Wired’s Charlie Sorrel:
If you have an old PowerPC Mac, you should probably make it its favorite dinner, throw an arm around its shoulder and – as you shed a single, silent tear – lead it round behind the back of the house. Lowering it gently into the old, rusted bathtub you whisper, almost inaudibly, “sorry.” You then pull out a gun and finish off your faithful old friend.
Or……just continue to use it in 10.6 and be happy.
I presume you mean 10.5, as 10.6 is SnowLeopard.
Doing without the OS features will be survivable. The speed with which Apple’s third party ecosystem tends to move forward, though, could make sticking with PPC pretty nasty.
Yeah, it’s been three years… that’s a pretty good run for commodity PC hardware. It’s a sad event, of course, but not unreasonable.
Wow, that was a very depressing writeup. Does 10.6 have a fix for those as well?
Also, throw away your iphone and buy a new one. Just in case.
Much as this sucks, it’s the way of the world. It’ll probably save Apple a few (or many) millions in dev and test costs this year, and every major company I can think of is scrambling for ways to get the bottom line back to semi-healthy.
BTW, PPC folks, the new machines are as fast as you always wished yours was. If you do anything media-oriented, it’s really time to start considering newness anyhow.
(says the guy whose $1000, two-year-old Macbook destroys his old high-end G5 in most benchmarks)
I’m running Debian on my old PPC and it’s lovely. This might not be for you, but I’m a longtime linux guy, so it works well for me.
I got this when I started my (academic) job last summer. The IT guy made me promise to try OS X, so I spent the summer with it. It’s cool, I think my wife would love it if I could ever convince her to try it, but it just didn’t work for me.
The problem I had was that support among linux distros is also shrinking. I spent some time with Ubuntu, but that was a little flaky (and not officially supported) on my machine. I’ve heard the new Fedora release supports PPC, but I’ve fallen in love with Debian all over again.
Meh. This assumes we want to upgrade. We’re running 1 copy of 10.5 so far at work out of about 30 computers, lol… Until we buy ones that are 10.5-only compatible, we’ll be sticking with 10.4.
Yeah, wasn’t this always one of the predictions? It’s a shame to leave outdated hardware in the dust (especially since Apple’s OS upgrades tend to make old hardware even quicker, in my experience) but at the same time… it is outdated hardware! I guess I’d be more bummed if any of my primary machines were still PPCs, but even so, there’s still a lot to be done with that old PPC, no need to junk it! Hell, I still have a G3 that’s kicking along fine, suits some basic needs just fine…
The marketing adage is that you should consider yourself lucky if users are willing to buy new software for machines older than about 18 months. After that, they usually stick with what they have, until they can’t live without some new software, then they buy a new machine.
(NOTE: this is an adage, not a hard and fast rule, and I know there are people who “upgrade” their machines by replacing the CPU, motherboard, hard disk, etc. — “but it’s really the same machine I’ve had for years.”)
Snow Leopard adds a handful of really nifty new programmer APIs, but they are not available when running on iPhone, so I doubt developers are rushing to embrace them.
These days, it’s more likely that old hardware will be blocked out of newer software by the graphics processor requirement more than anything else.
Goodness knows that the next rev of Flash will probably suck on PowerPC, if it deigns to run at all.
“Goodness knows that the next rev of Flash will probably suck on PowerPC, if it deigns to run at all.”
True that – it’s amazing that I can cut HD video on my G4, but a webpage with flash ads brings the thing to its knees.
You can install snow leopard on PPC if your Powermac use AMD processors 64Bit only this PPC is possible at all… see appleinsider report… using roseta. but i thing some homebrews come’s in next year to ad extentions on 10.6
Does the lack of PPC support go a long way to explaning the smaller footprint, me thinks it does
I manage a bunch of XServe G5s for the business where I work. One is running 10.4, (Server) the rest are 10.3. Since there’s been no need for the features of 10.5 there’s been no need to upgrade so far.
Perhaps 10.6 coming out will decrease prices for 10.4 and 10.5 Server on eBay. Then there might be some incentive for us to upgrade.
one of the problems i have with benchmarks is that they’re not necessarily representative of what i actually do with a machine. i have mid-2005 mac g5 systems running 10.5.7 both at work and home, and they’re plenty fast for what i ask them to do. there is no doubt that the intel macs are faster, and i’ll definitely upgrade to multi-cpu mac pro when the time comes. but for streaming video, the bottleneck is usually the network; for data analysis, it’s disk access; and for other things (like code development, viewgraphs, image editing, or reading a blog) it’s usually my cranial cpu or limitations of the application software rather than the g5.
by the way, before i did the upgrade at work, my g5 was up and running for just over 15 months continuously.
so, color me happy. thanks, apple.
Why doesn’t it run on ppc’s ?
But hey, its my first mac.
got my first mac this year (g5, dual, 4gb) and running it with os x server 10.5. I must admint, as a workstation its cool (first time mac user), but as a consultant, implementing linux in business sourroundings its strange, as a dns-admin its awful, as an webserver-admin it sucks…i think.
btw..importing 3gb of pics with iweb/iphoto into the webserver does not work.
cyall
mikerick