10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications • Hacker News Board

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#41

Post by radicaldreamer » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 7:40 PM UTC

cosmicray wrote: post #40

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.

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.

I thought Bento was supposed to be the replacement entry-level database?

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#42

Post by allenbrunson » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 8:01 PM UTC

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…

Personally, I am going to argue the other direction.

Windows is a pain to program for and use largely because it's filled with assumptions and code that date back to the eighties. It is very difficult to innovate with the boat anchor of the past shackled to your ankle.

Think how much easier it would be for Microsoft to improve security if, for example, they could remove the assumption that it's okay for apps to blithely write stuff to the \Windows directory. Well, Mac OS X has done exactly that. Most of its system directories are tightly locked down.

In fact, Apple has completely chucked their entire operating system from the eighties and started over. The result is a much more modern OS that is far more pleasant to use. Yes, there was a real fear there that, since people had to chuck OS9, they might move to something else entirely, but that didn't happen, for the most part.

Think about it this way. Which customers would you rather have: the people who are willing to buy new computers and software every few years, or the guy who is stubbornly holding on to his DBASE app from 1984? For me, the choice is obvious.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#43

Post by Hoff » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 8:05 PM UTC

teilo wrote: post #39

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…

Welcome to enterprise computing, and to the world of zombie software management.

Other OS vendors can carry decades of cruft and baggage for reasons of compatibility with older applications, and that really slows down development, and the testing costs scale upward for whatever you can't retire. You end up implementing the Windows XP box in Windows 7, the pain that has been IE6 replacements and upgrades, and various other forms of API and run-time and source-code compatibility, and translators.

Some of this zombie software lives on ten and twenty years past expectations, and longer.

Apple throws features and hardware under the bus when it gets in the way of their skating to where they think the puck will be.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#44

Post by jinushaun » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 8:14 PM UTC

A lot of complaints ignore one simple solution: Don't buy/install/upgrade to Lion. Your copy of Tiger/Panther/Leopard/Snow Leopard won't magically stop working when Lion is released. Don't buy that shiny new MBP with Lion pre-installed. We're in a recession anyway--and your current laptop still works. Save your money.

My Dell netbook is still running 10.6 because 10.6.2 broke support for Atom processors. Yeah, it's annoying not to have the latest version of 10.6, but 10.6 still works.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#45

Post by coob » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 8:31 PM UTC

cosmicray wrote: post #40

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.

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.

1) Bento.

2) Applescripts do not compile to machine code.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#46

Post by brudgers » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 9:06 PM UTC

guptaneil wrote: post #32

thought_alarm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

>"Apple does go through heroic lengths to preserve backward compatibility

Hardly. They could easily provide backward compatibility if desktop versions of OSX were easily virtualized and doing so officialy supported - which is the primary route by which Microsoft has provided backward compatibility (i.e code dependent on 16 bit libraries under x64 and legacy applications under Vista and 7).

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#47

Post by yuhong » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 9:07 PM UTC

Some non-programming related examples: It would be nice to have all AMAs on reddit be non-anonymous, but it would not be backward-compatible with the organizations out there who still try to control the message. I never advocated requiring non-anonymous Glassdoor reviews for a similar reason.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#48

Post by adrianN » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 9:30 PM UTC

JunkDNA wrote: post #36

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.

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.

The Cisco VPN client for OS X is crap though. Whenever my Mac crashes with a kernel panic, Cisco is to blame.

You should better whish for your employer to switch to something that can be readily used with onboard methods.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#49

Post by yuhong » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 9:36 PM UTC

cosmicray wrote: post #40

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.

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.

Yea, AppleWorks 6 was one of the first Carbon apps, and BTW Apple did not eliminate any Carbon APIs in the PPC->Intel transitions, meaning that all your early Carbon apps still using QuickDraw, WorldScript, the old pre-Carbon Event Manager, the old pre-OS 9 File Manager limited to 31 character filenames etc. can still be recompiled for 32-bit Intel.

Re: 10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

#50

Post by X-Istence » Sun, Feb 27, 2011, 9:44 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #46

guptaneil wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

> "Apple does go through heroic lengths to preserve backward compatibility Hardly. They could easily provide backward compatibility if desktop versions of OSX were easily virtualized and doing so officialy supported - which is the primary route by which Microsoft has provided backward compatibility (i.e code dependent on 16 bit libraries under x64 and legacy applications under Vista and 7).

Microsoft is virtualising Windows XP on top of Windows 7 on the x86 platform. That is for their XP mode that is available in Windows 7.

Microsoft in Windows 7 for legacy applications allow the users to select a target OS, at that point it is not virtualising that OS but having certain system calls act like they would in those older versions of Windows. As far as I am aware as a developer nothing gets "virtualised", it is a compatibility shim. See this wikipedia article:

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

This is how Windows provided support for 16 bit on Windows 32 bit, and how Windows provides support for 32 bit on Windows 64. Clever piece of code.

What you are suggesting is almost impossible on Mac OS X without also emulating an entire different instruction set ALA qemu. Running OS9 on x86 just isn't in the cards, Rosetta provided support for PowerPC on x86, and Apple apparently has looked at the download stats for Rosetta and figured it was time to let it go. Most apps have been PowerPC + Intel for a long time now.