I am getting a message "can't open because PowerPC applications are no longer supported" What do I do about these programs?

thanks. yes, someone at the store. i'm fairly uneducated w/operating sys and had my power pc G4 for 8 years. i told then i wanted to run everything and the only one they said i would need to upgrade was ms word 2004. Do you know if quark has a newer version that works on Lion and if will i be able to open all my old design documents on my new computer? i dont really work in indesign and prefer to do all my personal designing in Quark.

The latest version of Quark appears to be 9:

http://www.quark.com/Products/QuarkXPress/

I don't use it, so I can't comment on whether that works in Lion or not. According to the following compatibility chart, it should:

http://roaringapps.com/apps:table/tags/_q/index_tags/_q

...you cannot downgrade a new computer that ships with Lion to an older system. You'll need to stick with your older hardware...

I don't see any reason why a new Mac that ships with Lion can't be downgraded to Snow Leopard if desired. You'd have to erase the startup drive, but why not? It's a brand new computer with no user content. Another option would be to partition the drive and install Snow Leopard on the second partition. This is not an ideal solution, but I've been operating this way for years with an old G4 powerbook. When I want to use my legacy software, I simply reboot. Many people think this is a big deal, but it's not.

There is no solution to running old PowerPC apps on Lion...

Theoretically, wouldn't it be possible to run SL in a Parallels virtual machine concurrently with Lion?? I haven't tried it, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.

Theoretically, wouldn't it be possible to run SL in a Parallels virtual machine concurrently with Lion?? I haven't tried it, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.

I may be wrong, but I believe that would be in violation of the SLA.

You can run Parallels on Lion without breaking any SLA, and you can run SL on a mac machine without breaking an SLA.

Still, you may be right, but I think it'd be a hard one for Apple to justify. Surely the intent of the SLA is to stop people pirating mac os and running it on non-mac machines, thus cutting Apple out of its rightful intellectual property revenues.

In the case I'm talking about, you'd be running an authentic copy of SL on an authentic Apple machine. I can't see anyone being prosecuted for that without Apple losing huge public credibility (and customer good will). And although I know about as much about the law as I do OS Lion (not a lot), I'd be surprise if any judge would rule in their favour (of course, I don't believe any such case would ever go to court, but just hypothetically speaking).

Why would it be?

The same thing happened to Quicken (what a surprise). There was much discussion on the Mac-oriented blogs about Quicken alternatives but in the end, I decided that I couldn't take the chance of losing my years' worth of financial data so without getting into the issue of how this got communicated, the way I have solved this problem (and it's not a great solution but workable) was to set up a separate external boot drive.

One poster suggested SuperDuper! which I really like (I even paid for it so I could do incremental backups which are much faster). And then once I got it all working, I set up a second drive that I could use to back up my Snow Leopard boot drive.

I can't say that it's absolutely bullet proof, there have been a few hair-raising moments, but in the main, it's worked. Dual-booting does affect my workflow, though. Now if my wife asks if we still have money, I either have to check my checkbook register (how primitive) or I have to shutdown my Lion sessions and then boot in Snow Leopard. I've developed all kinds of kludgy work arounds, like creating a folder in Lion where I drop stuff that I need to enter in Quicken. I then boot from Snow Leopard, open the folder, enter the stuff, switch back to Lion. Tedious but it works until Intuit does something.

I am not about to get into a dicussion with you regarding the merits or disadvantages of any contract because you prefer to discuss any subject ad infinitum and I do not. So, please read the Lion SLA carefully and in its entirety - I am not 100% certain, but believe it would be a violation to do so. And since you are only purchasing a license to use it while Apple retains actual ownership of the software, they can impose as many restrictions as they like.

With that, I am done here.

Wow, what an unnecessarily aggressive and combative post that was! Bad day at the office?

I think he was responding to my 4 words, 'why would it be'! Bizarre indeed. I was simply wondering why it would be against the SLA.

Maybe as you say, a bad day at the office.

Thank you for pointing out a mistake I made:

I was trying to reply to softwater's post, not yours. Somehow, that got messed up. My apologies to you.

As for your question: if the SLA states that you cannot do it, then that would be the reason why it would be against it? So, I again recommend reading the SLA - I do not suggest or recommend anything unless I've read and fully understand the permitted uses and/or restrictions. If someone want to call that combative, they're entitled to their opinion.

Thanks for that. I was simply trying to understand why it might be against the SLA, as many people here have suggested the Parallels route as a workaround for the PPC issue.

I just thought you might have an insight, that's all.

No, I wasn't calling that combative, I was referring to this:

I am not about to get into a dicussion with you regarding the merits or disadvantages of any contract because you prefer to discuss any subject ad infinitum and I do not.

In any case, you can hit the keys on your computer as hard as you like, I still think these are interesting questions:

i. Would SL run concurrently with Lion under Parallels or VMware?

ii. Would it in fact constitute a breach of the SLA?

Well, I've read it and although I have some training in deciphering legal documents, I'm not entirely sure about the implications here - hence my caution. If it's not crystal clear, instead of recommending (or debating) it, I'd check with Apple for clarification or simply refer the poster to the SLA and let them interpret it.