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.
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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Drops PowerPC Support
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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.
Careful now. Criticizing Apple can be bad for you. Some people here think that Apple actually cares about them and not their wallet.
Tread lightly.
gnasher729
Suspended
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.
SPUY767
macrumors 68020
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.
Manic Mouse
macrumors 6502a
Correction; to run faster than Leopard on multicore, Intel processors. I don't think G4's qualify...
PurrBall
macrumors 65816
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.
matticus008
macrumors 68040
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.
atszyman
macrumors 68020
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.
Eric S.
macrumors 68040
For games it makes sense that you would want to run OS 9 native. For exchanging data between OS X apps and legacy apps, Classic is a great solution.
Eric S.
macrumors 68040
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.
slughead
macrumors 68040
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. 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'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.
compuguy1088
macrumors 6502a
I can give you one example of this, Neoffice has two different builds for download, one for PPC, and one for Intel, most likely to reduce size of the application.
compuguy1088
macrumors 6502a
What was the lowest configuration you could come up with that would be usable with vista?
gehrbox
macrumors 65816
Actually the weakest Intel Mac sold right now is the MacBook Air as far as processor speed goes.
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...
Eric S.
macrumors 68040
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.
Manic Mouse
macrumors 6502a
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.
compuguy1088
macrumors 6502a
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...
compuguy1088
macrumors 6502a
Dimwhit
macrumors 68020
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.