Apple’s Looming Lion: Mac OS 10.7’s Availability Means More Systems Will Be Dying

Plenty of business-practice differences between Apple and Microsoft exist, but a fundamental one that’s always struck me as particularly notable concerns obsolescence. As many of you already realize, Microsoft’s longstanding policy of supporting legacy applications and hardware proliferations in next-generation operating systems was a significant technical factor in its widespread market embrace. Perhaps the most significant backwards-compatibility discard from Microsoft that I can recall came when in April 1992 the company released Windows 3.1, which dropped its predecessors’ real mode supportand thereby required at minimum an 80286-class microprocessor. Other than that…

Apple, conversely, has been comparatively quite aggressive in iteratively obsoleting legacy hardware with each incremental turn of the Mac OS screw. As the relevant Wikipedia entry notes:

For the early releases of Mac OS X, the standard hardware platform supported was the full line of Macintosh computers (laptop, desktop, or server) based on PowerPC G3, G4, and G5 processors. Later versions discontinued support for some older hardware; for example, Panther does not support “beige” G3s,[41] and Tiger does not support systems that pre-date Apple’s introduction of integrated FireWire ports (the ports themselves are not a functional requirement). Mac OS X v10.5 “Leopard”, introduced October 2007, has dropped support for all PowerPC G3 processors and for PowerPC G4 processors with clock rates below 867 MHz. Mac OS X v10.6 “Snow Leopard” supports Macs with Intel processors, not PowerPC.

Note that in the above paragraph, no mention is made of the Motorola 68K-class CPUs that powered Macintosh computers for many years; Apple turned its back on them from the Mac OS X start. Other legacy discards also litter Apple’s past history; Mac OS X’s Classic emulation environment enabling Mac OS 9-tailored application support, for example, was PowerPC-only and completely disappeared with Mac OS 10.5. However, another emulation layer that became public coincident with Apple’s mid-2005 announced transition from PowerPC to Intel x86 CPUs had (at least until a couple of weeks back) dodged the obsolescence axe.

That legacy code bridge was Rosetta, a dynamic recompilation feature which enabled running most PowerPC-compiled programs on Intel-based hardware. Although, as mentioned above, Mac OS 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ was x86-only, Rosetta lived on…it was an optional install, not integrated by default within the O/S as with Mac OS 10.5 ‘Leopard’ and Mac OS 10.4 ‘Tiger’, but it still existed. That all changed 10 days ago when, during the WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) keynote, Apple formally rolled out Mac OS 10.7 ‘Lion’, whose online-only distribution is set to begin next month. ‘Lion’, in dispensing with Rosetta support, definitively closes the final PowerPC-based hardware loophole. And that’s not all.

I was surprised to find out that ‘Lion’ won’t run on the initial iterations of Intel-based desktop and portable Macs, because their CPUs don’t implement full 64-bit support. Those systems’ chipsets also often don’t support more than 2 GBytes’ worth of system DRAM, which I know from personal experience can be quite performance-hampering in all but the most minimal usage scenarios. Granted, you can still obtain and run legacy Mac OS X versions on legacy hardware, but since the company quits maintaining the operating systems and associated Apple-branded application suites (Mac OS 10.5 upgrades, for example, will cease once Mac OS 10.7 is released), you’re taking chances on exposing yourself to an increasingly buggy and insecure operating environment.

As I sit here staring at my Apple computer stable, I realize how quickly it’s become obsolete (assuming I don’t undertake lockout-circumventing hacks, that is):

• My 450 MHz G4 Cube is limited to Mac OS 10.4, as is my dual-G4 ‘Quicksilver’ Power Mac, since each of the latter system’s CPUs runs at 800 MHz.
• My dual-G5 1.8 GHz Power Mac is restricted to Mac OS 10.5
• My first-generation MacBook is stuck at Mac OS 10.6 (and is actually still running Mac OS 10.5; I haven’t yet upgraded it to ‘Snow Leopard’)
• My Dell Mini 9-based ‘Hackintosh’ can’t go beyond Mac OS 10.5 because Apple explicitly blocked support for Atom CPUs in Mac OS 10.6’s kernel, presumably to thwart copyright-infringing use by the OSx86 enthusiast community.
• And my Rev. C MacBook Air, although theoretically capable of running Mac OS 10.7 and purchased just last October, is in the process of being replaced by a refurbished 13″ MacBook Pro. That’s because its 2 GBytes of system DRAM is soldered down on the motherboard, therefore non-upgradeable. In spite of discarding daily use of the Chrome browser, I still run out of available conventional memory resources far too often for my tastes; Mozilla Thunderbird alone gobbles up more than 200 MBytes of RAM, with Mozilla Firefox consuming nearly twice that amount. And when conventional memory is exhausted, the resultant virtual memory page swaps to and from the 4200 RPM 1.8″ HDD bring the system to a molasses-slow crawl. Given that this is my second MacBook Air, I arguably should have known what I was getting into…then again, though, the first system ran ‘lighter’ Mac OS 10.5.

I’m admittedly torn about this situation. On the one hand, vigorously obsoleting legacy hardware enables Apple’s software engineers to focus their attention on highest-return-on-investment hardware platforms, thereby (at least theoretically) resulting in a more stable and otherwise robust usage experience. On the other, I can’t help but feel that the company’s being disloyal and greedy to longstanding customers like myself, by forcing us to undertake too-regular, too-expensive hardware and software platform upgrades. Readers, what are your thoughts?