We've all heard how great the new Power
Mac G5 is going to be - and I, just like everyone else on the
Mac Web can't wait to try one out. The G5 is a completely new chip,
the PPC 970, which of course means that additional hardware support
has to be written into the OS to support the CPU as well as the new
hardware architecture of the Power Mac G5.
Yet another model Apple has to support.
Does this mean Apple will start to drop support for more
machines? Possibly. Dan Knight's recent article speculates that the
beige G3 may be dropped from the list
of supported hardware in the final version of Panther; it is not
officially supported in the prerelease version.
At this point, the oldest beige G3s are almost six years old,
which seems to be the point where Apple starts discontinuing
support - the LC II was no longer
supported six years later with Mac OS 8, for example. It's not that
beige G3s are too old to be useful, but it's a pain for Apple to
support them with their no-longer-standard serial ports, ADB ports,
SCSI ports, and floppy drive.
I happen to really like mine, and I can't bring myself to get
rid of it, even though I have a new G4 PowerBook that runs circles
around it. The nice thing about my beige G3 tower is that it works
well with all of my hardware and software, and it never has any
major problems (which is more than I can say for other computers
I've used in the past).
While I didn't have very good luck with my beige G3 desktop
(which was one of the early ones), I think later model beige G3s
are extremely reliable computers. Perhaps that's why so many people
still use them.
But the G5 adds another series to the list of computers Apple
supports with OS X. This means Apple must write in support for
all of the machines from the beige G3 on up. Eliminate the oldest
of these, and the task becomes a little bit easier and faster.
Both arguments are valid. On one hand, the beige G3 was really
never supported well anyway - the floppy didn't work, most serial
printers didn't work, and many SCSI scanners and other peripherals
ceased to function.
On the other hand, someone who may want to try OS X but
can't (because of unsupported hardware) may decide to stick with
OS 9 instead.
I like Dan's idea of having an "unsupported installation," but I
don't think Apple will do this. It means more software they have to
write, more complicated options in the installer, and then, if the
user goes to install a third party application and it doesn't work,
imagine what a waste of time the phone call will be - only for the
software company to find out, "Oh, I forgot to mention, I have OS
10.3 on a 7600."
And guess who these companies will complain to - Apple.
I complained at the lack of full support for OS X on the
beige G3, and Apple has done a little bit (especially the video
card drivers), but the facts remain - X is very slow on a 233/266
MHz G3, and it's still not supported as well as it should be.
I really feel that if Apple's not going to support it as fully
as they support their other machines, they should discontinue
support. There remain, of course, XPostFacto
and other unsupported installers, if someone really wants to run X
on their older machines without Apple's blessing.
As much as I like my beige G3, it's old and not up to the task
of trying to run a new operating system. I think it's time that
Apple realize that, too.
