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you don't have to upgrade to 10.6 when it comes out. apple will support 10.5 for a long time. heck, they still release updates for panther 10.3.9

10.3 is no longer supported now that Leopard is out. Tiger will be dead when Snow Leopard is out. Apple should be criticized for not providing five years of security updates.
 
But, almost all the people clamoring for 10.6 to keep PPC support are talking about G5's. It's seems almost a consensus among that crowd that G4 would be dropped with 10.6.

Nonsense. If it runs on a G5, it runs on a G4. Why would Apple drop G4 support? To please the MacRumors crowd?

Remember: Snow Leopard is supposed to be _more efficient_ and to _run faster_ than Leopard. That makes it perfect for G4s.
 
I have an Intel Mac, but I still feel that it's too early to drop support for PPC. They only stopped selling them 2/3 years ago. If Windows XP can run on computers with a 233MHz processor (which is what I had until last year), then Apple can run Snow Leopard on 2 year old computers.

ESPECIALLY G5s. That would be plain STUPID if they cut off support for G5s.
The term "run" in your post is quite subjective.
 
And Intel Macs will run just as well without Snow Leopard (albeit not as optimally), so give me good reasons why Rosetta should be included. Non-universal apps are most likely just as old as the newest PPC macs, and have not yet upgraded, so it is unlikely that they will. It's not as though Leopard with Rosetta will stop working when Snow Leopard comes out. Why waste time and resources coding and optimizing Rosetta for Snow Leopard if Intel is the future?

If you need Rosetta don't get Snow Leopard.

Effectively that's what you're telling everyone with a PPC, why should you be any less inconvenienced? Most of the most expensive software is now universal and software costs an order of magnitude less than new hardware.


All that being said I'm still 100% convinced that PPC support will be in Snow Leopard since not one developer has produced proof of an official Apple announcement saying that PPC support will not be in Snow Leopard so that they can make an informed decision on whether or not to freeze current PPC versions of their apps or continue doing universal binaries in future releases.

For the record I have nothing against Intel, I have an aging G4 PowerBook that will likely be updated within the next two years and probably have no intention of buying Snow Leopard. My main beef is that if Apple were discontinuing PPC support in Snow Leopard, it should have been officially announced to developers now in order to avoid bad blood if they feel their time testing/optimizing code for the PPC was wasted.

While poking around at the applications listed under "About This Mac" on my MacBook, I noticed that a few components of Office 2008 are still PowerPC. I don't know if they're anything special though, the dates on them are a few years old. If they are though, then removing Rosetta could break it.
 
Nonsense. If it runs on a G5, it runs on a G4. Why would Apple drop G4 support? To please the MacRumors crowd?

Remember: Snow Leopard is supposed to be _more efficient_ and to _run faster_ than Leopard. That makes it perfect for G4s.

Correction; to run faster than Leopard on multicore, Intel processors. I don't think G4's qualify...
 
Nonsense. If it runs on a G5, it runs on a G4. Why would Apple drop G4 support? To please the MacRumors crowd?

Remember: Snow Leopard is supposed to be _more efficient_ and to _run faster_ than Leopard. That makes it perfect for G4s.

Exactly, why would they heighten the requirements to remove the G4, it should in theory have lower requirements than Leopard because of the optimizations they're doing.
 
Remember: Snow Leopard is supposed to be _more efficient_ and to _run faster_ than Leopard. That makes it perfect for G4s.
Not if the means of making the code faster is by removing PPC bloat and optimizing for features in Intel hardware (i.e. moving software away from Intel approximations of Altivec into full support for SSE4 and other native-Intel features). Decreasing the breadth of the codebase also allows a company to dedicate more man-hours to code optimization (that is, writing tighter, more efficient software).

This is almost certainly the case with Snow Leopard. Nothing about it appears to be fertile ground for PPC optimizations, with the possible exception of OpenCL (but only on G5 systems, because G4 architecture is hamstrung by poor bus speeds and low bandwidth). Even though the G5 remains a fast machine, its technological features are 3-5 years old, and so modern hardware features sometimes play a larger role in "system speed" than the processor's actual raw power.

It's the back side of the "megahertz myth"--just as the slower clock speed could outperform faster PCs, today's extensions and specialized chip designs can make "weaker" systems faster on the whole. Combining the G5 with some of the advancement of the past two years would be the best of both worlds, but it does not exist, and for some advancements, cannot exist.
 
While poking around at the applications listed under "About This Mac" on my MacBook, I noticed that a few components of Office 2008 are still PowerPC. I don't know if they're anything special though, the dates on them are a few years old. If they are though, then removing Rosetta could break it.

Well that's not Apple's problem. MS saw the writing on the wall and should have updated everything to universal.

Of course I'm just taking this point of view to illustrate that if you're going to fully advocate getting rid of PPC support in the OS then you should also be willing to get rid of Rosetta. If Intel is the future and this is a future thinking OS then there's no reason it should have to support PPC only applications. After all Leopard with Rosetta will still work so if you need Rosetta just stick with 10.5.

Of course I'm one of the only ones here who believes that 10.6 will still run on PPC.
 
God! You PPC users keep complaining oh my G5,My G5. Please! I hope you die with you G5.(I have to be Blunt). For a company to move forward they have to drop the backwards crap to speed up the process, and better their products. Think I want my current OS bloated with sh*t I do not use. Large Binaries and so forth. Just to let you know, Intel Mac are on many desktops every where. I think it is safe to say there are more Intel Mac users, than PPC users.

Get this. You are whining because when Snow Leopard comes out, you want the latest and greatest. So drop PPC to get the latest and greatest and stop B**ching.
I see you got my point..

Also for the CS people. Half of you torrented that crap from a torrent site *cough thepirate.... *cough. The crap was hacked anyway. And the problems you are having with CS; that's Adobes problem. If they wanna stay in the stone age and not write code properly on their very bloated software (A remix of Vista in my eyes) then be it. But Apple is moving forward not backwards.


God Day to you! :D

GRAND EXIT!! & CUT..

Notice my post number #666..lol that was not intended..

I could not agree with you more... Thanks... The #666 is kinda funny lol
 
Uh don't they use different binaries for PPC than Intel in every "universal" piece of code.. therefore, doesn't it only take up additional HARD DRIVE space--and no other resources--to support PPC?

I think it's pretty safe to say this is just to give Apple's programmers a break. Dropping PPC, by itself, won't lead to any speed improvement.

Sucks for people who own a dual or Quad G5, which are faster than the current iMac and are perfectly fast enough to run 10.6 (if it were coded for it).

Not to mention the fact that there are no new features, so this is just optimization. Therefore, they should LOWER system requirements, right? Whatever, my G5 blew up and Apple replaced it with a Mac Pro. RIP PPC.
 
I think it's pretty safe to say this is just to give Apple's programmers a break.

I'm sure they have a significant number of programmers there just to provide for PPC, but in my mind this is a mistake. I still think there is a large market for OSX on PPC, larger enough to make a profit. Yes Apple makes hardware too, but there must be huge markups on the software. A pity, I think they could continue up to 10.8 before it stopped being economically viable.
 
Not true. That was only to support Vista's "eye candy". One of the projects at my old job involved finding the slowest configuration for Vista to run on. I had it running on a 233 mhz Pentium II. It was definitely very slow, but it did boot and it did execute the OS.

What was the lowest configuration you could come up with that would be usable with vista?
 
What was the lowest configuration you could come up with that would be usable with vista?

I don't even know what this discussion is about, but I ran Vista on my five year old PC. Athlon 2200+ (1.8Ghz) and 512MB RAM, Radeon 9600XT. It ran great, visual effects and all. Stopped using it, mind, it was pirated and decided to implode...
 
I'm sure they have a significant number of programmers there just to provide for PPC

I can't believe that. Only a very small amount of OS X is architecture-specific. The overwhelming majority, like 98 or 99 per cent, is architecture-independent. And the existing PPC-specific code has been around for ages and is thoroughly debugged; there certainly won't be an army of programmers released if they drop PPC support.

The main area where Apple would gain from this is in testing. They won't have to test all the new code on legacy platforms, which does take considerable resources. And there's the bit about the "smaller footprint," which I believe concerns Apple's desire to move its laptops to SSDs. I don't think we'll see SSD size above 128GB for a while.
 
But I doubt that there will be much if any improvement on dual-core systems, for example. My impression is that these optimizations are really targeted at future systems with 8, 16, 32 cores.

They may just be threading the OS to make it scale better with cores/logical cores (with Nehalem). There'll still be some improvement on dual core machines.
 
That would require having to maintain two different code bases, requiring a larger amount of staff to work on both. Orchardspy though mentioned that they were still developing PPC builds of Snow Leopard in house...

Consider Apple was developing Intel builds of OSX from almost the beginning along with the actual release builds, that probably wouldn't be a major issue for them.
 
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