7 ms·

10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

41 points by bep 16y ago

iuguy 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
    The first Intel Macbook Pro is Core Duo as well.
  - pornel 16y ago
    According to http://adium.im/sparkle/ http://adium.im/sparkle/ 95% of their users have 64-bit Intel CPU.
  - justincormack 16y 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.
nailer 16y 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 16y ago
  So that's the secret behind the AHT!
- callumjones 16y 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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- lucaswagner 16y ago
  It's actually just a tool that runs in EFI; kinda like the AHT. Looks like OS 9, but it isn't.
  - nailer 16y ago
    I wonder why they used the OS 9 L & F? Was very odd seeing it start on a MacBook.
treblig 16y 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.
- guptaneil 16y 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.
  - adsr 16y 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#Release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac#R...
    - guptaneil 16y ago
      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-2008-snow-leopard-without-rosetta.html http://www.mactalk.com.au/11/72330-install-microsoft-office-...) 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 16y ago
        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.
- 16y ago
jedberg 16y 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 16y 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.
- adsr 16y 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 16y 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.
    - ben1040 16y ago
      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. For what it's worth, the website (www.derlien.com) for this project still calls the universal binary version "beta," but it's been that way since 2006 and has worked just fine.
  - JunkDNA 16y 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.
51Cards 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68K_emulator
- thought_alarm 16y 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.
jckarter 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
  Although you could just keep running leopard.
- vetinari 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
yuhong 16y 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.

41 points by bep 16y ago

iuguy 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
  The first Intel Macbook Pro is Core Duo as well.
- pornel 16y ago
  According to http://adium.im/sparkle/ http://adium.im/sparkle/ 95% of their users have 64-bit Intel CPU.
- justincormack 16y 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.

nailer 16y 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 16y ago
So that's the secret behind the AHT!
callumjones 16y 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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
lucaswagner 16y ago
It's actually just a tool that runs in EFI; kinda like the AHT. Looks like OS 9, but it isn't.
- nailer 16y ago
  I wonder why they used the OS 9 L & F? Was very odd seeing it start on a MacBook.

treblig 16y 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.

guptaneil 16y 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.
- adsr 16y 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#Release http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2008_for_Mac#R...
  - guptaneil 16y ago
    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-2008-snow-leopard-without-rosetta.html http://www.mactalk.com.au/11/72330-install-microsoft-office-...) 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 16y ago
      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.
16y ago

jedberg 16y 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 16y 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.

adsr 16y 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 16y 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.
  - ben1040 16y ago
    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. For what it's worth, the website (www.derlien.com) for this project still calls the universal binary version "beta," but it's been that way since 2006 and has worked just fine.
- JunkDNA 16y 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.

51Cards 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68K_emulator
thought_alarm 16y 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.

jckarter 16y 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 16y 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 16y ago
Although you could just keep running leopard.
vetinari 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.

yuhong 16y 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.