Apple’s latest and greatest incarnation of OS X, Snow Leopard, will be out this coming Friday. I usually let others cut themselves on the bleeding edge of new OS, and most application, releases. But this time, I can’t be an early adopter even if I wanted to. My G4 iBook is a PowerPC, and with Snow Leopard, Apple is dropping support for the PowerPC Macs. Snow Leopard will run only on Intel Macs.
I’m usually even more cautious about upgrades for the computers at the business. But again, since many of our computers are PowerPC Macs, we’re going to be faced with a pretty unpleasant upgrade situation once the applications no longer support the older OS X versions.
As a small business in a Mac-centric niche that has not exactly shown explosive growth in the past few years, we pretty much run our Macs till the wheels fall off. A PowerPC G4 or G5 that’s maxed out on RAM is hardly a useless relic, and in the case of the G5s, they are only three or four years old.
I know that computer years are like dog years, and I’m not one of those people that thinks a company should support old operating systems and applications forever. I just hope we have enough time to switch over gradually enough to prevent a financial crisis.
(NaBloPoMo | August ’09: 24 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 212 of 274)