Snow Leopard: Party like it's 1998

I am an owner of a PowerMac G5 and I knew it's days were numbered the minute the intel switch occurred. I have not upgraded to a new machine yet and was waiting for this point and to be honest it is due. As odd as it sounds the once powerful Dual G5 PPC is really showing age especially when handling high quality video streams.

So to the Apple store I go to get the newest and greatest. One thing I will not miss is the wind tunnel noise that is the G5 tower.

This part is inacurate:

"Earlier Macs ran on some variation of 680x0 processors and were supported mostly via emulation in a PowerPC environment. Emulation works, but it also slows things down. By 1998, Apple decided it just couldn't support 680X0 emulation for a number of reasons, but chiefly among them was speed."

Apple quit selling versions of Mac OS that ran on m68k hardware, just as with Snow Leopard they are no longer selling a version of Mac OS that runs on PPC hardware ... but they never dropped emulation of the m68k processor line in the PPC version of classic Mac OS. You can run MacWrite/MacDraw/MacPaint from 1984 in Mac OS 9.2.2 on at least G4 hardware, and I don't see why it wouldn't run on a G5 (I don't know for certain, because I went straight from G4 to Intel).

As other commenters have pointed out, much of early PPC versions of Mac System software/Mac OS was running as emulated m68k code; as time went on, Apple ported more of the OS to PPC. My understanding, although I have no way of knowing for certain, is that some subsystems were never ported to PPC. I find that a bit hard to believe, but if the emulation was fast enough, as it certainly was by the time G4s came around, then there wasn't really much of a need to port anything after the decision was made internally, if not announced externally, that Apple's OS future lie exclusively in OS X.

Speed didn't have anything to do with Apple's decision to quit selling Mac OS for m68k hardware. The decision was simply the result of a business practice known as planned obsolescence, which Apple practices masterfully.

The article is good, but missed one point. In an office environment you will always have a variety of old and new machines and you cannot upgrade any machine because of costs. By the way in offices the PPC machines are still enough. You don't need the latest and greatest to run MS Office, Mail and iCal.
There is one big thing here. Snow Leopard is almost the first OS that is really useable in business environments. Because it has iCal Server 2 and Address Book Server. It's the first time to support vacation messages and so on.
BUT I have seen it with Leopard and iCal Server I, this only works if you have Leopard running on the client side, because it works only if you have the new iCal running on the client side. That means, I could update my Xserve to Snow Leopard (it's an Intel Xserve), but can I use the functionality provided on the client side? I cannot upgrade to Snow Leopard on the client side, because only 5 out of 20 are Intel-based computers. All others are PPC. Our small company does not have the money to buy 15 new machines. Because than I may have to upgarde the Adobe Suite which adds another hughe price tag. So at the end I'm a little bit pissed by this.

Oh, yes I don't care about some of the other benefits. 25% faster install time. Who the hell cares about install time? The install process is made once in lifetime. Only 6 GiB HD space. Who the hell cares about this these times. By the way, it is simple to safe space when all the PPC stuff is removed all the other XML stuff is now packed.

I remember how Apple had backwards compatibility even in OS X's classic mode for the old 68k architecture. In OS X Tiger I could run a 1984 version of StuntCopter compiled for 68k Macs on my PowerPC G4.

I for one can't wait to see what SL Grand Central does to utilize my Mac Pro cpu's w/ my fiery rip printer dirver. I can't believe how poorly that driver utilizes the processor. Jumping from proc to proc mid-rip. At first I thought it was indesign, but noticed faster ripping/flattening on different printers and no proc jumping.

$29? Hmmph. I remember when Mac system updates were free.

(Hobbling back to the rocking chair now.)

Every processor architecture insider will tell you that the Intel transition is nothing of a "technology advancement".... it was and is a necessary evil. The only choice.

x86 is a dinosaur, kept alive by the Windows monopoly that supports almost nothing else. If you could run Windows on PowerPC, the CPU landscape would have looked a lot different, I think...

As part of the seeding program. I think people are going to pleasantly surprised at what Snow Leopard will bring. I am finding more and more features all over the place. Besides being snappier, which does seem true across a wide variety of apps, there seems to be things that everyone will find appealing. It truly is a wonderful refinement on Leopard.

no offense, but even if you had a power pc mac, you wouldn't want SL.

last laptops were G4s. imac made a G5, but it wasn't anything special and the Powermacs were dual g5s, save for the rare exception of the quad g5 that had a million watt power supply and dimmed your lights when you turned it on. If you were rich enough to get that, then you most likely sold it and got the mac pro when the pro apps went universal.

I'm not the only one, I'm sure, to think Apple has spread themselves very thinly across new products, exemplified by the Leopard ship slip in 07 to focus on the iPhone.

I can't say enough how happy I am that Apple has taken the under-the-hood focus with Snow Leopard. There are a handful of things I've always found buggy about Leopard, but to dedicate themselves to stability, quality, speed, all those good things, and to eschew big new features shows confidence and commitment. It must really f with the Windows program managers' heads.