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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

#31

Post by ohkine »

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…

First of all i don't think Apple has done that bad with backwards-compatibility. The jump from OS 9 to OS X was extremely easy thanks to Classic and Carbon support, and then the jump from PPC to Intel was easy because of Rosetta. But admittedly this is not on the same level as being able to run 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications on Windows 7.

That said:

Microsoft's backwards-compatibility policies are great for businesses, who naturally have many special considerations when it comes to legacy applications.

Apple's policies, on the other hand, seem to be more geared towards improving the experience for the user. They deprecate libraries and functions of the OS that are no longer relevant to how computing gets done (or how they want it to get done) on the Mac. This helps to ensure that applications keep up with the times.

Microsoft don't have this philosophy at all, and so Windows 7 often feels like an arbitrary mash-up of the last 25 years of PC operating systems. There are many many applications in W7, for example, where buttons and interface elements still have a Windows 95-ish feel to them, because they haven't been updated to the new system themes. A famous example in Vista (corrected now in W7) was the 'Add Font' dialogue, which had been exactly the same since Windows 3.1. Another example is mIRC, where (if i remember right) some decades-old Unicode work-around forces the application to use non-Aero title bars.

At the risk of sounding like a snob, the whole experience -- to a consumer who appreciates good user interfaces -- just feels kind of amateur-ish, really.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#32

Post by guptaneil »

thought_alarm wrote: post #23
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. Tha…

They probably have data on how often Rosetta was downloaded for Snow Leopard to justify the decision.

Apple does go through heroic lengths to preserve backward compatibility, but only for as long as it makes sense. If the backwards compatibility is going to harm moving the OS forward, then they are prepared to drop it, as in this case. Microsoft has always been too afraid to drop backwards compatibility (mostly because as soon as they do, many users will probably jump switch to Mac OS if they are forced to upgrade everything anyway), forcing them to remain stuck with legacy Windows code while Apple has continued to push forward. The jump from Mac OS 9 to OS X was a huge one that Microsoft still hasn't been able to take, even with Windows 7.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#33

Post by nnutter »

adsr wrote: post #21
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.

Exactly. And out of all the apps I use there was only one that triggered the Rosetta prompt; an open-source disk usage utility called Disk Inventory X. Users may not remember installing Rosetta but the fact is they and the developers have had plenty of time to find alternative solutions.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#34

Post by nailer »

lucaswagner wrote: post #29
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.

I wonder why they used the OS 9 L & F? Was very odd seeing it start on a MacBook.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#35

Post by nailer »

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…

> try to find PC hardware Windows won't work on

Sure, any ARM NetBook or tablet. But they're fixing that.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#36

Post by JunkDNA »

adsr wrote: post #21
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.

I know of one that will be a major pain: the Apani VPN client. It's the only way to VPN into a Nortel VPN from OS X and has never been ported to Intel. It is the only reason I had to put Rosetta on Snow Leopard. I get the feeling it will likely never get an upgrade since it feels a bit like abandonware already. Here's hoping my employer switches to Cisco.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#37

Post by ben1040 »

nnutter wrote: post #33
adsr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. And out of all the apps I use there was only one that triggered the Rosetta prompt; an open-source disk usage utility called Disk Inventory X. Users may not remember installing Rosetta but the fact is they and the developers have had plenty of time to find alternative solutions.

And out of all the apps I use there was only one that triggered the Rosetta prompt; an open-source disk usage utility called Disk Inventory X.

For what it's worth, the website (www.derlien.com) for this project still calls the universal binary version "beta," but it's been that way since 2006 and has worked just fine.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#38

Post by rbarooah »

adulau wrote: post #18

If you want to reuse your old PowerPC hardware, you still have the option to run a recent version of GNU/Linux. Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) has a recent version (ubuntu-10.10-desktop-powerpc.iso) for PowerPC Mac.

Although you could just keep running leopard.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#39

Post by teilo »

This is going to make my life miserable.

I wish it were possible that we could say goodbye to Rosetta and Universals Binaries yesterday. However, there are a good number of "Universal" pieces of software out there in common use, that have vestigial PowerPC components. I just ran into one yesterday, on a business critical piece of software at my company - supposedly UB software, that has a command-line utility that is compiled for PowerPC, and that in the most current version of the software. Quite a number of times, I have run into software that is UB, and yet part of the install process relies on Rosetta.

Oh, and I have to run Acrobat 7 for a couple business-critical websites, because we make templates using an old build of PDFLib, and since it's legacy software, we won't be upgrading to a newer build.

I believe I will have to setup an instance of Snow Leopard in Parallels, if I move to Lion.

Well, I don't fault Apple for this. Perhaps it will force this nonsense to stop sooner than later.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#40

Post by cosmicray »

adsr wrote: post #21
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.

1) AppleWorks 6 - which while mostly replaced by iWork, is still in use by quite a few people. iWork has yet to implement a database module.

2) compiled AppleScript scripts - a certain number of those were compiled, and generated PPC binaries, and not UB. beware.

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