Comments for: Apple to drop PowerPC support with next Mac OS

#11. Posted at 09:55 AM on Jun 12th 2008

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provoko

All that expensive hardware down the drain, and you guys thought you were thinking different. Tsk tsk.

#11, They're actually being pretty smart about it. This is not a ... : leor (#14) «

#14, Poor? There was a joke in there somewhere about Amigas, b... : Scrotos (#16) «

#14, I don't follow the comparison. I have Northwood Pentium 4... : ludi (#22) «

#11, Umm the hardware is not down the drain. Leopard will be supp... : adisor19 (#17) «

#11, Well, let's see; when the G5 hit, the biggest thing on the x... : Forge (#18) «

#1. Posted at 06:12 AM on Jun 12th 2008

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derFunkenstein

It's not like Leopard runs well on PPC hardware, so it's not a big surprise. It's also probably not going to drop until late 2009 or 2010 somewhere, so the newest machine to be discontinued is the G5 tower released October 2005.

The PPC --> Intel transition will really be complete then.

#1, Leopard runs pretty well on a user's dual G5 at work. The G4... : bthylafh (#6) «

#6, I have a Mac Mini G4 1.2Ghz and ya, 10.5 is quite slow on... : adisor19 (#7) «

#6, If all you're going to support in PPC is high-end PPC, it... : derFunkenstein (#21) «

#20. Posted at 01:56 PM on Jun 12th 2008

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LSDX

Cell CPUs being based on PPC, Apple could reenable the PPC emulation on addon cards via an OpenCL application. Maybe emulation is the wrong term, as it might run natively on a Cell Cpu.

#9. Posted at 08:31 AM on Jun 12th 2008

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LSDX

If OpenCL is as open as its name suggests and runs not only on GPUs but also on Cell CPUs, they are just moving the PPC support to another "layer".

#9, I am not sure what you're saying. Some computing library for... : Scrotos (#15) «

#15, PPC support is already on an emulation layer called Roset... : Forge (#19) «

#13. Posted at 12:26 PM on Jun 12th 2008, Edited at 12:30 PM on Jun 12th 2008

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Scrotos

For the OS, yeah, but interesting to note that 68k programs ran on an emulator from 8.5 on to the last versions of the classic environment for OS X. Maybe no new OS for PPC, but I'm more curious as to when Rosetta will be dropped and you can't run any PPC-compiled OS X programs anymore...

edit - wooo supposed to be a reply to #2 / #4 adi

#8. Posted at 08:24 AM on Jun 12th 2008

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axeman

I wonder if they will have better QA on this release, they seem to be slipping a bit of late, letting some pretty stupid bugs into production.

#8, Agreed. 10.5 has been riddled with bugs and not even 10.5.3 ... : adisor19 (#10) «

#10, Nonetheless, after switching from XP and Vista to 10.5, I... : bozzunter (#12) «

#3. Posted at 06:43 AM on Jun 12th 2008, Edited at 06:44 AM on Jun 12th 2008

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CasbahBoy

We don't know if they will drop support for sure; the only thing we know right now is that the developer preview released a year before the finished product requires Intel. Apple won't support PPC forever yeah, but for all we know this is just a move to begin stifling PPC support in general and Snow Leapord could very well be the last release to support PPC rather than the first to not support it.

Lots of discussion going on here: http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/06/11/snow-leopard-t...

Apple is pretty sneaky. Don't want to jump to conclusions until say exactly how things will be (and even then they can still surprise you...)

#3, I agree. From what i seen on the 10.6 Dev Preview, it looks ... : adisor19 (#5) «

#2. Posted at 06:40 AM on Jun 12th 2008

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blastdoor

Does anyone know how many years it was between the release of the first PPC based Macs and the end of 680x0 support in the OS? I think the PowerMacs came out in 1994... did Mac OS 9 support 680x0?

#2, 68k support was dropped with OS 8.5 Adi : adisor19 (#4) «