June 8, 2008

Interesting

John Gruber speculates PowerPC support in "The Ins and Outs of Snow Leopard":

A few factors: (a) Snow Leopard won’t ship until next year, at which point even the newest PowerPC Macs will be at least three years old; (b) dropping PowerPC would significantly simplify the development and QA testing for Snow Leopard; and (c) perhaps Apple will present technical merits, i.e. that by dropping PowerPC support, they’re able to implement certain performance improvements that can only work on Intel hardware.

Time for some point/counterpoint:

Historically, Apple has been good about supporting older hardware for reasonable periods of time. For example, Mac OS X 10.4 supported G3 Macs with 256MB of RAM and a FireWire port; the first one to do that was the Blue-and-White Power Mac, which came out in 1999. PowerPC was discontinued in 2006, so if Snow Leopard ships in 2009, that would only be three years-- somewhat uncharacteristic of Apple. Say what you want about PowerPC, but three years is just not a long time to own a computer.

Customers don't care about technical challenges, because such challenges are invisible to them; saying "deal with it" only becomes a consideration when the end product is directly diminished in quality because of them. If this is the case, fine, but I don't believe it is.

The counterpoint is that Gruber claims to have sources, and being a reputable writer, it's probably true. Thus, if he can confidently state that Snow Leopard will be Intel-only, it very well may be so.

(all other reasons I don't think/wish it will happen can be found in my may-be-laughed-at-after-tomorrow article about this whole issue.)