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10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

9to5mac.com

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Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#21

Post by adsr »

Sidnicious wrote: post #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.

You got to ask yourself how many PPC apps there really are that have not got an update and been recompiled for Intel by now. The indication would be if they have manually downloaded Rosetta on Snow Leopard.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#22

Post by adsr »

guptaneil wrote: post #12
treblig wrote: 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.

No it doesn't, I have it installed here and I don't have Rosetta. System requirements on the box says nothing about Rosetta and there's a big Universal binary icon on it as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac#R...

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#23

Post by thought_alarm »

51Cards wrote: 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…

My first Mac was an iBook G4 running OS X 10.3, and I was marvelled by the fact that I could run software written in the 80s on a brand new 2005 laptop out of the box.

I'm not sure where Apple got this reputation for poor backward compatibility. They've jumped platforms multiple times and have gone to heroic lengths to preserve backward compatibility as well as cross-platform and cross-architecture compatibility.

That said, the removal of Rosetta support seems uncharacteristically premature for Apple.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#24

Post by pornel »

pieter wrote: post #4
rasur wrote: post #3

Looks like I'll be repurposing the quad and dual G5's here onto debian PPC, when I can scrape up enough for an intel big-mac /cries/

Why? Nothing changes for you. Developers can still create universal binaries that run on your macs if the choose to do so. The only thing that changed is running PPC-only apps on intel machines, which is something nobody really cares about since there really aren't any PPC-only apps on the market. You already weren't able to upgrade to the latest OS, as Snow Leopard is Intel-only. You could be worried about developer…

According to http://adium.im/sparkle/ 95% of their users have 64-bit Intel CPU.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#25

Post by justincormack »

pieter wrote: post #4
rasur wrote: post #3

Looks like I'll be repurposing the quad and dual G5's here onto debian PPC, when I can scrape up enough for an intel big-mac /cries/

Why? Nothing changes for you. Developers can still create universal binaries that run on your macs if the choose to do so. The only thing that changed is running PPC-only apps on intel machines, which is something nobody really cares about since there really aren't any PPC-only apps on the market. You already weren't able to upgrade to the latest OS, as Snow Leopard is Intel-only. You could be worried about developer…

I stopped using my G5 because there is no ppc support in v8 and hence node.js. Most of the new JITs dont support ppc. I havent got rid of it yet though and I dont see the point in installing Linux until Apple stop security updates for 10.5 which is some way off... Useful for testing code where endianness matters.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#26

Post by jwatzman »

nathos wrote: post #20
51Cards wrote: 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…

And don't forget what I think is the most impressive, the transition from 68k to PowerPC. When they first did this, parts of the kernel were still compiled for 68k.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68K_emulator

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#27

Post by guptaneil »

adsr wrote: post #22
guptaneil wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it doesn't, I have it installed here and I don't have Rosetta. System requirements on the box says nothing about Rosetta and there's a big Universal binary icon on it as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac#R...

The application itself is a universal binary, but the installer requires Rosetta. It auto-installs Rosetta when you run the Office installer, unless you installed using Terminal (http://www.mactalk.com.au/11/72330-install-microsoft-office-...)

If you didn't use Terminal to install Office, then you must have either upgraded Snow Leopard instead of doing a clean install, which would allow you to use Office without running the installer again, or you have Rosetta installed without realizing it.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#28

Post by jad »

51Cards wrote: 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…

The flip side is that maintaining that backwards compatibility comes at a major cost.

Product quality tends to degrade (sometimes significantly) because more often than not it's necessary to compromise design, which in turn complicates code and causes more bugs. It has an engineering cost because it takes longer to develop the product. And perhaps most importantly, it can severely restrict how aggressively you can push your platform forward in each new version.

Having the freedom to move OS X (and iOS) forward aggressively is an important reason why Apple focuses its business model on selling products to consumers. Consumers tend to be looking for the latest and greatest, and each individual consumer makes her own buying decision. On the other hand, if an IT manager can't keep his VB6 internal clunkware running on your new OS, he's not going to buy 10,000 seats.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#29

Post by lucaswagner »

nailer wrote: 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.

It's actually just a tool that runs in EFI; kinda like the AHT. Looks like OS 9, but it isn't.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#30

Post by adsr »

guptaneil wrote: post #27
adsr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't, I have it installed here and I don't have Rosetta. System requirements on the box says nothing about Rosetta and there's a big Universal binary icon on it as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac#R...

The application itself is a universal binary, but the installer requires Rosetta. It auto-installs Rosetta when you run the Office installer, unless you installed using Terminal ( http://www.mactalk.com.au/11/72330-install-microsoft-office-... ) If you didn't use Terminal to install Office, then you must have either upgraded Snow Leopard instead of doing a clean install, which would allow you to use Office without ru…

Yes, I'm absolutely sure that I don't have Rosetta. It seems like an oversight on Microsofts part to require it for a universal binary, 3 years after PPC was continued.
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