[G4] snow leopard

[Keith Whaley]

Eric Smith wrote:
> 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.

Aren't localization files those files necessary for using the Mac OS with 
languages other than English?

> 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.

Point of order here...the speed increase experienced by most SL users is 
plenty real, and by default SL boots into a 32 bit mode.
How do you account for that phenomenon?

> 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.

Seems to me, that would go directly against a treasured Apple tradition, and 
would be cutting their own throat!
Backwards compatibility has ALWAYS been something Apple owners could count on 
and brag about.
You're talking about a rather rapid evolution into the very best of the 
current "very best." Too rapid, to some...

keith whaley