Re: Re: Re: Re: panther???
Originally posted by jayscheuerle
Make that 2. The original G3 Powerbook.
Not quite. Actually, you and iJon are both incorrect. No version of OS X has supported the original G3 PowerBook (250 MHz), which was introduced at the same time as the beige PMG3 (November 1997). Panther drops support for the beige PMG3 and the Wallstreet PowerBook, which was introduced in April '98. At least, I'm pretty sure it was April; maybe it was March--in any case it was before the original iMac was announced.
It's made-out to be a non-built-in USB thing.
Can anyone fathom why Apple would purposely disable Panther for these machines?
Is Panther built-in USB centric? 
[...]
Personally, I'm counting on someone coming up with a hack that lets Panther install on these machines. Putting the lack of support on the boxes clearly puts installing Panther in the "at your own risk" category, so Apple's covering its backside, but I can't help but feel that disabling any type of install for these machines is Apples response to the class-action suit brought up against them by beige-box owners and others... - j
Nah, that suit covered iBooks (like mine) and Rev. A-D iMacs too, and they're all supported in Panther.
Rather, Panther requires built-in USB because that's an easy-to-understand indicator of a NewWorld machine (Rev. A iMac and later), rather than an OldWorld one (Wallstreet and earlier). I believe the significant internal difference between them are at the ROM/firmware level--it totally changed, which, I imagine, is pretty important to booting and supporting an OS. Presumably there are fairly significant changes to the kernel in Panther (as there are in each new version of OS X), and Apple simply decided that it wasn't going to expend the time needed for kernel versions 7.0 and later to support a totally different architecture.
So over the past few years we've seen support for non-G3 machines, the original G3 PowerBook, and now OldWorld machines dropped. What's next? I think there are two possibilities:
1) Machines with less than, say, a 300 or 400 MHz G3. I doubt Apple would do this "just because", so it would have to be because 10.4 (or whatever) includes some fancy new feature that's always turned on and requires a certain level of performance.
2) Machines without the Unified Motherboard Architecture introduced with the original iBook. If you look in Apple System Profiler, you'll see that there are quite a few kexts dedicated to things like Gossamer, Grackle, and Heathrow. These all refer to chipsets used in Apple hardware before the UMA was introduced. (Some of those are from OldWorld machines, so you won't see them in Panther [I assume].) I imagine Apple could save some money if they didn't have to constantly revise those kexts to make them work with the latest version of OS X. KeyLargo, on the other hand, is one of the two primary chips in the UMA (it's the southbridge). In case you're wondering, I think the most obvious feature of the UMA is AGP graphics--so it might be harder for Apple to communicate to less knowledgeable users whether their machine is supported or not. There really aren't any external changes that are common to all the product lines that came along with UMA. For example, if your PowerBook or iMac has built-in FireWire, it has the UMA, but there are plenty of Power Macs out there that
do have FireWire but
don't have the UMA (B&W G3s, and G4s with PCI graphics). And all iBooks have the UMA. So, even though this option would probably save money on the development side, it would mean quite a few confused users--which might cost more on the PR side.
To sum it all up, the newest machine that will lose support in Panther (the Wallstreet PB) was introduced over five years ago, and we should be expecting more machines to become obsolete as development continues. I personally think that option #2 above is more likely for 10.4 or 10.5, but we've got at least a year to worry about that, and by this time next year the B&W G3 will be over five years old just like the machines that are losing support now are.
HTH
WM
edits: clarified the end of option #2
