PowerPC users deserve perfected Leopard - poll

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 16 June 2008 14:57

Opinion and Analysis

It seems I was right when I suggested owners of PowerPC-based Macs would be unhappy with the news that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard looks like being an Intel-only release. A new poll reveals that PPC users want Snow Leopard badly.

Mac news aggregator MacSurfer ran a reader poll asking "Bertrand Serlet says Snow Leopard is a new-feature pause in order to perfect OS X, yet it appears to be Intel only. Does Apple owe PPC users a perfected Leopard, too?"

I didn't see the final results due to time zone differences and the debut of a fresh poll, but the latest numbers I saw were 179 'yes' votes, and 143 'no' votes. 22 people admitted to mixed feelings.

Update: according to an email from MacSurfer, the almost final numbers were Yes 199, No 154, Torn 23.

Clearly, there will be a point where Apple draws a line under the PowerPC era, just as it did with the 680x0 hardware. And it is true that Apple has managed two major hardware transitions with remarkably little disruption to users.

The question really boils down to this: is Leopard good enough to be Apple's final PowerPC operating system?

But the discussion is academic - Apple is not a company that pays much attention to what its customers say they want. Famously eschewing focus groups, it delivers what it thinks customers will want, even if they don't know it yet.

Consider the way it made optical drives a standard feature across the range, dropped the floppy drive, made USB ports standard before many peripherals used it, moved away from the beige box and replaced CRTs with LCDs.

Apple doesn't always get it right - remember the Cube? - but the success rate is pretty high.