Just weeks ahead of its public launch, Apple has updated the minimum system requirements for its next-generation Leopard operating system to exclude 800MHz PowerPC-based Macs, AppleInsider has learned. Apple has yet to officially announce the hardware requirements to run Leopard, due out in October, but had long stated in developer documentation that the software would require “an Intel processor or a PowerPC G4 (800MHz or faster) or G5 processor.” According to people familiar with the matter, engineers for the company recently determined that Leopard installs on 800MHz PowerPC G4 systems ran “too slow”. Support for those systems was subsequently pulled from the most recent pre-release copies of Leopard, which inform testers that the software “cannot be installed” on those computers. My take: Assuming this turns out to be true, there are going to be a lot of unhappy G4 owners – including yours truly.
800 Mhz Macs should be included on Leopard’s compatibility list IMO. We are talking about machines that were released just 4 years ago, and we should not forget that Mac users take pride on their computers and they keep them for a long time. Sure it will take some more engineering time to add support for these systems, but I think it’s justified, to provide a good service to your customers.
In fact, I heard that someone ran previous Leopard builds on a 400 Mhz G4 and it runs just fine. Which makes the 800 Mhz limitation, well, dubious.
Edited 2007-09-24 20:12
Just because you can, given enough time, support something, doesn’t mean it makes good financial sense to do so.
One could argue that it’s rather amazing that they’re willing to support the minimum systems they do at all, given how similar operating systems have much higher requirements (e.g. Vista).
While it may give customers a warm, glowing, feeling. In the end, it’s all about the shareholders, since they can boot you in a minute if you don’t perform well enough for them.
I do think it was silly to pull the support that was already there.
Apple should have just stated that “800mhz systems are an unsupported configuration, use at your own risk.”
Admittedly, this change may also help them keep their support costs down, which comes back to maximizing profits for shareholders…
Doesn’t make it right, but it does make good financial sense.
Edited 2007-09-24 20:46
Instead of making a completely baseless claim why don’t you actually look it up?
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/sys…
I’d also point out that people have run Windows XP on machines that are below the minimum requirements (Microsoft doesn’t actually lock them out), it just takes a lot of tuning to get acceptable performance.
Does this actually surprise anyone though? Apple has a long history of forced upgrading. For example, the iPod Touch requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later. What could it possibly need that wasn’t included in 10.3 or 10.2? The answer is nothing… Apple just wants to force people to upgrade.
Yes, but nobody was selling 800 MHz PCs in 2003. My iBook G4 800 MHz is from January 2004.
However, I won’t miss it. This machine is just too slow for my tastes nowadays, I’m not going to spend any more to upgrade it.
Thats the point?
Apple’s latest patch won’t support a computer from 4 years ago where as Microsoft’s brand new OS will run on a computer about 8 years old.
Not baseless.
Your comparison isn’t valid for a few reasons:
* The OS X desktop looks the same regardless of hardware, it may run slower, but it looks the same. Vista disables many graphical features and scales down the OS on older hardware. Yes I know core animation, etc. might run slower, but the apps work.
* An 800mhz x86 chip != an 800mhz powerpc chip
Perhaps you should actually look it up before calling someone’s claims baseless…
Edited 2007-09-25 01:06
* An 800mhz x86 chip != an 800mhz powerpc chip
and as we all know, thanks to 2000 years of apple hype, 800mhz ppc are at least equal to 2ghz x86
well, i’m still using my 500mhz p3m laptop with xp-prof for office, internet, watching videos/dvds, image-editing and other random stuff i throw at it.
No. He’s right. Your claims are baseless. The GPU, not the CPU determines whether Vista disables Glass. Vista will run with Glass on an 800MHz CPU as long as your GPU is Shader Model 2.0 compliant or better.
You should take your own advice.
” The OS X desktop looks the same regardless of hardware, it may run slower, but it looks the same. Vista disables many graphical features and scales down the OS on older hardware. Yes I know core animation, etc. might run slower, but the apps work”
I really don’t think they were refering to Aero but switching themes (even down to basic)turning off cleartype, shadows on the mouse cursor, Fading Menus, Thumbnails and about 50 other preformance killing features (same as Windows XP had in the System )Properties Area
He’d still be incorrect. And with Aero enabled, those features are accelerated by the GPU. The lowest spec machine I’ve run Vista on during the betas and shortly after RTM was an 800MHz Athlon T-Bird with 768MB RAM and an AGP 4x Geforce 5600 GPU. That machine is currently running Vista with the same specs and a 1GHz Duron (Athlon died when it’s fan stopped working because AMD didn’t have overheat protection similar to Intel until later — Athlon XP IIRC, or maybe not until Athlon64). As with the 800MHz CPU, Vista was/is configured with all graphical options enabled.
Again, my claims are not. Vista does a lot of feature scaling based on the speed of the CPU, not just the GPU itself.
I have, can we end this pointless flame thread now?
Your original claim was that Vista had higher system requirements than Leopard and that it was “amazing” that Apple was willing to support such low-end systems where Microsoft did not. To quote you:
The claim of Vista’s higher requirements was proven baseless by averycfay posting Vista’s system requirements and linking you to that information on Microsoft’s website.
You then tried to refute his claims (and move the original topic from minimum supported configuration to minimum supported configuration with all graphical features enabled) by saying:
This is where I came in to add that Vista can run with all graphical features enabled on the minimum supported configuration and even with Glass enabled as long as you meet the GPU requirements. This invalidates your point of Vista not looking the same on a minimal configuration. You then responded:
Which is true in general, but has no effect on the validity of my statement to which you were responding, where I stated:
It was then pointed out that you could be talking about the graphical features equivalent to those in XP. Since you initially talked about Vista not looking the same, this would naturally be interpreted as lacking Glass, which would provide a much more pronounced difference in Vista’s looks than the features equivalent to XP’s found in the System Properties dialog.
In any case, not oly did I point out that you can run Vista with all such features enabled, but that you’d benefit from running such features with Glass enabled as well since they then become accelerated by the GPU (for ClearType alone, it’s a difference of 3 passes for pure CPU rendering vs. 1 pass on the GPU). Thus Vista will look exactly the same as it would on a higher spec configuration. I can post screenshots of such a configuration (running a 1GHZ Duron instead of 800MHz Athlon for reasons stated in my previous post — the Duron is slower than the Athlon was despite the increase in clockspeed because it has less cache and memory bandwidth).
The point of the thread was to correct the false claims initially made regarding Apple’s level of support vs Microsoft’s for their latest respective OS releases. I don’t see how a refutation of those claims with vendor-stated requirements and personal experience makes this a flame thread.
Sorry, but we’re going to have to agree to disagree.
My claims stand. Your arguments are just going in circles.
You refute my claims by repeating yourself instead of proving me wrong.
You use weasel words to twist what I say instead of taking meanings from the context.
The fact remains that Vista has higher system requirements *for an equivalent user experience*. I don’t feel like I should have to qualify every single statement I make — this is a forum, not a legal contract!
I think most folks that would read my comment and actually take meaning based on the context could extrapolate the meaning without me having to explain and qualify every single word.
I should stop feeding trolls, why do I bother…
Edited 2007-09-25 18:31
They stand only If you ignore the facts.
How can I twist what you say when I’m using your own words from your previous posts?
Your initial claim was:
You directly asserted that it was amazing Apple supported the minimum systems they do considering Microsoft’s Vista OS had much higher requirements. Vista, in fact, does not have much higher requirements. You can get the equivalent user experience on hardware lower than what Apple is requiring for Leopard.
You claims fall flat (even after several refinements) so now you resort to personal attacks.
Edited 2007-09-25 19:04
800 Mhz Macs should be included on Leopard’s compatibility list IMO. We are talking about machines that were released just 4 years ago, and we should not forget that Mac users take pride on their computers and they keep them for a long time.
Welcome to the world of hardware and software lock-in.
Regardless of when it was sold, 800 Mhz is pretty archaic today.
Personally, I own three Apple computers and I wouldn’t want to run anything on an 800 Mhz machine. My time makes hardware upgrades worth the price for me. I don’t want to wait around at all for my computer to do something. Perhaps you could look at it that way.
I think it’s less a limitation on the cpu and more a question of video card. I believe the pre-800Mhz didn’t have core image capable cards and therefor couldn’t enjoy Leopards new features which rely heavily on eye candy.
I think it’s less a limitation on the cpu and more a question of video card. I believe the pre-800Mhz didn’t have core image capable cards and therefor couldn’t enjoy Leopards new features which rely heavily on eye candy.
quartz extreme should be sufficient for the eye-candy and is supported by most video cards with at least 16mb vram. i suspect quicklook to be the culprit, it probably needs some cpu-power.
i’m using tiger on a g3/800mhz and on a g4/1ghz. the g4 is sufficient, the g3 can’t handle modern media anymore. apples decision seems to be reasonable to me. but i want to try leopard on my old ibook, and apple really shouldn’t try to stop me.
Very true; I wonder why pushed the requirements up from 400Mhz to 800Mhz – have they heavily threaded all the components to the point that there is a major performance penalty for single processor machines (I remember in a BeOS programming book it warned of the perils of too many threads and performance penalty associated with it).
Also, I raised previously all these updates that have been released for 10.4 – I thought there was something behind it. My conclusion was ‘dropping support’ for depreciated components in 10.4 which won’t be in 10.5 – but it appears that hardware being dropped is the reason for allow 10.4 to survive a little longer.
I wouldn’t have too much of an issue, though, if they dropped support for sub-800Mhz but at the same time had a discount policy of ‘bring in your old Mac and get $200 of a new one’ to make the upgrade that bit sweeter for PowerPC users. I’m sure most people could swallow the change if that was offered.
I wonder if it actually checks for the processor clock? In other words, I wonder if machines that had =<800mhz processor but were upgraded with faster processor will be locked out? If it does check for clockspeed and locks out <800mhz machines, I wonder if there is any scope for overclocking to to fool the installer?
It’s a pretty unfair move anyway. Particularly when you take into account that these are paid-for upgrades.
Because of all the crazy details, I think I’m going to have a non-inverted pyramid reply:
The phones that do h.264 do it in a cut-rate way. Perhaps some of the SmartPhones can hack it 100%+, but not often or yet per reportage in EE Times, e.g. http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201805288&pgno=2 or Rick Merritt’s http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=3TFC2HDAKJJ0WQS… ) …it is not like Junko Yoshida and the others don’t cover this stuff too, of course.
It has been set in motion;
Steve Jobs pressures Adobe to make Adobe, and not third parties (hint hint Versiontracker specialist-tool-troll) come up with Flash (and that other damn thing) plugins that are tunable to not eat CPUs like canapès…thus freeing $120B and approaching crazy humanitarian parity with Bill/Melinda G.
At first, Adobe will react by partnering with GPU makers and actually make a G4 Cube-compatible card (also several PCIe ones complete with blower accessories, turbines, a high-pressure exhaust line people are encouraged to cut pizza and froth cappucino, possibly bake pastries with) which takes add-in Adobe branded CPUs with little expiration stickers on them in case they overheat or something.
Adobe allows Flash tool licensees to run their plugins with CPU restrictions set up from the get-go! So unless that has changed, you can simply check out the preferences there (for your $200-2400 down…)
These will have the obvious duties of doing keyhole view blue work, Flash ads, stroke previews in illustration programs, color separations…all that junk we never intended our CPU do!
Later of course they will be completely distracted on selling screens and input surfaces certified for 2D/3D work, 10-15 bits per pixel etc.
Finally of course once Flash ads get to the point where they perform Aida (full chorus of talking Text-to-song heads, 8.1 audio etc just to get a little attention) Apple will deprecate Cubes, and perhaps the mystery of Apple Sleep Modes will be made public so that Slackintosh can become the Official Distro of Hospices (Hospicers? Hospitarians? Zombi wranglers?) everywhere, just in time for the discovery of the use for warm computers.
Is it me or doesn’t “800Mhz or faster” include 800Mhz?
That was before the last change they did.
I blogged about it here:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/09/24/updated-leopard-requiremen…
Edited 2007-09-24 20:29
If this turns out to be true, I’m seriously going to be pissed off. My Cube, as old as it may be, runs Tiger just FINE, and I’ve had people report to me that Leopard builds ran FINE on 800Mhz eMacs – even FASTER than Tiger.
In other words, it is obvious this move is SOLELY done for financial gains, to force people to move to Intel Macs. While an Intel Mac of course is a much better machine, I have various reasons to stick to my Cube – both aesthetic as well as financial.
While the OS runs fine Thom, related technologies don’t. You know very well that I had to disable Flash and Javascript on my 867 Mhz G4 Powerbook because on most pages the OS would stop registering clicks. Even Youtube is unwatchable because Adobe hasn’t optimized their Flash9 PowerPC port well.
Although I hate this move by Apple, I also think that they might don’t want people to get into such situations like the one I describe above. However, I get this behavior with Tiger too, so…
Heh yeah, I can’t do Flash on the Cube either – but I blame that on Flash being an badly coded piece of garbage, as Flash has the ability to bring even much newer systems to a grinding halt.
so lets hope that operas suggestion of putting native media tags into html5 (with ogg as the basic format) gets implemented. if not, we will be stuck with this kindo of junk for the foreseeable future…
Just on PowerPC? Adobe products are ridiculously slow on any platform. Yes the interface and the programs as a whole are improving but man are they getting slower and slower. With all the GPU acceleration Acrobat 8.x is still slow but of course it’s nothing compared to the performance of flash. However, there is probably a way to speed it up since Sony got flash running on all PSPs with a mere 233mhz cpu that is hardly comparable with any powerpc. So what gives Adobe? Do you really need Apple to lean on you much like Sony did or is money the problem?
Why did you have to disable flash? An old PIII @ 600mhz that I use occasionally can run flash ads and stuff without much of a performance penalty.
I think the problem is you, not the PowerBook. I’ve an iBook G4@800MHz and NOT a single problem with Flash, Javascript or YouTube.
That sounds very interesting. How do you manage to get Flash to run properly? I see around 95%-100% CPU usage on playing a Youtube video with lots of stuttering and frameskipping on my Mac Mini G4 1.25 Ghz with 1 GB RAM under OSX Tiger. Fullscreen grinds the machine almost to a halt. I tried it under Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera and OmniWeb and it doesn’t matter.
At the same time, Stage6 videos run smoothly with less CPU usage in fullscreen than Youtube does in the browser window with scaling turned off. I get about the same performance for Google Video. Flash is really unoptimized under OSX.
Edited 2007-09-25 13:20
Flash is a total dog on any system, but more so on PowerPC. My Cube with a G4 at 450Mhz and 2MB of L2 cache should be able to run Flash just fine, but because it is such a unoptimised piece of utter crap (and I’m being mild here) I simply cannot turn Flash on on the Cube. Youtube videos stutter, CPU usage spikes, machine becomes unresponsive.
Remember, this is the same machine that runs Safari, Mail, iTunes, Word 2004, AdiumX, and so on, all at the same time, with only minor slowdown. But Flash renders it completely unusable – even when only Safari is running.
Video processing, especially MPEG-4 is very CPU time heavy; you need a 1+ GHz CPU for proper performance.
You won’t be able to watch recent Quicktime movies (MPEG4) with Apple Quicktime player either.
MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) had a 2D UI, 10.5 cames (afaik) with 3D UI like Vista.
This is not correct. 320×240 h.264 videos work on cellphones with 250 Mhz ARM CPU, and so they should work on a Cube or my 867 Mhz Powerbook.
Besides, I get the spin of death just for loading normal flash stuff too, not just videos. Flash for the PPC in particular is extremely unoptimized. Nobody is paid to maintain it at Adobe, obviously.
Cellphones usually have either a special chip for video processing or a special ARM CPU (e.g. iPhone uses one from Samsung) that is optimized for such tasks.
Processing MEPG4 movie is a very complex and CPU hungry task, a 400 MHz general purpose CPU may have troubles even with smaller resolutions.
Additionally, the powerpc port is probably buggy and unmaintained.
XVid encoded AVIs (which are mpeg4) greater than YouTube’s resolution play fine in my Tangerine iBook G3 ( 333mhz ) running XUbuntu, using xine or mplayer.
Flash is slow and unoptimized on PPC. Gnash and SWFDec likewise are barely usable on low end PPC hardware. But its not the raw video decoding capabilities at fault here.
I also very often getting beachballs when using flash-content on sites, mostly on youtube or other video-sites.
As far as i remember flash performance on Macs was awful, approx 50% the speed of a comparable PC. (Also in the OS9 Days)
I dunno too much about the technical background, but i think OS X so called “advanced” architecture also causes more load and bloat. On the other hand even many animated GIFs causes Safari to use too much CPU. What’s that? The “most advanced OS” ever? The most inefficient OS ever?
I also don’t know how much overhead is generated by viewing video using flash, i guess a lot. Viewing PAL-sized MPG4 Videos using Mplayer is no problem on my old Mac.
Anyway, I am still using Macs. But i’m no fanboy.
http://webkit.org/blog/96/background-music/
Probably because the timer system in some versions of Safari is unable to throttle CPU usage properly. Not a graphics or OSX problem.
MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) had a 2D UI, 10.5 cames (afaik) with 3D UI like Vista
you’re wrong, osx always had an 3d-gui (nextstep & openstep didn’t).
OS X will not have a GUI pipeline approaching parity with Vista until Leopard is released. It may look like they’re doing similar work on the surface, but OS X started with software composition and rendering. They accelerated composition by moving it to the GPU with Quartz Extreme. In Leopard, they will accelerate rendering as well by moving it to the GPU with Quartz 2D Extreme (available, but disabled by default in Tiger). Vista currently accelerates both operations.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10-4.ars/13
It may look like they’re doing similar work on the surface, but OS X started with software composition and rendering.
so do you think a 3d-gui rendered by the cpu and not by the gpu isn’t a 3d-gui?
the better gpu-acceleration of later versions of osx is one big reason why they are faster. osx on the first imac only became usable after apple finally supported basic gpu-acceleration of quartz on the ati rage2+ (with meager 6mb vram).
At what point could Apple pull the plug on supporting your cube without you getting angry? It sounds like you’re pretty attached to it.
I’m sure Apple wants people to upgrade their machines, since they are in business to make money. On the other hand, while your cube may only be a four year old computer, if it runs Leopard like frozen mud, I doubt you’d be very happy anyway.
It seems to me that the simplest and most financially sound course of action would be to continue using Tiger on your cube.
It appears the system requirement is 800mhz or faster so you should be in good shape.
I would hope that they wouldn’t actually code the software to not run on slower systems. I think users should just expect it to run slower, but still run.
You must have one badass cube then. Tiger runs like rancid crap on my Quicksilver 900 MHz.
It’s really time that all the people who tout Apple as being the BMW/Jaguar/Mercedes/whatever of computers deal with the fact that rampant consumerism has a price. Whenever I suggest that Apple’s student discounts blow goats, or suggest that Apple really seems to focus an a very specific (rich, disposable income) sector of the population, I need to break out my asbestos skivvies. Apple has never, ever been about backwards compatibility or about doing loyalists right – they have been about turning a profit with little concern for its own faithful. If you’re going to drink the koolaid, you may as well drink it all.
Oh, and this comes from a long, long, long-ass time Mac user, so flame away, but understand that I’m not an outsider looking in, I’m very much an insider.
but osx updates keeps getting faster…
haha, i guess we wont see any of those apple fan propaganda posts this time
(okay, i admit it, this post has also another function, the number of downmods i get, will be the applefan counter
)
“okay, i admit it, this post has also another function, the number of downmods i get, will be the applefan counter
”
That was called ‘trolling’ where I grew up.
well, believe it or not, but im willing to wager a months pay that if i had not written that thing, my post would have had been downmodded to minus..
Business as usual with Apple, so I left my Quadra 1995 and of course Apple. The 68x line of CPUs and the firs 601, really fine machines, but later …
I can understand why apple may want to keep the spec’s high to make Leopard run as good as possible, however i don’t think they should hard code it into the OS Installation. If people want to try leopard on 400Mhz Mac’s then let them.
I keep reading here how OS X keeps getting faster and faster with every release. By now it should be flying on a 233Mhz G3.
“I keep reading here how OS X keeps getting faster and faster with every release. By now it should be flying on a 233Mhz G3.”
OSX did get faster with each release up to 10.3.
10.4 is faster for some, slower for others.
(Though it should be noted that OSX was down-right slow early on, so it couldn’t help but get faster with 10.2 and faster still with 10.3. I’d guess that Mac OS 9 is still faster than any OSX.)
I run both OS9.2.2 as well as Tiger on my 450Mhz/768MBRAM/32MB GeForce 2MX Cube, and Tiger is *a lot* faster than OS9 in just about *any* task.
Edited 2007-09-24 21:10 UTC
Nah, you have to see Win 3.11 boot on a recent machine (better not too recent…). The fastest boot you ever saw
So, OS X 10.0 was very slow but had no problem running on G4 800Mhz. Then the performance was improved in 10.1 10.2 and 10.3 version. 10.4 was “faster for some, slower for others.” And now 10.5 is too slow to run on G4 800Mhz. How curious.
Last week i upgraded a friends 350Mhz iMac from 10.2 to 10.4 and it was indeed faster after the upgrade. People forget that this old machines were never fast compared to todays hardware.
This is the Interweb remember? A patch will be released to remove the limitation eventually..
Can somebody explain to me why this thing is still called OSX? Usually the same version of an OS will continue to work with the computers it originally worked with, despite any upgrades.
I get the feeling OSX will be around until the name is somehow uncool. Then it will all of a sudden get some next gen cool moniker.
The same reason we have Linux kernel 2.x, GNOME 2.x, Java 1.x.
Why is Windows Vista still called Windows? After all it no longer runs on the same hardware that the original windows used to … OSX is much like that and the full name is OSX Tiger, OSX Leopard, etc.
I really don’t see what your problem with the name is. And NO it will not get changed when it’s no longer cool. If Apple ever decides to completely change the OS like they did in 2000 then you will get a new name. OSX did follow right after OS 9 but since then it has become the name of the operating system and not the version name much like many non-Apple users believe.
Mac OS X is a brand name, not a describtion of a particular version. Kinda like Windows NT.
Enter “uname -r” in the Terminal to get the real version number. Mac OS X Tiger is version 8, Leopard will be version 9. Mac OS X is the new name of the NeXTStep operating system.
It’s NEXTSTEP… :]
ok… anyways…
*Goes back to his Turbo slab with NEXTSTEP 3.3*
Edited 2007-09-25 23:09
I have only one G4 iMac still running (800 MHz), and my wife has her MacBook Pro. I really don’t know if she will even want to upgrade her notebook, Tiger runs just fine for her.
As for me, I only use the iMac as a print server now. I’m behind a good hardware firewall, and seldom if ever even use the iMac. I think I can just save my money and skip the upgrade.
One of these days, when CUPS gets good enough to support my multi-function printer directly, I’ll decommission the iMac and attach the printer directly to a Linux box. The wife can have what ever computer she wishes, but I’m pretty much done with Apple and Microsoft.
I forsee a spike in purchases of processor upgrades based on this news.
Unfortunately it probably won’t be that simple. If the install disk will not install, it *most likely* is based on the system identification string in the open firmware. So even with upgrades, you’ll need a hack. Hopefully I’m wrong.
If this is true:
My Mac is a 1Ghz G4 Powerbook, so I guess I’d be able to install Leopard. But if Leopard is so resource-hungry that it’s too slow to run on 800mhz systems, then it gives me pause, because my Mac isn’t exactly a speed-demon running Panther. I have a policy to upgrade OSX every other release, so I skipped Tiger with the intent of upgrading to Leopard, but now I don’t know.
I’v also been considering just getting an Intel MacBook Pro, since PPC-support is on the road to termination anyway.
Anyway, if Leopard is too slow, it’s too slow. Apple may be instituting this 800Mhz cut-off to avoid getting ripped for slow perf like Microsoft gets ripped for Vista and Apple got ripped for OSX 10.0.
It appears 867MHz is minimum requirement according to the article.
If there is going to be a lot of unhappy G4 owners, I’ll take it! I’m looking for a PowerPC Mac to wipe out the Mac OS and use OpenBSD on there to do PPC testing. I just want the hardware, don’t care about the OS.
This is the best thing Apple could have done! That means even faster G3/G4 boxes for sale so we can all have our own PPC boxes for running Slackware and OpenBSD :-).
I hope the next time they do so for all processors slower than 1.5 GHz. Then we won’t have to buy any new computers anymore. Also Sun should finish their PPC Solaris port to give people even more choice.
Apple and Microsoft are encouraging people to run other operating systems on the same hardware so the market share of these can only increase. Thanks to both of them for helping the free software world this much!
I know it’s, er, apples and oranges, but if Microsoft had done this with Vista regarding the same vintage of computers, nobody would have batted an eyelid (indeed, they come pretty close with the Windows Experience Index kerfuffle).
Yes, but the funny thing is this:
While Vistas minimum recommended requirements are specified at 1GHz, it installs and runs fine at 800MHz provided enough memory is installed (1GB).
Now, not only the zealotish Apple users always insisted that PPC Processors are *much* faster than x86… so… if this is true, then 10.5 has *much* higher requirements than even Vista.
Just a little nitpicking, no need to mod me down to hell. My next Computer is going to be an iMac anyway, because noone can compete with Vista in the field of annoyance and crappishness and there are some Apps i need, missing for Linux.
Well, they DID cut off quite a few decent machines for Vista. My old p3 machine that I still use has a 1.4ghz tualatin, 1gb of pc133 and an nvidia 6200 256 video card. But it won’t run Vista because Vista will not install on machines that don’t support ACPI, which mine doesn’t… But who cares. I’ve had my share of working with Vista on a new quad, 3ghz, intel core machine with 4gb of ram and it, for the most part, blows ^_^
Edited 2007-09-25 23:11
Unsupported below this is not equivalent to “won’t run or install” below these specs.
It means you can’t get a standard support contract for your woes.
No, AI specifically mentions it cannot be installed – testers get a “system not supported” message, which means Apple set up a barrier to install.
After all, it is a rumor site, and not until the release of 10.5 will we know for sure. I had hoped the cutoff would be a G4 of 500mhz or above, with a supported video card.
Your system is over 4 years old. Why should Apple guarantee an upgrade? It isn’t like you still can’t use your existing system. It isn’t like you can’t keep applying security patches to your current system. And finally, you do realize you can run must applications on your OS still. Does Microsoft have to guarantee a 4 year old system can run Vista?
I have an IBM Thinkpad laptop I bought about a year and a half ago and Vista won’t run correctly on it.
Personally, I think this is a non-story. Your hardware is old, our new OS won’t support it. Buy new hardware. That’s how it has always worked in this industry, isn’t it?
I have a notebook I bought in 2000 (AMD XP 2500+ 1.87GHz). Vista experience index is set to 1.0 but Vista perfectly runs in basic mode without any problem.
You probably meant “Vista won’t run correctly on it” with all its features enabled, which is obvious.
Well there’s always Linux. My own system is almost 7 years old and it has no performance issues with any current distro and handles Compiz without any lag. I wouldn’t expect any distro to support patches to a 7 year old distro or direct upgrade from a 7 year old distro to a modern distro, but there’s zero reason for 7 year old hardware not to be supported by a current distro (with some minor easily upgraded peripheral exceptions). Apple simply chooses not to.
Apple is in the hardware business and distro upgrades that don’t encourage you to purchase you to purchase new hardware hurts Apple’s bottom line. Of course, too many forced upgrades hurt Apple’s top line (which trickles down to the bottom line) by lessening Apple’s customer loyalty, so Apple has to balance carefully.
This is out of curiosity, as my laptop is a 1.4GHz Centrino, and my desktop is better, so both run current Linux distros just fine, and may even run OSX fine, it it were possible.
What processor does your system have? And how much RAM?
Have you tried one of the soon coming Linux distros (Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8, OpenSuse 10.3? Do they run OK?
It flips me that Vista has such tremedous hardware requirements for such little eye candy. Compiz can give you far more sophisticated “enhancements” with Radeon 8500-class hardware, and maybe less — not that I like them, really; I find most are too distracting.
Currently running the latest Leopard beta on a Dual 500MHz G4 and although it is useable, it is less than perfect.
The GUI causes a hit on some of the older graphic cards in these machines. (Mine is a ATI 9700 Pro)
Tiger is still a perfectly fine OS and whining over not being able to run Leopard doesn’t make sense. For the most part you only are losing some new GUI effects/tools and apps that strictly require 10.5 are likely far off.
Plus, if you still want to force the install and use it on any G4 machine its incredibly easy to do. (Hint: Edit OSInstall.mpkg)
Come on! If Apple keep supporting older machines, then the OS is never going to make big advances in the future. There are a lot of cool things under the hood with 10.5 that do require a lot of grunt, and will also push along third party development.
I also have a Cube and use Tiger on it. But it is only good for text editing, basic web browsing and email. As soon as you load up Pages or other modern programs, it grinds to a halt. I wouldn’t even think of putting Leopard on there.
I’m glad Apple don’t kowtow to whiners with old Macs. I bet the latest version of Ubuntu with Compviz/Xgl would also run like a dog on a similar spec PC machine. But you wouldn’t install that though Thom?
Well that’s what you get when you buy an Apple crap, don’t ya?! 😛 However, in this case I must agree with Apple (what a miracle, it must be the first time ever). Upgrade your damn machine to use the new software or keep using your perfectly working copy of Mac OS X. But there’s no need to sacrifice their OS so that some bigshot dickhead can keep using his crappy little PC, or anyone else for that matter.
This is called progress, and everyone’s got to get used to it. Technology is all about upgrading all the time, you either evolve or die! And if you don’t like it, find another hobby and let us enjoy this one.
It doesn’t sound like using Macs is a hobby for you… In which case you wouldn’t even really know how well a G4 800 runs, but hey, don’t stop tha Apple hatin’.
Direct from Microsoft’s site for Vista system requirements:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
:yet Apple is supposed to offer support for a slower processor in an operating system due to be released about a year later???
Then I see stuff like this:
“Even Youtube is unwatchable because Adobe hasn’t optimized their Flash9 PowerPC port well.”
And this is somehow Apple’s fault? Come on people. Reality check. There have been MASSIVE moves in computational power in the past five years since the 800MHz iMacs were around.
Will there be people pissed off? Sure. Just like there are with anything new that has to loose support for something old. Will there be an unofficial way of installing Leopard onto 800MHz iMacs (or eMacs or Cubes or whatever else you want to throw in there)? Of course.
Geez, if you don’t want to shell out the “big bucks” for a new machine you can pick up G5 iMacs for around AU$700.
Storm in a teacup…
Those are the recommended system requirements if you scroll down on the same page you can see the minimum requirements.
Who runs anything on the minimum system requirements?
It’s not that I ever would or even that it is a good idea but, it is the point that it is a false requirement that should not be there
There could still be uses that users would want such as a file server running the latest OS or many other uses.
Besides I kinda like that you can install XP on a 7mhz cpu with 20mb ram (Even though it takes 10 min to open a webpage lol)
http://winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
The difference here between Mac OS and Windows is that Windows would happily install onto a computer that it would run terribly on. The fact remains that the junk hardware is getting in the way — don’t just blame the software!
Both the G4 and the G5 are in their graves, whether Mac users know it or not. Welcome to the future… it is now!
Moore’s Law is a true for Apple hardware as it is for any other PC maker.
Our campus, a PC shop, had to delay the deployment of Vista to replenish or replace our new PCs we purchased several months ago.
Delaying new PCs by 18 months is always fun due to the heavy nature of Vista.
Despite suggesing 800Mhz G4 or faster it may not actually be the processing power that is the issue here. Apple seem to draw a line in the sand in regards to how many machine types they can really provide quality control for. Then they pick an arbitrary feature that creates that line.
Remember how Tiger “required” firewire? Many Tiger users would never go near a firewire port but the “requirement” was there. It’s just Apple’s way of saying they can only support so many machines IMHO.
Having said that, there will probably be a hack in no time and those <800Mhz processors will run just fine.
OK – I know a lot of people just cannot go out and BUY the best or latest/greatest, but if you are still on a G4 800 MHz or less – that was like 4 years ago.
If I had a P4 1.6 Ghz CPU, I certainly wouldn’t think that it could run VISTA very well either.
Also, if you happen to have a very stable, very nice system in a G4 and are happy with it – then why bother upgrading – if you want to upgrade, you really should check out the latest hardware.
I have a G5 1.8 GHz with 1.5 GB of RAM – runs Tiger fine – just very SLOW – I have a MacBook 2.0 GHz with 2 GB of RAM and it runs Tiger about 3x the speed of the G5 processor.
My advice – if you have a G4 – look into getting the Intel platform from Apple – you will not regret the investment in the technology. Then you won’t have an issue with LEOPARD – I am worried for some of the issues I might have with the CORE VIDEO and the MacBook since it is onboard video… but it should run the OS just fine.
just my opinion.
Bill
Welcome to the Apple method of treating your customers – upgrade or bugger off. Having worked for Apple Computers Australia a few years ago, I don’t think much of the company, even though they have some wonderful products. The phrases ‘bad apple’ and ‘rotten to the core’ really do come to mind when I think about Apple, which thankfully is not often.
Dave
The difference being that users with older G4s are still left with a functional OS without major problems.
This isn’t the same being forced into upgrading to Vista to get desperately needed security improvements.
Yup.
Dave
Upgrade or bugger off? Reminds me of Microsoft’s “Upgrade ,or don’t play new games” strategy.
That’s why people should boycott games en masse that use DirectX, and NOT OpenGL. Sadly, people don’t seem to care these days, and are too apathetic to really put their foot down.
Dave
This is a feature, not as some of you put it vendor lock in. Its obvious that apple is just trying to protect their current user base from having a less then stealer system running. Jobs has never led us wrong people, why doubt him now?
I think of Apple as a company that always wants to provide an easy, entertaining and problem-free experience when using a Mac. Running Leopard on a Mac which may make the experience bumpy is something Apple doesnt want(for the average user). Which is why they implement such changes. For more experienced users they could bypass this limitation which is something that is ok for apple.
Any other company would just let the user do whatever they want. That would mean more sales for the company. However we have seen that Apple often sacrifises some things to provide the user a better experience.
Edited 2007-09-25 09:52
are apples expensive or not?
If apple were to say ‘intel only’, then that WOULD be an issue.
Quite honestly, 800Mhz machines, in the grand scheme of thinds are ‘slow’ compared to what is out there today. By another token, no one is forcing you to upgrade. 800Mhz G4 machines run fine under Tiger, what does Leopard offer that you absolutely-positively-must-have?
I own a 1.25Ghz G4 powerbook (4 years old) and I won’t be upgrading any time soon. While I would like a shiny new OS on my machine, I just don’t see the utility. The Tiger OS will still be supported for a year or so for people who haven’t upgraded.
As an aside note, my old Blue and White 350Mhz G3 is running just fine with Panther loaded. I’m not complaining that apple isn’t suporting that model. The computer works and does what it is supposed to do. Isn’t that what really matters at the end of the day?
This is a pretty poor showing from Apple. I’m not a Mac user but I’m pretty sure I’d be pissed if I was.
How long before it’s patched to work (a’la OSX86)?
Edited 2007-09-25 15:28
Probably not long. There is a project called XPostFacto dedicated to getting new OSX versions to run on unsupported Macs.
Too slow on older machines? Apple had jolly well figure out what is the problem, and either fix it or make the offenders switchable options.
Consistency across my family of machines is just as important as consistency within an OS. If I have to convert my older machines to Linux or BSD, I might just as well keep on going. …and their quality is now such switching back becomes problematic.
This is not something I wanted to hear. Apple, please fix.
Everyone does it. Why increase the OS X team’s testing matrix or take a risk of customers having a pathologically bad experience by supporting a 4 year old machine? It’s not in the financial interests of the company and chances are good that customers on those really old machines have a “fixed” deployment that doesn’t change much. Their old OS won’t magically stop working and their old apps will still function.
The only problem that could arise with a long tail of legacy users is that old security bugs might finally be exploited. It’s not that likely to happen, though, because there simply aren’t enough old Mac users to pique the interests of the Russian hackers.
I had already upgraded my G4 from 400mhz to 1.5 Ghz in order to avoid this kind of hassle with future G4 support. When they announced the dropping of G3 support, I started to worry about my G4’s longevity much more. Even though I personally could weather this Leopard upgrade path how soon will it be that having an Intel processor Mac will be a prerequisite for being able to run OS X, I wonder?
With the news about a further release candidate of the latest Open Suse just a few days back, I was reminded that there are alternatives for PPC hardware, alternatives that don’t run the risk of having to deal with big Jobs. I think Apple has to be careful – egging users on to the upgrade path is one thing, seeing them go entirely out of frustration and justified resentment at the lack of corporate subtlety, is another….