I have hundreds of technical drawings on AppleWorks 6 - My present Mac is 10.4.11. I surmise that my only safe option is to buy another Mac to upgrade without loosing my ability to work on these drawings - Please does someone disagree - JN
A new Mac will have Lion and will not run AppleWorks. It's possible to open AppleWorks draw documents in EazyDraw (note that you must have the 'retro' version to do this) or to convert them to WP documents and open them in Pages (for which of course you need still to be able to run Appleworks).
This page examines the situation in more detail:
http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/aw/page3.html
To add to Roger's comments the latest OS that will run AW is 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
You may still be able to find a very few new, or a few more refurbished, Macs that will run 10.6. Otherwise you will be looking at a second hand machine to replace yours if you need to change it and keep AW.
Another modern application that will open AW drawings that you may wish to consider is Intaglio.
Michael Wasley wrote:
Another modern application that will open AW drawings that you may wish to consider is Intaglio.
I did look at Intaglio but it seemed not to handle large complicated drawings at all well.
I would recommend purchasing Intaglio or EazyDraw version that is able to run on 10.4.11 first, to see if the conversion will work. If it doesn't, you may want to buy a Mac older than July 20, 2011 to maintain Appleworks compatibility. Read this tip for more conversion issues you may run into:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2522
See my FAQ* if you should go the used or refurbished course:
You can buy very good used computers on eBay which are running Leopard or Snow Leopard. I just upgraded from a 2006 intel to a 2009 running OS 10.5.8. Will soon upgrade this computer to Snow Leopard, and will avoid going to Lion as long as possible so I can continue to use AW, especially the Draw program. This is not a permanent fix, but by the time 10.6 gets to be obsolete, maybe Apple will come up with a good replacement for AW.
Kiai wrote:
maybe Apple will come up with a good replacement for AW.
We have been waiting for that since nearly the start of the century!!!
fruhulda wrote:
Kiai wrote:
maybe Apple will come up with a good replacement for AW.
We have been waiting for that since nearly the start of the century!!!
And with Apple moving into the iToy market and away from proper computers we'll go on waiting I think.
There are many refurbished MacBook Pros and Mac Pros (desktop) for sale in the Apple Store that come with Snow Leopard (10.6.4) installed. (You will have to probably reinstall the software to include Rosetta so you can run AppleWorks.) The refurbs come with the same 1-year warranty that Apple offers new computers; plus you will find these models have all the bugs worked out of them by the time they are offered for sale as refurbished models.
I recently purchased a MacBook Pro 17" (mid 2010, updated late 2010) with matte display and i7 processor, 4 gb RAM, the better graphics display cards, and 500 gb hard drive (5400 rpm), for $1000 less than this model would have cost new. Imagine my delight when I received the refurb to find that it had been upgraded to 8gb ram and the 500gb hard drive was the more powerful 7200 rpm (a big difference in speed, trust me!).
And by purchasing Apple Care, Apple has to take care of me and my Snow Leopard machine until February 2015, no matter what OS they are pushing down people's throats.
AppleWorks lives on! (And no, Filemaker and Bento is no replacement for the AW's database.)
Any Mac introduced before Lion was released can run Snow Leopard, including the mid-2001 iMacs. So you can still get a current-generation Mac that runs Rosetta & use AppleWorks.
hi
you can try to use vmware with an imac i7
i use vmware and it's better for rosetta and 32 bit app
regards
No need for VMware on an iMac i7, you just need the restore DVDs that came with the mid-2011 iMacs before Lion was released. My mid-2011 i7 iMac came with Snow Leopard 10.6.7 installed & on the DVDs. You can't use a retail SL disk that is earlier than 10.6.8 & I don't think any of those exist.
Peggy wrote:
Any Mac introduced before Lion was released can run Snow Leopard, including the mid-2001 iMacs. So you can still get a current-generation Mac that runs Rosetta & use AppleWorks.
That's actually not true. Snow Leopard will only run on Intel Macs. The situation is this :
Any Mac capable of running Snow Leopard OR EARLIER will be able to run AW - Lion is the first OS that can't.
PPC Macs will run as far as Leopard 10.5.8 - they should have 1GB RAM minimum, but can run with less RAM for Tiger. They will all run AppleWorks.
All but the latest Intel Macs will run Snow Leopard and therefore Rosetta and therefore AW too.
However, current iMacs that come with Lion preinstalled can have 10.6 installed on a separate partition (must be 10.6.6 or later), to run Rosetta.
The current generation of MacBooks, and Air, cannot have 10.6 installed and therefore cannot run AW.
I don't know what the situation is with the latest Mac Pros.
Whilst all the answers above are from far more experienced & technically minded people than me, I think your original idea is probably the safest. If you want to update your system but keep your Appleworks library of drawings safe then buy another computer for faster web surfing etc & any other things you think need updating & leave your Appleworks working perfectly on your current one.🙂
I have hundreds of technical drawings on AppleWorks 6 - My present Mac is 10.4.11. I surmise that my only safe option is to buy another Mac to upgrade without loosing my ability to work on these drawings - Please does someone disagree - JN
