Columns
Editorial: Fighting the flab
Now Leopard may still be a year off, but it already looks a strange beast. We can only speculate on PowerPC support, guess what will and won't be included, and look to past performance in gauging the likely price. Yet none of this will deliver any certainties.
The developer builds are Intel-only, but that seems fair enough. Apple wants to promote a clear upgrade path, and by having third-party coders switch first, it can hope that they'll be less inclined to slave over Universal Binaries and instead write software for only the latest incarnation of Macs.
What seems almost certain though, is that the payload will be far smaller, actually requiring less disk space than its predecessors. That's quite radical. And welcome. But then Apple has made it clear from the start that Snow Leopard is about consolidation and tidying up, trimming the fat, shoring up new technologies
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I'd happily go along with that, even if it does mean my iMac G5, which still feels quite new just three years down the line, is saddled with what to all intents and purposes is an outdated operating system. Don't get me wrong: I'm not sacrificing my own machine for the sake of the greater good. I'll benefit too as my MacBook - by far the most-used of all my Macs - will claw back some power and space.
I'm just glad Apple seems to have spotted Windows' most glaring flaw. It's not its overdesigned Aero interface, the price structure or the fact it comes in more flavours than ice cream. It's Microsoft's sentimental love of the past, and the fact it can't bring itself to cut off those laggardly users who are either too slow or unwilling to upgrade their hardware. Instead it offers them a curious hybrid that emulates the features of the latest release, and in doing so saddles those who have followed the upgrade fast track with gigabytes of legacy code they neither need nor want.
If Apple does indeed end support for PowerPC with Snow Leopard, there will be an outcry. But while such a policy may seem harsh, it would be fair. Withholding the latest updates isn't punishing those who refuse to upgrade to the newest hardware; it's a way of thanking those who have invested most in the company by giving them the kind of swift, efficient operating system they deserve.
