Ron Schenone

Apple Snow Leopard – It Only Runs On Intel Machines

Posted by on Aug 27, 2009 | 11 Comments

Not being an Apple person, I like reading about the new Snow Leopard operating system.  I enjoyed reading this from the AP:

Snow Leopard is a relatively cheap upgrade, costing $29 for an individual user who has Leopard, the previous operating system. A “family pack” for five users costs $49.

For Mac owners using the older Tiger operating system, switching to Snow Leopard costs $169, or $229 for a family pack. That “box set” includes the latest iLife and iWork software for such tasks as movie editing, photo organizing and word processing. Buying the DVD is the only upgrade option for consumers — you can’t download the software.

What’s the catch? Well, part of the reason Snow Leopard can promise faster, better applications is that it’s designed for Macs with Intel chips, which Apple started using in early 2006. It won’t run on older Macs with the previous PowerPC family of chips. The launch of the new operating system is a hint to get a new computer.

I find this kind of ironic since it was Apple that did a lot of bad mouthing about Vista. Apple criticized Vista for not running on older hardware. But when it comes to their operating systems, it is OK to screw the consumer on systems that are only 3 years old. My point is not to start a Microsoft vs Apple argument. My point is that Apple and Microsoft appear to have more concern about its bottom line and damn the consumer. Though I must admit that I wish that Microsoft would have offered Vista users an upgrade to Windows 7 for only $29.

Comments welcome.

Source

PS I just read a rumor that Snow Leopard will have an anti-virus program. If this is true, us PC users are going to laugh our asses off!

  • Ryan Farmer

    PCs that are 3 years old are no longer worth the $120-200 it takes to upgrade to the new Windows, so I suppose your argument is academic.

    At any rate, this is no surprise, it’s been a long time coming.

    I’d really suspect it has a lot more to do with making you buy a new machine by the way, as Windows doesn’t depend on x86 either.

    Windows NT and betas of Windows 2000 have ran on at least half a dozen architectures and there’s really no reason it still couldn’t.

    Any smart programmer that doesn’t want to be married to a particular platform will make a portable application. It doesn’t mean that it will run worse on any architecture or OS just because it’s portable, it just means that the program doesn’t overly depend on the API of one operating system or the features exclusive to one processor family.

    Linux has been ported to well over a dozen CPU architectures but I doubt you’d find anyone complaining it runs poorly on an x86 PC.

    id Software’s game engines have ran on x86 PC, PPC and x86 Mac, x86 Linux, x86 XBOX, PPC XBOX 360, and even the Playstation 3.

    Portability is the sign of a good developer with their mind on the future.

    Usually when things are not ported to Linux, it’s either because the developers are idiots or Windows fanboys, or because the company knows damned well they can’t have backalley deals that let their copy protection viruses hook into the Linux kernel, while Microsoft and Apple are all too willing to oblige if the price is right.

    There’s no reason at all your PowerPC Mac can’t live another 5-6 years as a Linux machine though, Linus Torvalds uses Fedora because they’ve always had great PPC support and he used to use that architecture.

  • Ryan Farmer

    On a side note (and I know I tend to be long winded, sorry), the reason Linux usage has tripled since Vista came out is because Microsoft isn’t even trying to pretend to be innovative any more, instead you have their DRM getting “in your face” and Microsoft and their “partners” at the game studios and recording industry trying to figure out new ways to turn you upside down and shake.

    When Microsoft starts talking about Windows polling hardware ports for “prohibited devices” and implementing resource hogging DRM components that anyone who encodes a media file can demand be used, you know that they are surely not on your side.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

    Thanks Ryan for the explanation.

  • f4rLL

    It’s interesting that you view it as them dropping the support for the older systems when in fact most of the PowerPC systems were already not meeting the system requirements for leopard.

    Although, I doubt that was even their reasoning for not continuing to support the PowerPC architecture.

    It’s far more likely that they chose not to support the legacy architecture to allow for the re-write of a new completely 64 bit Finder and many of the system applications. – The more probable motivation for removing / cleaning up the old PowerPC support code.

    Both improving performance and freeing up 7GB of storage space as well as removing the required development libraries to support the old architecture, creating both a snappier development environment and compiler because of no longer having to compile “universal” applications.

    I think that most people would agree that in order for the technology industry to advance we have to be willing to let go of legacy systems.

    As well as the uses that have been mentioned for the old systems they will continue to operate as they have since they were released, granted a few OS releases have improved some of their systems and provided new features.

    You can hardly call that abandoning customers.

  • http://wp3.lockergnome.com/nexus/blade/ Ron Schenone

    f4rLL,
    Thanks for the info.

  • Pingback: frakturfreak (frakturfreak) 's status on Thursday, 27-Aug-09 23:17:39 UTC - Identi.ca

  • Chris Nguyen

    http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=5C8553F3-1A64-67EA-E4E46E6D125ED264

    Beefed up security?

    Although Apple hasn’t said much about efforts to beef up security in Snow Leopard, reports started circulating this week about a little-known addition that could be used down the road to strengthen the OS. Users with access to the final build spotted an unusual file that extends a File Quarantine feature already part of Leopard. Currently, if you download a file using Safari, Mail or iChat, Leopard warns you that it’s from the Internet when you open it — sort of a cautionary “Do you really want to open this file?”

    Snow Leopard takes that warning a step further and will scan all files downloaded by Safari, Mail, or iChat for Trojan horses or other malware. It will then put up an alert saying the file could damage your computer. The warning also apparently tells you to put the file in the trash.

    Intego, which makes anti-virus software for Macs, highlighted the addition, as did Gizmodo. At this point, the feature offers limited protection, as it apparently checks for just two known Mac trojans, according to the Register.

    Updated signatures for newly discovered Trojans will apparently be downloaded by Software Update and added to the “XProtect.plist” file. Computerworld confirmed that the the XProtect.plist file is indeed part of Snow Leopard.

    Yeah, there is somewhat of an anti-virus program, in a sense that it checks the file rather than try to disinfect you. But this is a good improvement towards Snow Leopard.

  • http://www.twitter.com/richgilberto Rich Gilberto

    I feel your argument that Apple is abandoning PPC users is a little weak. They have gone on for several years offering “universal” versions of (almost) all their software at the expense of a perfect experience on their intel machines. The operating system is quicker and more efficient for the sole reason that it is entirely written to take advantage of the intel processors of the machines (as much as I dislike proprietary technology, when it catches on it’s a thing of beauty.

    Basically what I’m trying to say is, Snow Leopard having support for PPC machines is, well, Leopard. And we already have that.

  • Ryan Farmer

    @f4rLL: You’re right, only the high end (think G5 and higher) would run Leopard at a reasonable speed.

    I’d still kill to get my hands on a dual or quad G5 Mac Pro, those would make one hell of a Linux machine.

    I may snap up another PPC Mac (I already have a dual 1.2 Ghz G4 running Fedora) if this news of Snow Leopard leaving PPC users out in the cold ;) sends the price crashing down on ebay.

    At this point it makes sense for Apple to ditch PowerPC with Mac OS, they supported it long enough for most users that already had one to want to upgrade, and the Universal Binary thing was making DMG setup files for things like Firefox almost a third larger than the Windows or Linux EXE/tarball.

  • Pingback: Apple Snow Leopard - It Only Runs On Intel Machines - Intel Blog

  • Pingback: Apple Snow Leopard - It Only Runs On Intel Machines - Apple Blog