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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.

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.