[G4] Snow Leopard

[Eric Smith]

macrumors.com is today reporting a story, originating from
arstechnica.com, that OS X 10.6 will be named Snow Leopard and,
as some of us have previously guessed, will be Intel-only.
The release is expected at Macworld in January 2009, and is
said not to contain any major new features but to focus on
"speed and stability."

This strategy makes sense to me from Apple's point of view.
It has been clear that Apple has been on an accelerated pace
to end their commitment to backward-compatibility. Abandoning
Classic mode in 10.5 and artificially restricting its installation
to G5 and a subset of G4 systems was a death knell for PPC in
general. To accomplish that with a minimum of fuss from the
user community, what better way than to release a "feature-less"
upgrade that simply drops PPC support? PPC users can be told
just to stick with Leopard without losing any functionality.
Then by the time 10.7 comes around, everyone will already be
accustomed to the fact that PPC is no longer supported.

Eric S.