Will Leopard Support Current Macs?
Funny thing, the computer business. I was actually all set to order a 20″ iMac, until today. Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that starting in June 2006, Macs will be moving to Intel chips. He pointed out that this will be progressive; not all Macs sold from that date on will run on Intel, but the changeover will take time. (I assume they’ll start changing at the high end first, then move to consumer machines.)
But does this mean that Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) may not run on current G4 and G5 processors? I highly doubt it, but I’m going to hold off on my order until I get confirmation. There are two reasons for this: first, I don’t want to get stuck with a Mac that’s frozen as to which OS it can run. But it goes much further: as an author of Mac books, I’ll have to have a machine that can run Leopard when it goes into beta, and I don’t want to have to buy yet another new Mac just for that in a little more than a year (assuming that Leopard ships in the fall of 2006…)
Ah, what an annoying business this is sometimes…
Of course it will. Steve clearly stated that support for PowerPCs would
continue for a very long time. Moreover, with Leopard coming late next year
and PowerPC-based computers still coming until two years from now,
Leopard will have to support them. I therefore see no reason not to order that
iMac today. I can’t at all see a connection between the iMac, whose OS is 6
weeks old, and Leopard, which is at least 18 months away.