10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

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.

From the point of view of an IT professional, this is a big deal.<p>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 <i>are</i> oodles of copies of PowerPC applications out there in the wild.

You can check out all of your applications to see if you're running any PowerPC software. System Profiler -&#62; Applications -&#62; sort by Kind. Only culprit on my system is some random CS4 stuff.

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.<p>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.

This is going to make my life miserable.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I believe I will have to setup an instance of Snow Leopard in Parallels, if I move to Lion.<p>Well, I don't fault Apple for this. Perhaps it will force this nonsense to stop sooner than later.

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.

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.

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.<p>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.

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.

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".

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.

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/