Apple Mac mini purchase claimed to ship with Snow Leopard disc - Page 2

Likely they still are. I worked in several large ad/marketing firms in NYC and they all had very slow adoption rates of new Mac hardware and software because of the cost of replacing hundreds of computers + software. One firm I worked at, with dozens of offices around the world, was still using OS9 three years after OSX was released, and their hardware was older. They had an in-house policy of upgrading hardware every 6-7 years if it was deemed necessary.

Smaller shops may adopt newer technology faster, but, I doubt they are replacing 300+ Macs like the companies where I worked. The only time you see people upgrading every 3-4 years is mostly for personal use or small businesses. But given the current economic climate, many people will likely put off those costs until next year or later once things hopefully turn around.

Also, most of these companies won't immediately upgrade to Snow Leopard anyway until the bugs have been worked out and is proven to be very stable.

I'm not saying Apple should support older hardware in the new OS, I'm just saying that adoption of the new OS will be slow because there's a lot of legacy hardware out there being used by large companies on which the new OS won't run. It won't be as slow as OS9 was, but, it will be slower than Tiger to Leopard.

This is a good point.

Leopard is for PPC and Snow Leopard is for Intel.

If there were any advantage to a 64 PPC version we would have it by now.

I dunno, I still think September 4th is the earliest we'll see it. Monday seems too late to announce for a Friday release.

I'm curious. With what Mac are they planning on replacing the G5's?

Have you seen this:

http://9to5mac.com/snow-leopard-sale

The Intel transition ended three years August (xServe G5 > Core), which means nothing PPC is under AppleCare as of this coming week. There is no mere coincidence in that timeline of Snow Leopard's release.

Problem is, there are plenty of xServes running like crazy in many places, as reliable as they were three years ago, many of those educational, who will now have to re-purchase a lot of very expensive server hardware to be up to date. As recently as this year's Ed update meetings, Apple reps claimed there was no decision yet to make Server an Intel-only app. So now a (larger than you might think) number of IT need to tell our bosses that we need to spend $2700 to get a $500 (retail) update.

The idea that universal would take up too much space on any recent machine is ludicrous - if the new OS can delete the remaining 10.5 PPC code after 10.6 installation, they must be doing something like Monolingual does, which would simply have to flip-flop its behavior after checking exactly one flag. Coding this is choice trivial if they already know how to remove legacy code.

If it were a chore, I'd agree. But it's not. Given xCode and the fact that 10.6 has been taught how to remove 10.5 PPC code post-install, then it's a dual-compile as always and maybe a dozen lines of code to have the same routine remove the Intel code post-install for the same space savings. Unless the optimizations can't run respectfully on PPC, or can't fit on a single DVD, there's no reason to do what they did.

Apple is selling about 4x to 5x the number of X86 Macs than it was selling PPC Macs the year before the transition to Intel. They only sold 17.2M PPC Macs from 2001 to 2005. Of those, you cant expect Apple to support all the way back to 2001 (example: G3 400MHz iMac). That really only leave the year of the transition when the G5 Power Mac was still being sold up until a little over 3 years ago.

Those were expensive machines and they do not account for the majority of the 600K total PPC Macs Apple would have sold 4 years ago. That means you only have about 1 million G5 Power Macs that would even be eligible for Snow Leopard. Of those 1 million how many would even want to bother with the update, especially when they find out there is very little visual changes and all the under-the-hood changes could not even help the Power Mac anyway.

Now consider the potential cost to R&D Snow Leopard for PPC to such a small number of potential buyers, with the actual number of Snow Leopard for G5 Power Mac because people with older systems arent as likely to update their OS and cant even use GCD and OpenCL.

Now multiply whatever number get by $29, figure out the net margin, then subtract gross R&D costs for developing for the PPC architecture from 4 years ago. The numbers dont add up from a business standpoint.

Lastly, Apple has always had a very fast adoption rate. Snow Leopard will push this to a whole notha le-va' because the price is very low. Missing a few antiquated machines arent going to change the fact that Apple will likely sell more Macs next quarter alone than they did for PPC four years ago.

I have, and it doesn't change my mind. It would be amazing to the point of insanity if Apple announced on Monday it was out that Friday - that would be a very close announcement at the best of times, but since it would mean the software was shipping the month before everyone was told to expect it, it would be even more ridiculous.

I'm saying such a statement doesn't make sense. How will SL uptake be slow if G5s only represent maybe 15% of all actively used Mac machines? Haven't you noticed how much Apple's sales have exploded after the introduction of the Intel platform? That really waters down the impact of not supporting G5s. People complained about Leopard not supporting G3s, that didn't significantly impact Leopard's adoption either.


It's not just about cross compiling. You still have to test the new code on the old platform. The code still needs to be continually tested, and maintaining that testing on a platform that's over the hill and only represents a small portion of your user base doesn't make sense. The big under the hood changes such as OpenCL won't work on video cards sold with or available for the G5. Grand Central almost certainly requires a fair amount of optimization that I'm betting is architecture specific and really only benefits the G5 quad, and the reports are that the people that bring in a G5 quad for repairs get a Mac Pro in return.

There's no point in adding all those optimizations for a platform that's been discontinued three years ago. Without those two under the hood optimizations, you're missing out on the biggest benefits from Snow Leopard anyway. The hardware is perfectly capable of most of the other changes, but there are still expenses in development that make it a less viable target.

whole notha le-va'

Funny how the disk label is in english while the installer is in some sort of Japanese.

Im glad someone appreciated it.

Japanese.

That in itself isn't an issue, because you can choose to set up whatever language that you want to use when the system first starts up.

I think the main issue is that the photo of the installer disc looks doctored.

When you start using dollars signs for a discussion, can you provide us the calculation and not do a marketing/sales director gloss over, without providing the actual meat.

Pet pev of mine, when I had to listen to my marketing/sales director try to bluff arguments with me.

What are the actual numbers?

The photo of the DVD was taken using a white iPhone.

FWIW you can see in the reflection that the picture was taken with a White iPhone 3G/S

EDIT: Dammit! You beat me to the punch bloggerblog... ARGH LOL

You do know that Japanese uses a lot of Chinese characters but not vice-versa, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

My 2 cents...

The bulk of the "hardcore design and broadcast" businesses will still be running a mixture of PPC with 10.4.x and PPC/Intel with 10.5.x

I agree the adoption of Snow Leopard will be slow in these markets. Whatever new Mac Pros they get will probably be downgraded to 10.5.x to fit in with their main installed base of 10.4.x/ 10.5.x PPC/Intel Mac Pros.

Smaller and more nimble studios (say in the 5 to 30 employee range) will adopt Snow Leopard as they get new Macs through 2010... Probably trickling in from the admin/ business/ project management side, with the production Macs going Snow Leopard probably only 2nd half of 2010 starting with those Macs doing "simpler" or more "straight forward" Photoshop/ CS4/ Final Cut/ Aperture work.

It will take a good 6 months for good stable support for Snow Leopard from 3rd party manufacturers IMO of that real expensive broadcast hardware eg. Blackmagic, AJA, audio interfaces and upwards in price and spec. Also all that RAID hardware drivers will take a while to be real good and stable on Snow Leopard... Since there are a lot more diverse RAID setups now since Apple stopped making their XRaid for most markets.

Notice the mispelling of Time Capsule as Time "Cupsule" in this screenshot: FWIW:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC...mco=MzgzMjcyOA

You can now order the standalone version or is that an error?

That's 10.FIVE.6, and I guess many people have made that mistake and ordered Leopard. :P

Mac Pros - they're pretty much all G5 Power Macs, apart from a handful of G5 iMacs which are used for image review/catalog.

The freedom to upgrade came because our publishing database/cms software has finally been upgraded from a classic app to a web-based solution, which also allows them to finally upgrade from Panther..

It also allows them to normalise the software on each machine to the same level as there was a complete mixture of different versions of quark, photoshop, illustrator, acrobat, etc etc.

As to the previous comment about keeping old hardware running because once it's it's past it's infant mortality rate it'll be fine doesn't wash - new G5 parts are not easy to find (at least in the UK..), and most of that is ebay level spare parts, and you end up cannibalising to keep things going. IT doesn't like that, so once hardware is out of manufacturer backed warranty/extended warranty periods, they replace with new hardware.

As I said before, the last legacy software hurdle has now been removed, so we can now upgrade with no issue.

The team using the macs are really looking forward to the extra speed the intel platform will deliver, and it'll make support a darned site easier with everyone using the same kit.

The rest of the company are using Dells running XP, with a few odd Vista machines floating about, and yes, some things are stuck in limbo because some of the the other systems which are business critical will not run on Vista/Windows 7, hell, the web-based reservations system doesn't work properly on anything but IE6/7..

But, the software is in the process of being updated, and once it is, everything will get upgraded as per the macs have been - or we start the process of looking at other software which *is* compatible.

It makes me wonder sometimes if there is ever any review here. And this is not the first time.

If I really have a good proof and a good lead, would I broadcast it with such crappy photos? For an online site that considers itself an expert in technology, has it ever asked how easy it is to photoshop? Look at the artistic renditions of the iTablet or whatever you want to call it, they are so beautiful, so real but the artists never presented them as such.

And the images provided are not even good ones. And you accepted them as proofs?

But forget the photos as proofs. Do you really think Apple would release it first in Japan and with a mini at that?

Come on, do you even think critically? If you did, would you even publish this? The more tragic part is a similar lack of critical thinking among some readers here -- accepting articles like this as real news?

I understand that there are days when you do not have enough articles to justify the site; but you have some readers who seem to take the time to write more critically and thoughtfully. Why not invite them, and perhaps pay them to write -- to increase the number of credible contents and perhaps the quality of contents?

That appears to be a post on a Japanese forum. Everyone misspells things from time to time.

Um, yeah. I can sell you a clue for low, low price of $29.99.

Snow Leopard was designed to take advantage of Intel chips... there is no benefit to PowerPC Macs and so no reason to upgrade them. And you're absolutely correct in thinking that no one will throw away their PPC computers just to upgrade... PPC was far superior to Intel... too bad IBM was lame in keeping up with Intel.

I agree! My iMac is still going strong after 3.5 years. I've been using the "beta" version of Snow Leopard for a month now and it works flawlessly... and i bet it will continue to work fine for a few more years. Waiting for the next generation before I upgrade, hopefully it's a quad-core machine.

Snow Leopard still has Rosetta as a voluntary install... Although Windows still supports crap as far back as Windows ME, they have dropped support for 98 and their hardware support only goes back a few years. Even though Snow Leopard only supports Intel Macs, it runs much better on older Intel hardware than Windows Vista can ever possibly dream of.

If I tell you that the sun is significantly larger than the moon do you need actual numbers for a logic discussion about this fact to be true? The actual numbers for every value are irrelevant as its clear that its a waste of resources to support so few old Macs.

Those are very different things. Rosetta allow for legacy apps to be supported on the modern OS by using an app for emulation. MS is maintaining more native support for legacy apps with legacy OS underpinnings. In MS defense, legacy apps will run natively, but since the HW has increased so much since the PPC days and Rosetta is well done one is not likely to see much, if any slow down.

Hopefully there will be plenty of GCD optimized apps and better development of GCD in 10.7 to really make use of multiple cores. I have yet to see any testing that shows that multiple cores at slower clock speeds to the equivalent price point of the dual core at faster clock speeds is better using Snow Leopard for every day tasks.

You might be surprised by the hardware some people in the business cling to. I have a friend who's been a pro photographer for over 30 years and in addition to the Intel Macs and PPC PowerMac G5s he has, he still has two Powermac 9600s running Mac OS 8.6 and Photoshop 4 IN PRODUCTION. What amazes me is that the old SCSI drives in those machines seem to be bulletproof. I can't see modern SATA drives ever lasting 13 years.

Next month when SL is released, how many legacy Macs will be rendered inoperable? If they worked before SL, they'll work just the same after.

It must be pointed out, as well, that one of the goals of SL is to develop an efficient. leaner code aimed at optimizing Intel-based Macs. Not cluttering up SL to accommodate legacy systems is consistent with that goal.

No one is going to trash a functioning pre-Intel Mac the day SL comes to market and as such, what's the problem?

Besides, if you were to compare the potential gain Apple would get from motivating some to update their hardware with the small boost to SL sales possible if this software also worked on legacy systems, clearly Apple gains more from the former than the latter.

It should likewise be noted that the cost of purchasing a basic Mac today is significantly lower than it once was. It cost me 10 times more to buy a G4 Tower a few years ago than it costs now to buy a Mini that will run circles around that old hardware. Considering hard drives only last a few years, it makes a lot more sense to buy a whole new computer, including the latest and greatest software, than it does to continue to prop up a system that clearly is going to require maintenance in the near future. If Apple continues on with the Mini that machine will get progressively faster. If speed isn't a significant consideration, then what do you want SL for? If speed is important, then you're likely to want to upgrade equipment to gain even more. If it isn't why care about SL?

First, businesses do not normally jump on an update right away anyway. When money is involved, they want to make sure the update is stable. Second, I suspect most big shops start to update their computers every two three years. So, they probably have a mixture of both Power PC and Intel machines.

Moreover, the speed increase gives serious shops an incentive to upgrade their machines if they have not already. So, Apple may lose some update sales, but it will gain some new Mac sales. Win win anyway you cut it.

Do those computers use plug-ins not available for newer systems, or would a new system not improve productivity?

SCSI drives are generally more expensive. They're supposed to be very well designed and well built, fewer shortcuts taken that would be done on IDE/ATA to keep the price down.

The equivalent of SATA then is some form of IDE/ATA. I've had maybe 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 consumer hard drives fail before it's retired, but haven't yet had a SCSI drive fail yet that I recall.


I agree, I think people are making too big of a deal about the older systems. Consumers owning older systems might not be so prone to pay money to update the software anyway. Pro users are going to follow their needs, but pro users don't account for as big of a percentage of Mac users as they used to, so it makes little sense to suggest that G5 users are going to hurt Snow Leopard adoption by a large margin. If a PowerMac G5 still does what you need, that's great, it may well still work just fine for many years.

First of all, Mr. T, that was a phenomenal example of accidental trolling you just pulled. Kudos.

Now, lets suppose that Trajectory is right, and that SL adoption is significantly slower than it could be if PPC were also supported. How is that a significantly bad thing? Acknowledging potential problems like some high end programs requiring SL for the Grand Central Dispatch features (though I really kind of doubt that there is anything in SL that will make a program not backward compatible with 10.5), we should keep in mind that software adoption issues don't really affect Apple that much.

Microsoft has to be very concerned about adoption of its products for two big reasons: First, it puts all its eggs in one basket, and makes HUGE updates all at once (and that usually happens only once every 5-10 years), introducing a ton of new features and new technology en masse; Second, Microsoft's business is dependent on software sales revenue.

Apple, on the other hand, has been very good about feeding updates gradually, putting out a new OS version every year or two (someone else surely knows the correct span, so I'll just be vague here). And most importantly, Apple's profits come from hardware sales, not software sales. So if Apple sold not a single copy of Snow Leopard, it really wouldn't hurt them any (except for all the SL disks lying around in their warehouse... Lisa time maybe?). New Macs would continue to come with SL, and Apple would move on to 10.7, 10.8, etc, etc. This non-reliance on OS sales is reflected in the fact that Apple really doesn't have any copy protection on the OS, aside from consumer loyalty and individual integrity.

So, my question to Mr. T is this: What potential harm, if any, do you see in a slow adoption rate, versus a fast adoption rate? (that's a serious question, please answer it).

C

Meanwhile Safari 4.0.3 has slowed to a crawl. I swear it's just a conspiracy for me to buy Snow Leopard!

Even people like me with Intel Macs might well choose to not upgrade even though the price of upgrading is so reasonable. It's because in my case, the Mini is two years old and my plan is to run it through to the spring and look to buy a new Mac then. Upgrading the entire system is inevitable in that I now have an HD hybrid camera but my current Mini only has a gig of RAM. Adding RAM, probably having to replace the HD within about a year, and then updating my software will cost me pretty much what a Mini is going to run me a few months down the road. I can't justify spending money on a computer that will be replaced in a few months.

From Apple's perspective, this is a good thing. They sell another computer and SL is a factor. Certainly it's quite the thing that Apple will be speeding up its hardware without sinking so much as a cent into revised hardware. And if my Mini were, let's say a year old with better specs, I'd certainly be spending the cash on SL. Then I would find myself with a faster computer, thanks to the efficiency of SL, causing me to be even happier that I had chosen an Apple over a PC.

I recently bought a netbook and have to say it's not quite the bargain it appears to be. It doesn't come with anything close to the software package provided with every Mac. You can't even burn a DVD without seeking software for that. Apple offers more in terms of software for the money which generates more hardware sales. With PCs, software is less interconnected with hardware and as such companies that provide software look to that product to make their money. No way Microsoft would ever serve up a significant OS upgrade for $29 because there isn't anything in it for them to pretty much give the OS away. My netbook, apparently, will run Windows 7 but if I want to switch to that new OS from XP, it'll cost me way more than $29. In fact, the netbook itself will not cost much more than buying an OS from Microsoft. When you combine that with the fact that Microsoft has earned consumers' mistrust, even if Windows 7 proves to be a decent OS, there is little doubt adoption of that OS will be far more messy than the transition to SL. It'll cost a lot more and after the mess Vista turned out to be, many consumers will be unwilling to buy into the new OS for the first few months. No sense in paying more than $100 for the privilege of being a beta tester for Microsoft.

In contrast, the worst that can be anticipated in relation to SL is that the OS will not support pre-Intel Macs. Pretty small stuff compared to the horrors inflicted on those poor, unsuspecting souls lured into the PC universe through promises of cheaper hardware.