The mission of Low End Mac is to help you maximize the life of your
Apple gear.
This is definitely not the goal of Apple as of late, and these days
it seems that the company wants you to replace your Mac every three
years or so, given the speculation that the next release of OS X,
dubbed "Mountain Lion",
seems to require exactly that.
As
outlined in Dan Knight's Too Many Macs Left Behind by
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, some Macs that were current through early
2009 are projected to get shut out of further OS updates based on
Mountain Lion's requirements. Mountain Lion will supposedly exclude all
systems running Intel GMA 950 or X3100 integrated graphics, if the
developer preview requirements carry over to the retail version. These
Macs that lose support could conceivably still be covered by AppleCare,
yet no longer be receiving OS updates! What kind of message is Apple
trying to send? Are Macs going by the wayside like mobile phones (they
might as well be doing so with the continued iOS assimilation of
OS X).
I, for one, purchase a Mac to receive long lasting value. That's why
you pay a premium price for a Mac. In addition to superior reliability
and engineering, you should not expect to quickly lose staying pace
within three years for a machine you paid hundreds or possibly
thousands of dollars for. You can't even sell your used physical copies
of Mac OS X or Apple software any longer, since everything has gone
digital and is attached to your Apple ID.
Maybe Apple should do away with desktops and give away the MacBook
Air for free with a two-year data plan subscription and only sell that
along with the iPhone and iPad with them all running iOS going forward?
Okay, maybe that's a bit heavy on the sarcasm, but netbooks went the
route becoming a disposable computers, and look where they are today -
on the brink of extinction.
The Long Lasting Value of Tiger
In all seriousness, I suppose
what I'm really trying to say is that Apple needs to breed long lasting
value into its own culture to keep its customers loyal and happy, as it
did in the past, rather than the opposite philosophy it is following as
of late. Consider the 12-year-old PowerBook Pismo that Low End
Mac's staff covered in the most recent Low
End Mac Round Table. The Pismo was over five years old when
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
shipped in April 2005, and it could load Tiger (and later even an
unsupported install of OS X 10.5
Leopard with a G4 upgrade).
Tiger runs perfectly fine on the Pismo and, in fact, is probably the
best OS for the Pismo (and nearly all other PowerPC Macs) - provided
that you have enough RAM installed. The Pismo had a weak ATI Rage
Mobility 128 GPU with just 8 MB of video memory (VRAM) compared to
the very last PowerBooks - the 1.67 GHz Hi-Res 15" and 17" models
shipped with Tiger and 128 MB of VRAM along with the exponentially more
powerful ATI Radeon 9700 Mobility.
The extra technologies in Tiger, such as Core Image graphics, were
simply disabled when a model with lesser hardware, like the Pismo,
booted up into it. Tiger was an unprecedented value for PowerPC (PPC)
Macs and allowed you to continue to use Mac OS 9 applications in
"Classic Mode" while staying up-to-date and compatible with the Web and
other software that had minimal hardware requirements yet needed the
most recent OS version.
Tiger also generally sped things up dramatically on Macs designed to
support it, breathing more life into these aging machines. It was one
of those great moments that made you proud to own a Mac and made you
amazed of what the engineers at Apple had accomplished.
The Long Lasting Value of Snow Leopard
The same
thing happened again with OS X
10.6 Snow Leopard, keeping support for all Intel Macs while
maximizing Rosetta
performance, which lets Intel Macs run PowerPC software. Snow Leopard
may have dropped all of the Universal Binary PPC code and as a result
marked the end of the line for PowerPC support, but with Snow Leopard
as a streamlined OS and with Rosetta fully optimized and matured, Snow
Leopard ran PowerPC applications designed for earlier versions of Mac
OS X with the greatest of ease (with a few minor exceptions).
If you had both an Intel Mac and a PowerPC Mac and did not need
Classic Mode and applications designed for OS 9, but you did find
yourself using both Macs due to underwhelming Rosetta performance on
the Intel versions of Tiger (Intel) and Leopard, the Rosetta in Snow
Leopard gave you a compelling reason to just use the Intel Mac.
I'm typing this on Microsoft Word from the Office 2004 suite, and I
have not noticed any slowdown or change in how the application works
using Rosetta. Word 2004 is not very demanding as far as an application
goes, but I also played some older Mac-specific game demos to test the
theory further. For example, Doom 3 for the Mac arrived before Tiger
and the advent of Intel Macs (it was compiled specifically for fast
PowerPC G4 and G5 Macs), and it works flawlessly using Rosetta in Snow
Leopard at the highest resolution on my 2.3 GHz Core i7 Early 2011
MacBook Pro. It's obvious just how good Rosetta was and why so many
continue to be up in arms over Apple eliminating support for it when
OS X 10.7 Lion was
introduced.
It's understandable why Lion won't run on lower-end Core Duo and
Core Solo Macs (and may have much to do with dropping Rosetta), since
Lion is fully 64-bit and those older machines were 32-bit only, but
with Mountain Lion there seems to be no good reason to drop Macs just
because they have underpowered graphics. Just disable features that are
going to require more powerful graphics cards, as Tiger did with Core
Image, while keeping the GUI the same. Apple could make a lot of people
happy by making a downloadable repository of "Virtual Macs" that would
fully emulate older hardware (at full speed) while running Lion and
allow users to install and run older applications, but instead it chose
to have us find third party solutions such as VMware Fusion or find ways around its
installers.
Lion and Mountain Lion Reduce Mac Value
The recent versions of OS X have taken away much more value than
they add to the Mac, but that may be a necessary evil for some of the
most recent technologies and applications. As a seasoned Mac user, I
find the best Mac OS X value is a close call between Tiger on PPC and
Snow Leopard on Intel for the wide variety of features and
compatibility they provide. Both give you access to smooth backward
compatibility with legacy applications (OS 9 applications using
Classic Mode in PowerPC Tiger and PPC application support through
Rosetta in Snow Leopard). Both Classic Mode and Rosetta were at their
peak in their respective final variants.
Both Tiger and Snow Leopard are installable on a wide variety of
Macs spanning at least a five year period. In addition, Snow Leopard is
the very last version of Mac OS X to have the word Mac in it.
Now by Apple just calling it OS X, it de-emphasizes the
importance of the Mac and the connection between it its operating
system.
Nothing against Lion and Mountain Lion, but these new operating
systems continue to devalue the Mac, decrease compatibility, and are
unlikely to provide enough useful features to become your primary OS. I
gave Lion a fair chance, but for now Snow Leopard just feels better -
and it runs noticeably faster too (even on this quad-core i7 with
8 GB of RAM) and would still be my primary OS even if I had no
PowerPC applications requiring Rosetta.
The best Mac you can purchase has always been the one that allows
you to have the option of using both new and old technologies and
operating systems, rather than being forced into an entirely new way of
thinking. I don't know about you, but I still like to "think
different."
My next article that will look at the best crossover Macs - Macs
that provide the best of both worlds. Hint: My Early 2011 MacBook Pro
is one of them, as I am currently dual booting Snow Leopard and Lion
while retaining access to ExpressCard34, Firewire 800, and Thunderbolt.
Dan Bashur lives in central Ohio with his wife and children. He uses various PowerPC G3 and G4 Macs running Tiger and Leopard. Besides finding new uses for Macs and other tech, Dan enjoys writing (fantasy novel series in the works), is an avid gamer, and a member of Sony's Gamer Advisor Panel. You can read more of Dan Bashur's work on ProjectGamers.com, where he contributes regular articles about the PSP, classic gaming, and ways you can use Sony gaming hardware with your Mac.
