While it's definitely bad that Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs just 3 years after they sold the last machines, expecting any support at all 10 years later is ridiculous.
What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?
This might be too little, too late. They should do what they did with the Intel transition; start selling PCs which can run Mac OS X as an interim measure.
Why might they not do this?
a) makes them look bad
b) well... is there a CPU architecture transition coming up? Last time there was this performance block, it was time to move from PowerPC.
I purchased one of the first Macs that ran on a PowerPC processor and I was profoundly disappointed. Performance was no better than a 68040-based Mac and it was pretty crashy. As time went on and software was updated that machine became less crashy but performace was always poor.
I don't have any insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple felt like they needed a backup plan in case the PowerPC alliance was unsuccessful at matching the speed growth of Intel's products. I'd say the G3 was the first PowerPC CPU that impressed me, I think Apple only stuck with PowerPC for two more generations (the G5).
Meanwhile, Apple has gone through two deprecations of CPU architectures: first PowerPC and then Intel. Macs are nice, but I wish they had the same commitment to backwards compatibility.
New tools lose support for obsolete platforms, film at 11?
It's been 6 years. The world has moved on, and Apple no longer has any commercial interest in PowerPC. You really expect them to keep bothering with it?
If you are compiling for PPC architectures, why are Snow Leopard/Lion of any concern? This is just a pointless whine about nothing in particular. If we all shared your attitude to the advancement of technology, we'd all still be using punch cards. The PowerPC platform is dead. They announced it's death at least 7 years ago. Move on.
There wasn't an issue at all with keeping up with performance. The problem was that IBM was pushing PowerPC more and more into the server space and Apple needed a roadmap that factored in laptops.
If PowerPC is such a great architecture, then why did Apple transition the Mac platform to x86 about 12 years ago? Has PowerPC gotten much better since then?
I hope for Apple users this wil not be the disaster that the switch from Motorola to the PowerPC was. Back then, this is what turned me away from the Mac platform I used to love.
This article has decent points but is definitely just sort of coming from the perspective of being completely unfamiliar with the Mac platform.
Worrying about the App Store taking over on the Mac is misguided. The Mac has never forced the App Store on anyone and the Mac App Store doesn’t even seem to be particularly popular.
“Emulation” (it’s not emulation) is apparently this big problem, except that early M1 Macs show faster Rosetta performance with still-better battery life in many cases.
And yes, Rosetta won’t be around forever, but we have been here before. It wasn’t a problem going from PowerPC to Intel either. If the authors at Android authority ever used a Mac they’d already know this. Anecdotal, but I can’t think of a single pre-Intel program that was lost to the Intel transition that I was using at the time. All the developers checked the box and recompiled, and the dinosaurs like Adobe eventually trudged along.
For those of us who actually used Macs back in the PowerPC days and earlier, there was no such thing as Hackintosh or Boot Camp. The fact that those are going away is essentially inconsequential, especially now that the Mac platform is vastly more popular than it was in 2006.
Why would I want to run Windows on my Mac? It’s been a shitty experience anyway, because even in Intel-land the hardware has been heavily macOS optimized including things like fan and power control. The trackpad driver on Windows was always worse, for example. And again why would you want to run Windows when you spent all this money to not run Windows? It doesn’t make sense especially since so many programs (e.g. 1Password) have their best versions on Mac.
And to put things in perspective... Apple announced in June 2005 that they were going to phase out PowerPC, so anyone actually buying a Powerbook in May 2006 knew that they were going to get a reduced lifetime.
There was 4 years from the official announcement to dropping support in the latest OS and 7 years between the official announcement and the last official software release.
What ties people to PowerPC these days? Surely the speed and power consumption of the latest Intel machines is 100x better?
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