Seems to me that it is not too early for systems to be packaged with SL. It does not take an unimaginable amount of human error for one of those boxes to get moved to the wrong place and shipped to a customer. I am not saying that I believe this story. I am just saying that it "could" be true.
That will, unfortunately, dramatically slow down the adoption of Snow Leopard and any software designed to run only with SL.
not really. all machines released starting 3 years ago were Intel and most companies made the switch to doing Intel versions (sometimes Intel only) a while ago. I think Quicken and Adobe are the last major holdouts and you can always use the option Rosetta install until they catch up.
Anyone at this point with a PPC that doesn't buy a new machine is probably not doing anything that would really benefit from Snow Leopard and will be able to use Leopard just fine until that machine breaks down. and then they buy a new machine (get a lot more cost benefit given the strides in the last 3 years), with Snow Leopard etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trajectory
You really think all those design and audio/visual shops using PPC computers will just throw them away to use Snow Leopard because it only costs $29?? LOL!
You actually think the majority of design and AV shops are still using PPC machines. Likely not. And even those that are will be just fine running Leopard until the machines break down.
the combination of an OS optimized for an Intel Processor, the faster processors in the machines, the better graphics set ups, more ram, bigger hard drives etc plus the end of even the extended warranty period makes this the prime time to upgrade, especially for those types of shops.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac Voyer
Seems to me that it is not too early for systems to be packaged with SL. It does not take an unimaginable amount of human error for one of those boxes to get moved to the wrong place and shipped to a customer. I am not saying that I believe this story. I am just saying that it "could" be true.
personally i think it is a fake. I just can't see Apple making that kind of a mistake.
HOWEVER, i do think the release is soon and that the 'ship by' emails with Aug 28th could be soon. that date is the one by which the box goes in the mail so it is possible that come Monday we could see the date of release go up, it could be Sept 1 (which fits the Sept release). At which point they will start shipping machines with SL preloaded and the in store stock gets the added disks until those machines run out. I suspect they figure a good number of folks will do the data transfer thing for the $100 so they can get their machine updated at the same time. heck it could be a selling point for that data thing
You actually think the majority of design and AV shops are still using PPC machines. Likely not. And even those that are will be just fine running Leopard until the machines break down.
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.
No, but Apple is probably selling more Intel Macs per quarter than they sold in a year when they only had PPC. And there aren't many PPCs newer than 3 years old, Apple replaced the G5 Quad three years ago this month. Most people replace their computers when it's about 4 to 5 years years old, and that remaining slice is a small percentage of Apple's potential market. Does it really make sense to still support them with the new OS.
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.
Apple has already stated the Snow Leopard is not a feature upgrade, but an optimization of Leopard. That is why the upgrade only costs $29.
There are no real new features, it just lets the new architecture run leaner and meaner and scraps the PPC architecture for the 90% of us that don't need it.
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.
Not because it's $29, but because they are getting into the point at which they can replace the machines for tax purposes, and most are no longer covered by their warranties.
The company I work for has a publishing arm, and they're about to replace all of their Apple hardware because the G5's are all out of warranty, have zero book value to the business, and they can get tax breaks by buying this year. When they do purchase, all the machines will likely be running SL.
Companies don't like having lots of old unsupported hardware around - of the machines we have at least 80% of the G5's have started to have major hardware issues the last few months, most of it we've gotten around, but the time has come to move on.
I'm curious. With what Mac are they planning on replacing the G5's?
You, sir, are utterly wrong. It's the cheapest OS X update to come along in, well, forever, and the Intel transition ended over three years ago. Yes, yes, we shed tears for everyone who bought top-of-the-line last-generation G5 towers that will continue to be plenty fast for years to come, but the era of PowerPC is over.
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.
No, but Apple is probably selling more Intel Macs per quarter than they sold in a year when they only had PPC. And there aren't many PPCs newer than 3 years old, Apple replaced the G5 Quad three years ago this month. Most people replace their computers when it's about 4 to 5 years years old, and that remaining slice is a small percentage of Apple's potential market. Does it really make sense to still support them with the new OS?
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.
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.
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 can?t 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 aren?t as likely to update their OS and can?t 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 don?t 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 aren?t 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 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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jpellino
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.
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.
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 can?t 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 aren?t as likely to update their OS and can?t 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 don?t 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 aren?t going to change the fact that Apple will likely sell more Macs next quarter alone than they did for PPC four years ago.
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.
Comments
That will, unfortunately, dramatically slow down the adoption of Snow Leopard and any software designed to run only with SL.
not really. all machines released starting 3 years ago were Intel and most companies made the switch to doing Intel versions (sometimes Intel only) a while ago. I think Quicken and Adobe are the last major holdouts and you can always use the option Rosetta install until they catch up.
Anyone at this point with a PPC that doesn't buy a new machine is probably not doing anything that would really benefit from Snow Leopard and will be able to use Leopard just fine until that machine breaks down. and then they buy a new machine (get a lot more cost benefit given the strides in the last 3 years), with Snow Leopard etc.
You really think all those design and audio/visual shops using PPC computers will just throw them away to use Snow Leopard because it only costs $29?? LOL!
You actually think the majority of design and AV shops are still using PPC machines. Likely not. And even those that are will be just fine running Leopard until the machines break down.
the combination of an OS optimized for an Intel Processor, the faster processors in the machines, the better graphics set ups, more ram, bigger hard drives etc plus the end of even the extended warranty period makes this the prime time to upgrade, especially for those types of shops.
Seems to me that it is not too early for systems to be packaged with SL. It does not take an unimaginable amount of human error for one of those boxes to get moved to the wrong place and shipped to a customer. I am not saying that I believe this story. I am just saying that it "could" be true.
personally i think it is a fake. I just can't see Apple making that kind of a mistake.
HOWEVER, i do think the release is soon and that the 'ship by' emails with Aug 28th could be soon. that date is the one by which the box goes in the mail so it is possible that come Monday we could see the date of release go up, it could be Sept 1 (which fits the Sept release). At which point they will start shipping machines with SL preloaded and the in store stock gets the added disks until those machines run out. I suspect they figure a good number of folks will do the data transfer thing for the $100 so they can get their machine updated at the same time. heck it could be a selling point for that data thing
You actually think the majority of design and AV shops are still using PPC machines. Likely not. And even those that are will be just fine running Leopard until the machines break down.
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.
No, but Apple is probably selling more Intel Macs per quarter than they sold in a year when they only had PPC. And there aren't many PPCs newer than 3 years old, Apple replaced the G5 Quad three years ago this month. Most people replace their computers when it's about 4 to 5 years years old, and that remaining slice is a small percentage of Apple's potential market. Does it really make sense to still support them with the new OS.
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.
Apple has already stated the Snow Leopard is not a feature upgrade, but an optimization of Leopard. That is why the upgrade only costs $29.
There are no real new features, it just lets the new architecture run leaner and meaner and scraps the PPC architecture for the 90% of us that don't need it.
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.
Not because it's $29, but because they are getting into the point at which they can replace the machines for tax purposes, and most are no longer covered by their warranties.
The company I work for has a publishing arm, and they're about to replace all of their Apple hardware because the G5's are all out of warranty, have zero book value to the business, and they can get tax breaks by buying this year. When they do purchase, all the machines will likely be running SL.
Companies don't like having lots of old unsupported hardware around - of the machines we have at least 80% of the G5's have started to have major hardware issues the last few months, most of it we've gotten around, but the time has come to move on.
I'm curious. With what Mac are they planning on replacing the G5's?
I dunno, I still think September 4th is the earliest we'll see it. Monday seems too late to announce for a Friday release.
Have you seen this:
http://9to5mac.com/snow-leopard-sale
You, sir, are utterly wrong. It's the cheapest OS X update to come along in, well, forever, and the Intel transition ended over three years ago. Yes, yes, we shed tears for everyone who bought top-of-the-line last-generation G5 towers that will continue to be plenty fast for years to come, but the era of PowerPC is over.
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.
No, but Apple is probably selling more Intel Macs per quarter than they sold in a year when they only had PPC. And there aren't many PPCs newer than 3 years old, Apple replaced the G5 Quad three years ago this month. Most people replace their computers when it's about 4 to 5 years years old, and that remaining slice is a small percentage of Apple's potential market. Does it really make sense to still support them with the new OS?
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.
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.
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 can?t 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 aren?t as likely to update their OS and can?t 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 don?t 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 aren?t going to change the fact that Apple will likely sell more Macs next quarter alone than they did for PPC four years ago.
Have you seen this:
http://9to5mac.com/snow-leopard-sale
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 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.
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.
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.
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'
I?m glad someone appreciated it.
Funny how the disk label is in english while the installer is in some sort of Chinese.
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.
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 can?t 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 aren?t as likely to update their OS and can?t 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 don?t 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 aren?t going to change the fact that Apple will likely sell more Macs next quarter alone than they did for PPC four years ago.
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?
EDIT: Dammit! You beat me to the punch bloggerblog... ARGH LOL