PowerPC, Legacy apps and Future business development... How?

A business depending on software will maintain it as they would any other asset. You would not be using a twenty year old van, so why expect to use old software indefinitely.

If by IBM you actually mean Microsoft, I can assure you that they are not supporting software forty years old. Punch card readers are difficult to find nowadays.

The transition of the Mac platform to the Intel architecture was announced six years ago. The last PowerPC-based Macs were discontinued five years ago. Any application that still hasn't been updated for Intel is dead, and you need a migration plan. You needed one several years ago.

Rosetta, the "translator" between ppc to i386 has not only been removed and replaced with a Placeholder ( /usr/libexec/oah/RosettaNonGrata ) , Apple has disabled all calls to Rosetta directly in the kernel of OSX .

Reinstalling the rosetta.pkg from a Snow DVD will bring in the executable that is missing ( /usr/libexec/oah/translate ) but it will cause only a Segmentation fault and the simple popup dialog that powerpc apps are no longer..

It is dead. Simple because Apple has blocked it completely throughout the OS.

Believe me I have tried every trick you can think of, including the "transplantation" of frameworks from Snow into Lion and it does change not a single thing.

Apple intentionally made it so that a PPC app is nonfunctional whatever you do.

You marked your own answer as correct? It wasn't even an answer to the question you posed.

Apple has to think like a big company and stop thinking It's small?

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/07/21/apple_projected_to_surpass_exxon_b ecome_worlds_largest_market_cap_company.html

If you are of the attitude "don't fix it if it ain't broke",

why did you upgrade in the first place? Also, why did you

not have a plan to quickly revert to an old system?

If a person that uses a computer for business does not have

any plan or means to return to a working state, be it after

an OS update or not, is only asking for trouble.

As for PowerPC support, I have an old Dual 2GHz G5 if you

want it.

You may be right, but Apple is a company who makes its money by selling to the home user. They were once the domain of creative artists, professionals in all sorts of media, but with Lion they have shown that their future lies in taking over the market for consuming - not creating - media. Look at their products

iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes, iBook, App Stores (one for iTunes, one for iPhone/iPad and one for Mac OS), and OS X Lion.

If you want supercomputers, Apple is not even in the industry. If you want Legacy, Apple is not interested. That's just missing an opportunity to sell you something 'new' 'improved' or, as we all know, just different from the last iteration.

I've been using Apple computers since 2004 and never looked back. Now, I've lost wholesale trust in Apple's direction since seeing Lion (though the very first time they forced me to have the App Store app in SL 10.6.6 I could already smell the future).

I predict people like me won't be Apple users in five years time. How long it takes to migrate to another OS just depends on when/if a better offer comes up. Given the highly competitive nature of the industry, the profits to be had, and the huge amount of talented programmers out there, that's surely just a matter of time.

I predict people like me won't be Apple users in five years time. How long it takes to migrate to another OS just depends on when/if a better offer comes up.

Your PPC apps won't work on that other OS either, so good luck.

That wasn't my point, Linc. My point was that Apple's apparent direction is likely to see a former hyper-loyal customer base start looking around for other options.

Those who are determined to run ppc apps while using Lion can, theoretically, install Snow Leopard within Lion using a virtual machine. Note that the jury's still out whether this contravenes the End User Licence agreement or not.

http://applehelpwriter.com/2011/09/11/runing-powerpc-apps-on-lion/

You're missing a fundamental point.

IBM and companies like it chose to retain multi-generational system compatability. In doing so they also restricted their future architecture choices significantly. The fact that they retained a multi-generational architecture does not prove that it is better to do so. It only means that for IBM, the benfit of doing so exceeded the opportunity cost of not restricting their future system architectures.

The choice to no longer support PPC by Apple was an economic decision - obviously they believe the benefit to them in moving to an Intel-only software architecture exceeds the opportunity cost of retaining PPC. Whether they are right or not will be a matter of empircal fact at some point in the future. But in any case, it is purely an economic decision - just as was IBM's decision. If you think that IBM is supporting legacy software because of any sort of altruistic concern for its customers, then you are dead wrong. If you don't believe that IBM is using anything but cold, hard accounting to justify its business decisions, then why get angry at Apple for doing the exact same thing?

Believe me, if IBM decided next year that dropping support for System 36 in future lines made better economic sense, they'd do it in a heart-beat and without any regret.

Finally, your comparison to supercomputers and defense applications is disingenious. First, because the fact that Apple has never competed in the area is irrelevent - the fact that this legacy support occurs is a direct result of people like DoD paying for that support - so that they don't have to redesign the programs currently in use and potentially introduce new bugs. But that is exactly the point I just made; IBM, et al are providing that support because it's good economics for them - DoD is paying for it. But that's not a universal constant - one can consider, for example that many banks have been slowly and carefully migrating their systems away from mainframes running COBOL over the past 10 - 20 years. Your comparison is disingenious secondly because even within the Defence and Research areas, supercomputers are a fraction of both the total computing power and the capital outlay invested in computers. In DoD, the kings of computing are probably still Compaq and Dell...or whatever companies provide the bulk of the desktops and laptops. Same across all government departments. Relatively speaking, supercomputers are small change.

Speaking objectively, Apple's decision to drop PPC may or may not be a bad move. But it's definitely not a bad move because it inconveniences you (or me, or thousands of other users), nor because IBM chooses to provide better legacy support.

I do projects for customers I cant disclose, I work with supercomputers and I know multinational environments. I work with big boy toys.

Well then, I hope that Richard Nieves isn't actually your real name...INFOSEC?

Companies have been and ever shall be motivated by one thing:how to convince a potential customer to become a current customer and have that customer continue to give them money for the longest period of time.

IBM would make and sell an abacus if they thought someone would buy it, and they'd keep making it until **** froze over so long as the money they made from selling them was more than it cost to make them.

Apple, under SJ, has a slightly different mind set. SJ is quoted as saying he didn't want to be the richest man in the cemetery, he just wanted to make something cool. I hope I got the paraphrase close and I hope he actually said it. Even if he didn't, I think it sums up the Apple mindset while it has been under his control.

Choosing to abandon the PPC is like choosing to abandon the steam engine. There will always be some who want to keep the steam engine but at some point, someone has to say here is the line and the buck stops here. That’s all Apple is saying. Apple is saying it’s time to move on, they aren’t saying screw you!

This is not to say Apple hasn’t irked me. This whole “do to my way or don’t do it with Apple is really starting to push my buttons. They could throw a guy a bone once in a while, but they really stick to their guns. Apple wants you to have an Apple “experience”and they don’t care much for your opinion.

How do we change that? There is only one way and that is to stop buying their product. I have little faith that such an action will materialize. ****, I’m about to go out and buy an iPad right now even though I think the devices are useless.

:O