OS 10.6: PowerPC officially left behind

You people whining about PPC remind me allot of the users who whined when Linux went from a i386 processor to i686 (and that short stint with i586). Everything has it's time and place, I had a i386, I had an i486 and even the i586. Now I have the i686, were they all worth it? Yes, some more so than others, but in the end the investment was returned before the machine was tossed.

And I agree with some of the others posters, keeping around legacy code that will serve only a SMALL amount of the base in reality serves (itself) very little purpose.

Nothing lasts forever, get over it and enjoy the ride while you can

Wolfit

My Dual 2.5ghz G5 is a proud, capable machine. the biggest obstacles against it at this point is that there are no choices to upgrade its graphics cards, im hitting the power/performance ceiling (1080p mkv plays at only 14fps...sigh), and now..no 10.6. 3 years is NOT that long in computers, to whomever wrote that. it used to be before desktops generally stalled out 2 years ago. i have final cut studio 2 and (most of) the cs4 suite running pretty well. some apps run like dogs, but i blame adobe- illustrator runs HORRIBLY on the machine.

im wondering how much my machine can go for.

My setup is:

dualie - not dual core- 2.5ghz
4.5gb ram
160gb, +300 gb hard drive
4 firewire 800 ports, 3 firewire 400, 3 usb
stock dvd burner

havent had a hardware issue - at all - since it was bought. what a workhorse of a machine.

i almost cried when they announced that. Dotn let me get started on my 2005 pb g4...its my new internet book.

I have a G4 iBook and one of the original mini's.

I'll keep the iBook going with Leopard until it finally dies (or, more likely, the AC power adapter breaks -- again.)

I was planning to buy an Intel mini anyway, so I'll be doing that as soon as they're shipping with Snow Leopard. But I won't be putting my old one up on eBay, so those of you who are looking to add to your server farms should look elsewhere. I'll probably convert mine to a FreeBSD-based server on my home network.

If you are going to continue to use Apple products, a switch to an Intel Mac is pretty much a guaranteed future purchase.

I was purely a PowerPC Mac owner until they updated the Mac Mini in March and I was able to replace a G5 tower with it.

I still rock a 17" PowerBook G4 1.67GHz. For what I need it to do, Leopard does fine. In fact, as I transition more of my more laborious work to the Intel-based Mini, I may rollback the PowerBook to Tiger.

If you ask me, when it comes to PowerPC Macs, Tiger actually runs much faster and efficiently than Leopard.

what they should do/should've done [just like they have in the past with the cd v. dvd installer when dvd's weren't yet the standard] is two seperate install disk - one for ppc and the other for intel machines. i can understand apple wanting us to migrate over to newer machines [$$$], but given the vast amount of ppc machines still running [something they should be deeply proud of] in the wild, i still don't see why it's now time to bring them to eol via os x 10.6.

as for anyone guestimating at how fast/slow leopard runs on a ppc machine, well, you can stop speculating now! i run a mirrored g4 dual 1.42ghz ppc running leopard server, with a 1 tb raid 1 off of a sonnet sata raid card, and two other hdd for 10.5 server, without so much as even a hick-up! it's zippy as hell, even with downloads running alongside many apps open.

i also run two quad 2.5ghz g5's at work with leopard with zero issues. why shouldn't i be able to update all of my ppc machines if i want to? that's just a huge amount of people out there with these still very capable machines running. hell, charge $39-$49 for legacy people who still want to update to 10.6. that would be the smarter thing to do, as you wouldn't piss off your loyal followers who are still running ppc machines, and make an even higher profit/apple tax from it. it would still keep both install dvd's separate and clean code-wise as well.

it just seems like that would be the more logical path to take, rather than just saying it's the end of the line unless you buy a new machine from us.

http://www.apple.com/ca/macpro/performance.html

It's not like the Quad G5 is that far behind. Just happens to fall on the other side of PPC/Intel transition. Would it be cool for Apple to offer a one time discount for Quad G5 owners. Hell yea, but that was 2005 almost 5 years ago now. And thats a good run for any desktop.

You know, I've had my powerbook for three years, and it only started to crap out around the 3 year mark. It's a fantastic machine and I really pushed it to its limits (it was the 12").

However because it was on its last legs I had to break down and buy a MBP, shortly before the line was totally refreshed.

I've never been so disapointed. I've had issues since day one, and Apple has ignored every single complaint I've made.

Hopefully the unibody's are better because at this rate... I cant really ever justify dropping another $2000 for one of their laptops.

But to the question at hand: it stinks. What stinks more is that when apps become "snow leopard only" my old powerbook will REALLY be left behind. but so many great apps are intel only these days anyways that its not a huge deal. still makes for a great web browsing/word processing machine. until the battery dies (without warning).

I guess my Quad 2.5GHz G5 with 8GB of ram, dual 1TB hard drives and the 7800GT will still be able to browse the web and be a file server. At least it was cheap.

I was wanting to see how well snow leopard took advantage of my tricked out dual 1.42 MDD ( fw800). oh well.

I see this as a perfectly calculated one-two punch by Apple to push people into upgrading those PPC systems, and something that was planned from the very beginning of Snow Leopard's development cycle.

Look at all the new APIs that Apple's announced for Snow Leopard. Application developers are chomping at the bit to be able to use them. Combined with the absurdly low price of upgrading for Leopard owners, I think that this OS will see the fastest uptake among users and developers ever.

Developers will feel comfortable using 10.6 only features quickly because the upgrade is so inexpensive for their users, and users will feel pressured to upgrade because of the low price and the fact that the newest versions of all their favorite apps are 10.6 only.

PPC users are going to get left in the cold faster than Classic users did when OS X first shipped.