10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

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

by bep • 15 years ago

41 50 15 years ago

_b8r0• 15 years ago

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.

rasur• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

tvon• 15 years ago

The first Intel Macbook Pro is Core Duo as well.

pornel• 15 years ago

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

justincormack• 15 years ago

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.

nailer3• 15 years ago

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.

rplacd• 15 years ago

So that's the secret behind the AHT!

callumjones• 15 years ago

I don't think it is actually OS 9 (how would OS 9 handle the current model SMCs?), I think it just looks like OS 9 but is instead running OS X/Darwin.

lucaswagner• 15 years ago

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

nailer3• 15 years ago

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

treblig• 15 years ago

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.

guptaneil3• 15 years ago

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.

adsr3• 15 years ago

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...

microtonal• 15 years ago

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.

jedberg• 15 years ago

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".

Sidnicious• 15 years ago

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.

adsr3• 15 years ago

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.

nnutter• 15 years ago

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.

JunkDNA• 15 years ago

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.

cosmicray• 15 years ago

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.

51Cards• 15 years ago

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.

siglesias• 15 years ago

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

nathos• 15 years ago

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.

jwatzman• 15 years ago

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

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

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.

guptaneil3• 15 years ago

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.

jad• 15 years ago

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.

ohkine• 15 years ago

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.

nailer3• 15 years ago

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

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

allenbrunson• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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).

jckarter• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

rbarooah• 15 years ago

Although you could just keep running leopard.

vetinari• 15 years ago

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.

teilo• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

jinushaun• 15 years ago

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.

yuhong2• 15 years ago

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.

10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

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