Fret not, 64-bit Leopard will still work with your machine

We've seen there's a bit of confusion after a certain not-entirely-lucid portion of Steve's WWDC keynote yesterday, wherein he announced "top to bottom" 64-bit integration in Leopard, what he characterized as a first for the industry. As we all know, Apple is only shipping on one version of Leopard, so that led some to believe they'd be left in the lurch, their G4s, G5s, Core Solos, and Core Duos rotting on Tiger and unable to make the jump past 10.4. Thankfully, that ain't the case.

As we mentioned yesterday (but didn't really dig into), Leopard isn't entirely like Windows, where you're expected to install the 32 or 64-bit variants of the OS based on the system / CPU that will run it. We discussed this with Apple, which expressed that this latest version of OS X takes a far simpler approach for the end-user than multiple hardware-centric OS versions, opting instead to run both 64 and 32-bit apps and drivers on any 64-bit machine (read: Core 2 Duo-based), and defaulting to the usual 32-bit app / driver operation on 32-bit Macs. In other words, users with 64-bit capable Intel machines will see a performance boost if running 64-bit apps, but those that don't have a newer Apple box won't be at all penalized -- nor will they be unable to upgrade. So, we cool?

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 12th 2007 9:44PM]

Ogvor,
I can't answer your question but I LOVE your opening sentence!!! LOL

[miles Posted Jun 12th 2007 8:01PM]

If I recall correctly, all Core 2s are 64-bit.

Core's (Without the 2) are 32-bit though.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 18th 2007 7:30AM]

You're kidding, right?

You answered your own question.

[miles Posted Jul 21st 2007 4:26PM]

@Mike
I know tons who are ditching OS X for Linux though.

@Brutha
It's to be expected because, you know, Apple just had WWDC.
The same thing happens when CES or E3 comes around. It's just common sense.

[(Unverified) Posted Jun 16th 2007 6:53AM]

What a bullshit guys. Who said, that Apple suxx. I know 4 men that came to Mac from a PC, cause of my advice. And now they are happy. They forgot about system errors, viruses, hardware upgrades. PC era has past, Mac is coming back again.