Snow Leopard: Apple's low-cost upgrade

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 10:41

Opinion and Analysis

As much as I sympathise with late-model G5 owners (after all, I still own one, along with an Intel aluminium iMac), you can't really complain about leaving the PowerPC behind. By the time Snow Leopard ships, most Macs that can't run it will be at least three years old, the exception being the last few Xserve G5s to be sold.

And if Apple follows its previous practices, security updates will continue to be released, so it's not as if PowerPC owners are being completely left out on a limb.

But the "requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later" line has become commonplace on software as developers took advantage of new technologies. I suspect "requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later" will soon become the order of the day, so I'd suggest G4 and G5 owners will need to start planning for a hardware upgrade over the next 12 months or so.

If you're happy with what you've got, that's fine - but you're probably in a minority already (Apple's been shipping a lot more Macs per quarter since the move to Intel CPUs) and one that's becoming less important every month.

So the writing's on the wall. I'm not suggesting you must throw your old gear away, just that you can reasonably expect a rapid lessening of support from software developers.

By the way, Apple hasn't revealed the Australian price of Snow Leopard: we'll have to wait until September for that information.

But extrapolating from the 10.5 prices in the two countries, something around $A39 sounds about right.