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Mac OS X 10.6 To Exclude PPC?


Numberzz
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@MrDee You forgot my favorite, Encore DVD. Point is that developing apps for both platforms (PPC/Intel) is not as easy as Jobs want to persuade audience. Especially for “big apps” where you have lot of work in optimization (difference in Intel’s SSE and PPC’s velocity engine). So like it happens with 68k/PPC transition, there will be more and more Intel only applications in next months.

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to double post:

 

I don't see Apple dropping PPC support in 10.6. Maybe they'll raise the minimum requirements to something like a 1.5Ghz G4 or a G5, but I don't see support being phased out completely.

 

What I could easily see though, is 10.7 dropping 32-bit support. This would keep those old-timer G5 owners happy, but it would screw the Core Solo/Core Duo buyers. But that would be around 2011/2012 anyway, and if my Core Duo macbook has lasted 5 or 6 years with full updates that's a pretty good run.

 

Core 2 duo has 64 bit support. and I think the other cores do also sense they are all based on the same system.

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Another good part of PPC going, right now they have to focus double on the software updates they are making because they have to make a PPC version and an Intel version. If they drop PPC, then they have more time to focus on more useful development.

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Another good part of PPC going, right now they have to focus double on the software updates they are making because they have to make a PPC version and an Intel version. If they drop PPC, then they have more time to focus on more useful development.

 

Not to mention used Powermac G5s won't be such horrendous rippoffs anymore from having all these phantom companies buying them for supposed PPC only software work.

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I see Company's like Adobe and Microsoft possibly dropping development of PowerPC and PowerPC G5 with their future releases, its just too costly. Its not necessarily the development, but the support and maintenance of what will be soon a legacy architecture. It was even difficult for Microsoft a Company with enormous resources to maintain NT and 9x. If those two Company's quit the architecture, there is not much use in really developing 10.6 for it. I remember Jobs specifically saying at WWDC '05 when he first announced the Intel Transition that Apple would continue to support PowerPC users until 2008.

 

So, if future versions of Final Cut Studio, Logic, iLife, Aperture, iWork and the successor to Shake do not support at least the G5, start making your plans to move to an Intel Mac immediately. In fact, a sign of this is already apparent, the system requirements for the latest version of Final Cut Studio is so high, it doesn't make much sense running it on a G5, not to mention Logic. I still think the G5 would be a good machine going to waste, especially a G5 2.5 GHz Quad Core with 8 GBs of RAM.

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Damn...does this mean my Motorola-based Mac won't be compatible with Leopard?

 

Depends on the processor in your Mac my friend. We don't know yet, but according to the most recent Leopard build, the minimum requirements to run the OS efficiently is 867 MHz, 512 MBs of RAM. As for the future, we don't know how far the architecture will go in terms of future OS X support. The G4 maxes out at 1.5 GHz although you can get processor upgrades at 2 GHz. But its Apples willingness and viability in maintaining the PowerPC (G5) architecture for another release of OS X after Leopard. If the PowerPC only has one more year of support (2008), I guess we can probably say, 10.6 will not support it general (G4 and G5).

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Depends on the processor in your Mac my friend. We don't know yet, but according to the most recent Leopard build, the minimum requirements to run the OS efficiently is 867 MHz, 512 MBs of RAM. As for the future, we don't know how far the architecture will go in terms of future OS X support. The G4 maxes out at 1.5 GHz although you can get processor upgrades at 2 GHz. But its Apples willingness and viability in maintaining the PowerPC (G5) architecture for another release of OS X after Leopard. If the PowerPC only has one more year of support (2008), I guess we can probably say, 10.6 will not support it general (G4 and G5).

Well, actually, I was just joking around :D. But thanks for that input.

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Well, there will certainly some sort of company that comes out with a paid hack to allow leopard to run on anything with a G4 nomatter how slow.

 

Just gonna wait and see how good Leopard is, despite its memory usage Tiger is a light and instantaneous OS on my machine.. And if Leopard acts like a pig on PPC machines. Do have extra x86 machine which would be regarded as upper midrange thats not doing anything for the foreseeable future.

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Well, there will certainly some sort of company that comes out with a paid hack to allow leopard to run on anything with a G4 nomatter how slow.

 

Just gonna wait and see how good Leopard is, despite its memory usage Tiger is a light and instantaneous OS on my machine.. And if Leopard acts like a pig on PPC machines. Do have extra x86 machine which would be regarded as upper midrange thats not doing anything for the foreseeable future.

 

Well, there are tools out there already that allow you to get Tiger running on PPC systems without Firewire and USB including Beige G3s with processor upgrade cards, the utility is called XPOSFACTO. I am sure it will be updated to support Leopard when ready. The OS X86 community have shown their commitment too to supporting Leopard on Apple non approved hardware with various hacks for changing the operating systems requirement check and various command line tools that even get Leopard running on a G3.

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Well, going back to man power, you have to take into account they maintained an exact replica of OS X for most of its life on Intel in their development labs without worrying about cost or human developer resources. So, I don't think its necessarily an issue of maintaining for the architecture, its the value and direction for third party developers when we must officially give up on this architecture. If Apple was to go ahead and continue support for PPC G5 then then the third party would be the one with the burden here and decision making issues.

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They're gonna have to kill off PPC sometime...It just doesn't make sense to wait to long to discontinue support. Right now, PPC is a waste of time and manpower.

 

Just for the record, Apple supported beige G3's for six years (from the beginning of the G3 in 1997 to 2003, the release of 10.3)

 

The B&W G3 has been supported for eight years (1999 to the present). Same with the first gen of iMacs that can run 10.4.

 

Laptop wise, the G3 systems (except the original PowerBook G3) were five years (1998 to 2003).

 

Pismo G3 laptops have been supported for seven years (2000 to present).

 

iBooks have been supported for six years (the originals from 1999 to 2005) to seven years (every model after the originals from 2000 to present). All iBooks had G3 processors.

 

While we can't fortell the future, we can take a good guess given the history. Given the history, PPC will be supported for many years to come.

 

Edit due to poor grammar.

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