Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 4th Jul 2008 05:10 UTC, submitted by Dan Warne
An opinion article at APCMag: "The focus of Snow Leopard is on core upgrades, not shiny new features. A bedrock focused update that delivers a streamlined, enhanced OS X. Stability. Efficiency. A "new generation of core technologies." All this is about raising the floor on the entire system. Multi-core optimization, support for 16TB RAM (yes, Terabytes), and a language to allow developers to tap the power of the graphics processor are just a few of the key upgrades. But you can't lift the floor and let people walk around where the floor used to be all at the same time. Not without leaving holes for a potential rising damp problem further down the track."
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Member since:
2006-01-23
That having been said, it would be nice if they did have some sort of Snow Leopard for PPC. (Though the only difference really would be that it wouldn't have the larger binaries - the speed improvements are all for taking advantage of multicore processors and modern GPUs, a good idea IMHO.) Definitely nobody's making you buy Snow Leopard, there's no real new features, so there's no "Apple tax" this time around.
Until Leopard, every major release of Mac OS X ran faster than its predecessor, for me at least.
I really believe that they should continue to support the PowerPC G5 processors simply because they're a good fit. It's not as though anyone (other than fanatics) were expecting PowerPC G4 support to continue past Leopard.
Of course, it seems obvious since Tiger that Apple have struggled with getting an operating system to run efficiently on two different hardware platforms. They'd be wise in their development efforts to drop PowerPC for optimisations or split the work toward the end into two teams.