The Guardian's Rupert Jones was
singing the blues in a column last month, complaining that his that
his four-year-old
MacBook running nearly four-year-old Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger isn't
supported by Apple's latest version of iTunes (version 10), contending
"it's a problem that has sparked fury among Apple users across the
world."
Jones further observed that adding insult to what he perceives as
injury is that if he had a 10-year-old Windows PC running Windows XP
Service Pack 2 - launched almost a full year before Mac OS X Tiger and
a version of Windows that Microsoft no longer supports - he would be
able to run iTunes 10 to support his iPhone 4 and his daughter's new
iPod shuffle.
The latter point seems to be a plausibly valid complaint - or is
it?
Worldwide, most PC users are running Windows
XP.
The key to explaining this apparent slight to Apple's own hardware
customers is that most PC users are still running Windows XP (still the
world's
most popular OS by a wide margin, serving 52.4% of computer users
overall according to HitsLink May 2011 stats*), so it makes perfect
sense for Apple to maintain legacy support for the preponderance of
Windows folks who are still living in the OS dark ages.
However, on the Mac side,
HitsLink tracks only a minuscule 0.34% overall OS market share for
OS X 10.4 in May - a far cry from Rupert Jones' alleged legions of
disenfranchised and outraged Tiger users ready to storm the ramparts -
which satisfactorily explains why Apple doesn't offer support for Tiger
anymore, expending valuable engineering effort offering legacy support
at the expense of applying it to security and performance enhancements
of software that people are still using.
Jones' argument also goes off the rails with his grievance about
being instructed to buy and install at minimum OS X 10.5 Leopard in order to
support iTunes 10 and his family's new gadgets, an OS X version he's
found hard to get hold of, since Apple's UK retail stores no longer
stock it, and expensive (£120 new on Amazon). Now, it's a
perfectly legitimate complaint about OS X 10.5 disk availability,
and it would seem to me logical for Apple to stock a few copies of
Leopard in both its brick and mortar and online stores, since its the
last OS X version that supports PowerPC-based Macs.
Nevertheless, a four-year-old MacBook is by my lights a low-end Mac,
and the low-ender philosophy anticipates that a certain amount of
workarounds and challenges go with the territory (for example, see
Simon Royal's current column on Using an iPhone with a
PowerBook G3 or Titanium G4).
If one wants or needs to maintain full compatibility with the latest
developments, the obvious choice is to buy new hardware and/or
operating systems if your old computer is incompatible, as has always
been the case.
* At Low End Mac, things are a bit different. The majority of our
visitors (52.4%) use Macs, 37.3% use Windows, 5.6% use iOS devices, and
3.0% use some version of Linux. Among Windows users, 44.1% use Windows
7, 42.2% use XP, and 12.6% use Vista. Among Mac users, 9.2% are still
using OS X 10.4 Tiger, 17.8% use 10.5 Leopard, and 69.5% use 10.6
Snow Leopard. That means that just 4.8% of visitors to a low-end
Mac-oriented website are in the same boat as Rupert Jones.
dk
