[G4] snow leopard

[Eric Smith]

Richard Klein wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 6:06 PM, Eric Smith <eric-s-smith at comcast.net> wrote:
>> PPC systems have essentially been cut loose by Apple.
>> Except for "security updates" for Leopard, we probably
>> won't see any more OS updates for PPC. And with OS support
>> coming to an end, application developers will probably
>> move to Intel-only fairly quickly.
>>
>> But this has been expected for well over a year, since
>> the first developer release of Snow Leopard came out at
>> Apple's 2008 WWDC as Intel-only. And it was foreshadowed
>> even earlier, when Leopard dropped support for some G4
>> models and eliminated Classic mode entirely.
> 
> Furthermore, when you hear that Snow Leopard takes up less hard drive
> space and runs faster than Leopard, at least some of that is because
> they trimmed the extra code to support PowerPC Macs.

Some of the disk space saving is due to the removal of PPC code,
but that is not the major factor. The greatest part of the space
reclaimed came from optimizing localization files.

Better performance would have nothing whatever to do with
removing PPC code. Whatever performance increase there is
would be due to 64-bit applications plus Snow Leopard's new
features like Grand Central and OpenCL.

Apple could easily have provided a PPC version of Snow Leopard
without impacting the performance of Intel systems. Most PPC
systems would not get the benefit of all the new features, but
not all Intel systems get those benefits either.

The biggest gain for Apple in dropping PPC is from resources
to test and support the old platforms. And since those platforms
no longer generate any direct revenue for Apple, prodding users
to buy new systems is a marketing goal. But this is an ongoing
process. 10.4 wouldn't run on some G3 systems, 10.5 wouldn't
run on some G4 systems, 10.6 drops all PPC systems, and I'm
guessing that 10.7 will be 64-bit only and won't run on early
Intel platforms.

Eric S.