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10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

9to5mac.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#11
post #6

Interestingly there's an unreleased Intel version of Mac OS 9 that you see at Apple stories - it's used via Netboot for testing batteries (amongst other things I imagine, but when I saw it it was for testing). Looks like they still (as of late 2010) haven't gotten around to porting some of their old diags to OS X.

[deleted]

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#12
post #7

You can check out all of your applications to see if you're running any PowerPC software. System Profiler -> Applications -> sort by Kind. Only culprit on my system is some random CS4 stuff.

Microsoft Office 2008 installer still requires Rosetta, meaning Office 2011 is the only version of Office that will be able to run on Lion.

Combine that with requiring CS5, and Lion will be a very expensive upgrade for many people.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#13
post #7

You can check out all of your applications to see if you're running any PowerPC software. System Profiler -> Applications -> sort by Kind. Only culprit on my system is some random CS4 stuff.

Unfortunately, at least one installer (Microsoft Office 2008) requires PowerPC emulation. This can be worked around be installing the mpkg using the 'installer' command, but that is obviously not for the regular user.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#14
From the point of view of an IT professional, this is a big deal.

Apple is sliding forward the lower bound on software that can be expected to run on a newly-purchased computer by several years. There's no indication to the average user which of their applications will stop working on their next computer, and there are oodles of copies of PowerPC applications out there in the wild.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#15
One thing I have always admired Microsoft for is the huge effort they put into maintaining backwards compatibility. This may come largely from my days watching business clients forced to run old legacy apps that had been around forever. Despite Window's many (many) shortcomings, whenever I hear people complain about the time it takes to roll a new version out I try to point out the task at hand. The broad hardware support (try to find PC hardware Windows won't work on), the ability to run (until 64bit OSs recently) 16bit apps from 1993, virtualized XP, etc. Windows certainly hasn't been perfect but for the above I will always applaud Microsoft's dev team. I feel for the Mac IT guys this change is going to affect.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#17
post #6

Interestingly there's an unreleased Intel version of Mac OS 9 that you see at Apple stories - it's used via Netboot for testing batteries (amongst other things I imagine, but when I saw it it was for testing). Looks like they still (as of late 2010) haven't gotten around to porting some of their old diags to OS X.

[deleted]

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#19
post #15

One thing I have always admired Microsoft for is the huge effort they put into maintaining backwards compatibility. This may come largely from my days watching business clients forced to run old legacy apps that had been around forever. Despite Window's many (many) shortcomings, whenever I hear people complain about the time it takes to roll a new version out I try to point out the task at hand. The broad hardware su…

Devs have had 5 years to make their apps universal binary--to run better, on more machines. That's half a decade. Not unreasonable.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#20
post #15

One thing I have always admired Microsoft for is the huge effort they put into maintaining backwards compatibility. This may come largely from my days watching business clients forced to run old legacy apps that had been around forever. Despite Window's many (many) shortcomings, whenever I hear people complain about the time it takes to roll a new version out I try to point out the task at hand. The broad hardware su…

For the most part, I'd say Apple's compatibility efforts have been equally impressive:

* 'Classic' support enabled Mac OS 9 apps to run on OS X for many years.

* Rosetta allowed for apps written for a completely different processor architecture to run on Intel (until 10.7, aparently).

Apple also made these moves before the bulk of 3rd-party applications were running natively on the new systems/architectures. The fact that Apple has been able to change low-level OS & processor architectures over the past 10 years is quite a feat.

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