Why does Apple make more old macs obsolete each system release?

[iMeowbot]

yeah but in the windows world people insist on running new operating systems on obnoxiously old hardware that should have become a boat anchor years ago.

Yep, but Mac users are guilty of that too.

 

[count chocula]

i'm pulling for 10.6 Mr. Tinkles

 

[dmw007]

i'm pulling for 10.6 Mr. Tinkles

What an evil cat.

 

[Bobdude161]

Yes... because they require faster hardware.

And of course it's also to sell hardware. Apple's a hardware company that also sells software.

I'm just scared of Apple dropping my Sawtooth in 10.5, not that I'll be using it but feeling obsolete makes me depressed. That's my deepest concern though. And what really brought up the question is why does Apple need to keep making OS X bulkier? 10.2 was simple, bad but simple. 10.3 is great, and 10.4 is just 10.3 but loaded with "goodies", that just take more CPU. I wasn't too impressed with 10.5 it seemed like 10.4 just with auto backing up and an overrated expose. Apple keep it simple stupid!! For my sake!!

 

[funkychunkz]

11.0 - Lynx (link to the past, link to the future)

[OffTopic]

They would probably go on to 10.11, if it came to that. They're still going on strong on the base '10' notion. OS 11 will probably be a different system all together.

 

[Pedro D]

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as shown in the Apple website:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

 

[contoursvt]

Interesting. They must have something not configured right or maybe something could have been lacking on your 2003 PC because I've got XP running on a dual PIII 550Mhz Xeon box from like 1999 (Compaq SP700). I have naturally upgraded RAM over the years but it runs XP like a champ.

Also I installed Vista on a dual PIII 450Mhz with 1GB RAM and an older SCSI controller and 36GB SCSI drive. Granted it was a clean install but it ran quite quick. Have a vid of it too. Motherboard is so old that it has ISA slots.

Lastly, XP and even Windows 2000 has no issues with many applications open. It sounds like you're not really familar with computers and how they work. Quite possibly the problems you've had is just lack of RAM.

I could probably open up MS Word like 100 times and Excel a 100 times plus photoshop with and some 10-20 images from my SLR camera, MP3 player in the background playing music, Outlook for my mail, 5-10 web sites, messenger, google earth and maybe be ripping a DVD at the same time. Could whole pile of other stuff. All this on my Dual PIII 550Mhz Xeon box.

Point I'm getting across is that you're trying to blame something based only on your own experience and making it seem like fact when it is not.

Also there are a TON of older systems on both mac an PC platform that are useful for far longer than what people give them credit for. All they need sometimes is a little bit more RAM and a faster drive. CPU speed is actually one of the least important things for day to day usage...

Except that Windows XP ran painfully slow on my 2003 PC - and still runs pretty slow on some of my friends newer PCs.

Couple that with XP's inability to handle the 20+ open apps that my iBook G4 could handle, and I'd say Apple does a decent job supporting and reasonably running new OSes on older hardware.

 

[contoursvt]

My favorite OSX versions are 10.3 and 10.4. I cant stand 10.5. It seems buggy to me. On my G4 733 with 1.5GB RAM, I'll just stick with 10.4 even if I could have 10.5 for free.... IMO 10.4 was as solid as a rock.

I'm just scared of Apple dropping my Sawtooth in 10.5, not that I'll be using it but feeling obsolete makes me depressed. That's my deepest concern though. And what really brought up the question is why does Apple need to keep making OS X bulkier? 10.2 was simple, bad but simple. 10.3 is great, and 10.4 is just 10.3 but loaded with "goodies", that just take more CPU. I wasn't too impressed with 10.5 it seemed like 10.4 just with auto backing up and an overrated expose. Apple keep it simple stupid!! For my sake!!

 

[wankey]

Except that Windows XP ran painfully slow on my 2003 PC - and still runs pretty slow on some of my friends newer PCs.

Couple that with XP's inability to handle the 20+ open apps that my iBook G4 could handle, and I'd say Apple does a decent job supporting and reasonably running new OSes on older hardware.

Are you kidding me? Windows XP ran fine on my 2003 PC. It runs blazingly fast on my gaming PC right now.

I easily have well over 20+ apps running at work. In fact my monitor at work is a 27inch graphics design monitor (some NEC PVA monitor) and I have my taskbar on the side... It usually fills up with programs running, not including the minimized tasktray programs. That's vertical space, so I have at least 100-150 processes running at the same time. The default programs open all the time include Flash, Dreamweaver, Eclipse, Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefox, iTunes, Word, interoffice communicator, Skype, and a plethora of office related software.

I have used an iBook G4 and yeah, it can *walk* 20 programs... are you sure it can run them? I wouldn't even say I'm using a computer on the iBook with more than 10 programs open.

Apple has a hugely bad time supporting older macs. My dad works with Macs at work doing research and he gets frustrated with Macs easily. Newer releases break older software he uses, when he tries to upgrade the software, it doesn't have the older module he requires... this happens on a yearly basis since Apple seems to like to update like that. Furthermore, some software don't even constrain themselves to point releases, they keep to the point patches... Lets just say the 2 PowerMacs they bought for 10,000 dollars a piece are now sitting around doing mundane tasks whilst the entire department has now moved on to PCs for the heavier work (they still buy macs though for the new researchers).

What apple needs to do to solidify its OS is to stop releasing half baked ideas and buggy OSes. Leopard was a huge example of that, and only started being a solid OS around 10.5.3. They always reach a very solid ground state for each OS release, then release a very buggy OS afterwards. Look at Panther and then Tiger, both were very very solid OSes when they were hitting their 10.x.10th patch, then came 10.x+1.0 and hell breaks loose again.

I hope they really push Snow leopard on optimization and then stop for a few years to really focus on 10.7