

10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications - bep
http://www.9to5mac.com/53977/10-7-lion-drops-support-for-powerpc-applications

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51Cards
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.

~~~
allenbrunson
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.

~~~
MrFoof
Back in 1999, at the start of my career, I did a bit of "catch all IT" for a
company, which included help desk and desktop support.

There was one fellow who hemmed and hawed at having to use Windows 2000. He
wanted to stick with Windows 95. He ended up migrated, but he spent a furious
amount of time getting the Windows 3.1 File Manager working. Apparently on his
Windows 95 laptop he had brought it over as well.

He also was using a release of SideKick from 1992.

\-----

How is this relevant? I recently talked to someone who does provide IT support
for that same company. That same person? Still running SideKick. Still
complains about not having File Manager. Also is hemming and hawing about
having to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Company is also still on 10Mbps networking. The owner still refuses to use
copper, since they're a fiber optic distributor (multimode fiber is run to
each and every desk).

------
Sidnicious
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.

~~~
adsr
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.

~~~
cosmicray
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.

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

------
treblig
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.

~~~
guptaneil
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.

~~~
adsr
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac#Release)

~~~
guptaneil
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-...](http://www.mactalk.com.au/11/72330-install-microsoft-
office-2008-snow-leopard-without-rosetta.html))

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.

~~~
adsr
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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iuguy
This is an interesting turn up for the books. While I use some universal
binaries here and there, I don't run any PowerPC code on any Mac kit.

I wonder though, if Apple were to transition to their A4 chips for Macbooks
whether we'll see Rosetta come back in an ARM compatible flavour.

------
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.

~~~
Hoff
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.

------
jckarter
I wonder if they'll stick to this for the final version. They tried to remove
256-color mode support in 10.5.something but backpedaled when the Mac
Starcraft players went nuts.

------
adulau
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.

~~~
vetinari
Many ppc Macs use nvidia graphics. There is no proprietary nvidia driver for
powerpc.

On the other hand, 10.5 runs fine on ppc. As a poster above noted, your old OS
does not magically stop working after release of new version.

------
jinushaun
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.

------
nailer
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.

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

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

------
jedberg
This makes me sad because some of my old fun games won't work anymore (well,
without a VM at least), but since I rarely play those, I like the fact that
all the other stuff I use will be forced to "go native".

------
yuhong
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.

------
rasur
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/

~~~
pieter
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 developers creating intel-only apps, which you
won't be able to run, but that already happens on a big scale because almost
nobody uses PPC macs anymore. This has nothing to do with Lion.

The bigger problem with Lion may be the dropping of 32-bit macs. Most people
don't really know if their mac is 64-bit (Core 2 and up) or 32-bit only (Intel
Core's, which is mostly the early Mac Mini's, iMacs and Macbooks I think).
It's good for developers who want to write 64-bit only apps though, because
once Lion has been adopted and SL support is dropped, they can just say
'Requires Lion', instead of the somewhat awkward 'Requires Snow Leopard on a
64-bit Mac' right now.

~~~
justincormack
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.

