Good. I'm glad to see that Apple is waiting for a few seeds to include PPC support. That way they can focus on Intel for anti-PPC whiners and then fix it for the rest of us.
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Mac OS X Snow Leopard Drops PowerPC Support
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It really is for the good of the many
As someone who purchased a Powerbook right before the Intel switch, I understand that this had to be done. As Apple continues to forge new paths with the iPhone/Touch OS and continuing to better speed up and slim down the current OS, this kind of thing was inevitable.
But like many have said, Snow Leopard isn't going to have many "new" features but just make improvements on speed and security. I'm guessing many of the speed updates will maximize the use of the current and future Intel chips. Not the PPC chips.
Luckily I just bought a new iMac and Macbook so.....
As someone who purchased a Powerbook right before the Intel switch, I understand that this had to be done. As Apple continues to forge new paths with the iPhone/Touch OS and continuing to better speed up and slim down the current OS, this kind of thing was inevitable.
But like many have said, Snow Leopard isn't going to have many "new" features but just make improvements on speed and security. I'm guessing many of the speed updates will maximize the use of the current and future Intel chips. Not the PPC chips.
Luckily I just bought a new iMac and Macbook so.....
I think this is a fair assessment. We don't know for sure! It was a Developers conference. You'd think they would announce that if the OS will have new features to make applications run faster/smoother it might have been mentioned that these features would not be available on PPC machines. It would only make sense. If I were a developer and wanted to optimize an application to utilize new features in a new OS, without adding new features to the software, I wouldn't want to spend time making sure that this newer version of software compiles as a universal binary if I knew that the features wouldn't be available on PPC.
Great news this is the Leopard we should have gotten all along 
and for people bitchin' about lack of support for PPC, I hear you, but it's not the end of the world. I have an iMac running OS9 for web surfing it's not great, but it hasn't melted the time-space continuum for running an older OS.
and for people bitchin' about lack of support for PPC, I hear you, but it's not the end of the world. I have an iMac running OS9 for web surfing it's not great, but it hasn't melted the time-space continuum for running an older OS.
You're damn right it has. I have the last rev dual core G5 that's a little over two years old. Support should NOT be dropped on a machine that young.
Absolutely not, I'm just saying there's no reason to complain. Most people replace their computers at <36 month intervals anyway, but those who expected to be able to milk their machines for more than 3 years chose the wrong platform.
Nice thought, but try running an OS9 application on an Intel machine running the oldest system that supported Intel (methinks Tiger 10.4). They dumped a lot of legacy folks on that decision.
I'm pretty peeved that Leopard/Rosetta don't have 68040 emulation as that should be pretty straight forward. I wouldn't ask for 6502 or whatever was in the GS as an emulator is better suited for those computers/OSes. But don't be surprised if applications built for iPhone/iPodTouch are not able to run directly on the Mac version of the OS via Rosetta.
Sure, but can you quit yer bitching until after Apple actually announces that its dropping PPC support? The fact that the Developers Preview doesn't support PPC doesn't mean the final product won't.
They could also do something like trimmit on install, essentially only installing PPC or Intel binaries depending on the host. Just because they use less space doesn't absolutely mean they are supporting only one platform.
I'm all Intel, but I can understand the feelings of PPC owners.
The Quad G5 and Dual 2.5, 2.7 can MORE than keep up. These are very fast system and should have been supported in this go.
Don't like to be hard on newbies - we've all got to learn somehow. But unless you are being incredibly arch or ironic, I think your comment betrays a staggering lack of understanding about Macs, Apple, the way things work in general about developer releases etc - not to mention the fact that you clearly haven't even read the prior posts about Snow Leopard otherwise you'd know already that it is only a developer release and that therefore no ordinary mortal can get their hands on it legitimately and anyone who posts it, says anything about it, etc etc will have all their privileges revoked.
If you are joking, forgive me, I'm clearly getting too jaded. so try and make your jokes a bit more obvious next time.
Nice math. You're forgetting something though. Leopard will be supported for the one year it takes for the non-intel machines to die out (between next summer and the summer after that - the 4 year mark). In fact, it will probably be supported for a little longer than that since so many people won't switch over even who have Intel Macs. Therefore, Apple will be pissing off no one. No one who has a three year old computer should complain that the computer company isn't letting them be "cutting edge." Any Mac user knows they are already running a cutting edge operating system, and 10.5.4/10.5.5/10.5.6... will be perfectly fine in two years.
Stop complaining.
That's funny, there IS reason to complain.
And I'm not sure where you get the idea that "most" people upgrade every three years, nobody I know does. Got a stat on that?
And telling people they "chose the wrong platform" sure does sound like talking people out of buying Mac. Maybe that's your intention, but that's the result.
Not sure if I agree it's a "shock" headline, but I did add a question mark for your benefit, as it hasn't been officially confirmed.
That being said, given what we know about Snow Leopard, that it's going to be multli-core optimizezd, I don't think Apple's going to waste resources devoting time to get that working right on PowerPC since it's a discontinued platform.
arn
If apple can afford to dump the PPC users it can afford to dump the 32 bit Intel users (which are far less).
Yes and No. Yes if you hack it and have drivers that work with Snow Leopard, but basically No, and if you do, you lose all software support from Apple.
Sebastian
Nope. That might not happen for months or a year. If apple IS planning on continuing PPC support, they can announce that now and silence the bitching.
But they won't.
This should come as no surprise to anyone. Apple has always stated that a typical Macs life span is approximately 3 years. Since the last PPC computers were last sold in August of 06 (the quad g5's), that means that they would be approximately 3 years old, this time next year (assuming they haven't leaked yet).
*Right now over half of the mac computers out there are intel based. Come time next year that numbers will probably be less than 20%
*Supporting multiple CPU architectures is very costly in both designing and testing. This also applies to 3rd party developers. For some apps its not that much work, but for others it involves keeping two separate code bases.
*The biggest advantage of snow leopard is its ability to work with multiple CPU cores. Most G5s only have 1 or 2 CPUs, which would probably see only minimal gains.
*As far as I know, there are no new APIs or Core Services that are being added to snow leopard. This should help in assuring that most applications are compatible with Leopard and Snow Leopard.
*Right now over half of the mac computers out there are intel based. Come time next year that numbers will probably be less than 20%
*Supporting multiple CPU architectures is very costly in both designing and testing. This also applies to 3rd party developers. For some apps its not that much work, but for others it involves keeping two separate code bases.
*The biggest advantage of snow leopard is its ability to work with multiple CPU cores. Most G5s only have 1 or 2 CPUs, which would probably see only minimal gains.
*As far as I know, there are no new APIs or Core Services that are being added to snow leopard. This should help in assuring that most applications are compatible with Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Exactly, I think they may do this, but Gizmodo think PPC is staying.
I'm in two minds on it, firstly the iPhone SDK is Intel-only and the Snow Leopard site says the next version will use less hard drive space (so making it Intel only would easily achieve that). But on the other hand Steve made no mention of dropping PPC at the keynote, and it'd been worthy of it and the Safari 4 beta does run on PPC machines...
You could make the same comment about 10.0 though
.If you don't want to run Microsoft Office and Adobe CS3/4 on your Mac, they can go right ahead there.
a) XP doesn't exactly perform well on its minimum hardware specs, and I've seen machines run on it in South East Asia.
b) XP came out in 2001.
New programs should be Universal.
Yeah, because your G5 is going to just completely stop working and never turn on again as soon as Snow Leopard DVDs are on the shelf of the Apple Store.
Apple's not "dropping support" on PPC. Leopard and Tiger will still be able to run on them, and they'll keep getting updates. Hell, QuickTime 7.5 that came out the other day was still an update for PANTHER.
I'm still not convinced. The Snow Leopard screen shots published a few days ago showcasing the improved file sizes also showed the Application file types as "Universal": which by definition includes PPC.
Having said that it might not matter so much; as Leopard's feature set probably isn't going to change significantly now for about 18 months until 10.7 comes out. Most of today's PPC crowd will have updated by then as the increasing power of the Intel platform make it an even more irresistible upgrade target.
Having said that it might not matter so much; as Leopard's feature set probably isn't going to change significantly now for about 18 months until 10.7 comes out. Most of today's PPC crowd will have updated by then as the increasing power of the Intel platform make it an even more irresistible upgrade target.