But seriously, at some point moving forward at least allows for much better file sizes and performance than trying to make those people holding onto a G3 iBook happy. At that same point I'm sure Apple keeps its resources "efficient" aka minimal so having a team appointed to legacy hardware isn't worth the time/money.
With that, Leopard's not a bad place to stop and if Snow Leopard is only a performance boost, then by time the next 'feature-rich' OS comes out most people will be in upgrade mode anyhow. Of course, I'm in the camp of upgrading every 3-4 years, so sorry to those G5 tower owners. :-/
This transition is less about file size and more about code optimizations.
Dropping PPC sounds totally logical for Snow Leopard considering that optimizing multithreaded execution and taking full advantage of the CPU and GPU features are extremely hardware dependent tasks thus it has to be done separately for each platform.
If Apple kept PPC support, it would take twice as long to make all the necessary optimizations in the code (compared to an x86-only version). Since the share of PPC in the installed base will be almost ZERO by 2009 (and rapidly dropping afterwards), it's simply doesn't make sense to delay the whole OS for the sake of PPC support.
the Nook Color proved it was an undercover tablet all along, Barnes and Noble has hit back with this latest Nook as proof of its focus on one thing: reading.
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But seriously, at some point moving forward at least allows for much better file sizes and performance than trying to make those people holding onto a G3 iBook happy. At that same point I'm sure Apple keeps its resources "efficient" aka minimal so having a team appointed to legacy hardware isn't worth the time/money.
With that, Leopard's not a bad place to stop and if Snow Leopard is only a performance boost, then by time the next 'feature-rich' OS comes out most people will be in upgrade mode anyhow. Of course, I'm in the camp of upgrading every 3-4 years, so sorry to those G5 tower owners. :-/
This transition is less about file size and more about code optimizations.
Dropping PPC sounds totally logical for Snow Leopard considering that optimizing multithreaded execution and taking full advantage of the CPU and GPU features are extremely hardware dependent tasks thus it has to be done separately for each platform.
If Apple kept PPC support, it would take twice as long to make all the necessary optimizations in the code (compared to an x86-only version). Since the share of PPC in the installed base will be almost ZERO by 2009 (and rapidly dropping afterwards), it's simply doesn't make sense to delay the whole OS for the sake of PPC support.