intel kernel version and choses which one to install based on your machine. The supposed space savings could be accomplished just as well with a smarter installer and more segregation of extensions and other system files so that only the version for your processor gets installed.

This isn't a rumour, the developer seeds of 10.6 are Intel only, when for previous operating systems they've always been universal. They could add in PPC support later, but it seems an odd move to release Intel only initially.

All I'm saying is that G5 users make up a very small proportion of the current Mac install base, and will make up an even smaller proportion when it comes time for Snow Leopard to be released. Apple dropping PPC support is not going to affect a whole lot of people in the grand scheme of things. Heck, they aren't even adding in any new features for PPC users to miss.

It's not certain that the OS code that's out is Intel only. It most likely has the PPC code there but it's either too unstable to run, or completely broken at this time. The requirements for disk and memory are the same for this developer's release as they are for Loepard. If the PPC code is such a space/memory hog why isn't the developer release smaller?

We don't know for sure what's going on but the fact that there hasn't been an official announcement from Apple that PPC support is being dropped in this OS, is to me, a strong indication that they are intending it to still be PPC compatible.

 

[Infrared]

Being stuck with 10.5 on my G5 makes it useless now because I won't be able to run the latest software after 10.6 hits. Sure, I may be fine with new apps for awhile but sooner or later applications are going to saying '10.6 or newer' or 'Intel only.'

You won't be proven wrong. There are already apps that
are 10.5 only. And it's only 6 months or so since Leopard
was released.

 

[unwinded]

oh my God...... delicious..... sarcasm... num num.... me wants some more?

Most of these posters on here that say to just drop PPC obviously either have never owned a PPC Mac (aka BandWagoneers of the "cool and hip new Intel Apples") or don't use a Mac in a pro environment (graphic design, video prod, etc...).

Sorry but when you rely on Adobe CS products for your paycheck, some of us HAD to buy PowerMacs before the Mac Pros came out. I'm pretty up to date on rumors from this site and even MacRumors, ThinkSecret and AppleInsider were hearing that MacPros wouldn't be coming out until December/January of 06/07. I HAD to buy my PowerMac G5 in Feb 06 for a major website relaunch that took all of that year to complete. I COULD NOT wait until the new year for a MacPro to come out. That PMG5 came with Tiger. I now have Leopard. What part of being able to only upgrade the OS ONCE do people not understand?!?!?!?!?!?! THAT is why I'm not happy with this crap.

BandWagoneers? Please. That comment sums up what is wrong with most of you people. You should be proud of what Apple has accomplished since the migration to Intel. Referring to new users and switchers as "BandWagoneers" is a disgrace to the Mac community. It conjures up images of a classic elitist Apple fanboi. I bet the majority of the PowerPC owners on here ARE those classic elitist Apple fanbois.

There is one comment on here where someone says that non-PowerPC Mac are not true Macs. Who says that? I wonder if you search the archive posts here if you would find many of these same users attacking the Intel transition. I'm glad Apple is dropping PowerPC support. These kinds of users are a disgrace to the community. And I seriously doubt that many of you whiners rely on your PowerMacs for your pay checks... They must be tiny pay checks.

Sell your quad G5s or whatever and go buy a Mac Pro. Those G5s still have excellent resale value.

 

[FF_productions]

Was there ever any indication that the software would not be ready eventually? You are saying that there were people that bought a Quad G5 because they did not want to wait. Well, thats what they get for being impatient. From June 2005 onward, I seriously doubt Apple were selling a lot of hardware.

It's a long wait for that software. Didn't CS3 come out just a year ago? Office 08 not too long ago either?

Final Cut Studio went universal around the end of March, 06. Mac Pro didn't come out until August of 06. I'm sure there were many other apps that hadn't been intel'ed as well that are essential to professionals.

Companies had to play catchup and make their apps for Intel as well as PPC.

 

[Sgt Pepper]

BandWagoneers? Please. That comment sums up what is wrong with most of you people. You should be proud of what Apple has accomplished since the migration to Intel. Referring to new users and switchers as "BandWagoneers" is a disgrace to the Mac community. It conjures up images of a classic elitist Apple fanboi. I bet the majority of the PowerPC owners on here ARE those classic elitist Apple fanbois.

There is one comment on here where someone says that non-PowerPC Mac are not true Macs. Who says that? I wonder if you search the archive posts here if you would find many of these same users attacking the Intel transition. I'm glad Apple is dropping PowerPC support. These kinds of users are a disgrace to the community. And I seriously doubt that many of you whiners rely on your PowerMacs for your pay checks... They must be tiny pay checks.

Sell your quad G5s or whatever and go buy a Mac Pro. Those G5s still have excellent resale value.

This is getting silly.

Reminds me of that famous tv experiment where they take a class room of kids and make one half of the class different by wrapping blue arm bands around them and then observe what happens at play time.

The results: total segregation and people ganging up on each other depending on whether or not you wear a blue armband.