CyberTaz said:
Hi Elliott;
Quite frankly I hope you're right - I've become quite fond of my Dual 2GHz
G5, and since it seems to be holding up quite nicely I'd hate to have to
ditch it just because Apple decides to. I've no idea how accurate the rumor
mill is but there's at least the speculation that the impending release of
Snow Leopard will do just that - cut PPCs off at the knees.
There *is* some concern, but it seems that the lack of PPC was confined
to early seeds. I can't find the official rebuttal right now, but I
expect that your G5 will be looking OK in 10.6 final, as will my trusty
G4 12" Powerbook. (Oh how I wish Apple would make something smaller
than an Air.)
Yes , if that comes to pass I can hold on to my G5 as long as Tiger
or Leopard continue to be supported but there's no doubt that they
will eventually go the way of Classic as OS X (or XI) continues to
evolve... But my comment wasn't directed toward that concern so much
as it was in reference to the inherent fragility of Office X - which
(to my understanding) wasn't really *designed* for OS X. Perhaps I'm
wrongly interpreting but from what I've read & heard from some rather
authoritative sources Office X was fundamentally a Classic app with
an "OS X-like" UI offered up as a stopgap measure until a more
properly built suite could be created - enter Office 2004 stage
right.
Well 2004 is a slight improvement, in that it had Unicode support and
long filenames, however badly done, but they are almost certainly very
similar animals. The big internal shift was 2008 when they moved from
Code Warrior to Xcode. From what I learned from MS blogs, that broke an
awful lot of stuff that was previously nickable from the PC side, which
was partly the reason they ditched VBA.
Also - and I'm honestly not baiting you here - I see the design intent of
10.5 from a slightly different perspective than you espouse. My impression
is that it was indeed *designed* for Intel while "keeping PPC architecture
compatibility in mind" - a minor distinction in wording, perhaps, but
significant. [IMHO] The potential for multi-core processor performance is
simply too enticing for Apple to continue dragging PPC support along in a
sidecar. Even Apple isn't arrogant enough to alienate its entire installed
population in one fell swoop, but PPC-based support will certainly meet the
same fate as the 68000 series. How rapidly I have no idea. The saving grace
- as you note - is that the Rosetta emulator already exists, but I believe
it may be deemed excess baggage sooner than you expect.
Yep, it would seem logical from the outside, but I'd point out that the
current developments are largely processor independent. Also there is
very little extra for multi-core versus multi-processor like your G5
has. Only a tiny fraction of the kernel and EFI is processor dependent.
I think it would be not exaggerating too much to claim that Apple could
fairly cheaply move to non-Intel processors if something interesting
came along. A good example is the iPhone. It runs OS X on an ARM core.
Another is the expected support for graphics hardware getting used for
computational tasks. Apple's 'universal' magic is working almost too
well.
I think that there is more of a threat for big old applications from
the likes of Microsoft and Adobe that depend on the old low level
Carbon frameworks. I'd be willing to bet that a more important shift in
OS X development is toward Cocoa. Expect the graphics chip computation
and full 64 addressing for applications to require Cocoa more and more.
You can see from the bugs in Office 2004 and 2008 that Carbon is being
used in ways that don't sit well with Cocoa. I offer the desperately
poor typography in Word as an example. So much of the layout engine
appears to be torn between using Apple's way and shoe-horning Windows
stuff into the product at a very low level. That way of working has a
pretty short use-by date. That was the basis of my throw away line
doubting that Microsoft will ever make a proper Cocoa Office.
If Ray Ozzie's Azure takes off, I doubt the MS Mac Business Unit will
survive another 10 years. There will no longer be a job for it to do.
While I'm in full rant mode, I'd like to add that a 'network' OS for
'cloud computing' is the dumbest plan Microsoft could possibly hatch.
If everyone could Office on the cloud, why would anyone not use OS X?
What *is* that golden goose with its neck slit open? They are ignoring
their own history at their peril. The PC was invented to do a better
job than the 'cloud computing' that IBM and DEC were selling in 1980.
