de Runtz, Lars wrote:
When Apple goes x86, do you think they will be maintaining a secret, hidden, G
series version of OS X?
It just dawned on me that that would be a smart plan...and be justified under
the same logic that they maintained an x86 version.
Was that Rosetta to emulate when x86 was needed, or the G series was needed?
...just curious...
-Lars
I doubt pretty highly they'd do that beyond a version or two, outside of
bored engineers perhaps. The Intel version was made and kept around
because they've been planning the Intel transistion for awhile now.
That's why it makes sense. Once all the Macs switch over to x86 and no
more PPCs are being made, there'd be little reason to maintain new OSes
beyond a version or two. Same with Classic, once PPCs came out with
System 7.1.2, after 8.1 no more 68k Mac OSes were made. It's possible
and even probable that most of 8.5 could have been recompiled in 68k
code without much trouble but it wasn't. Eventually, more and more
features will require boxes with higher and higher specs that won't be
available on the old PPC boxes, making it impractical to keep a PPC
branch around.
Of course, Darwin is still the unknown in all this. With it's Open
Sourciness, Darwin can probably be continually ported to PPCs as things
go. And, perhaps, Apple will surprise us and keep PPC support around for
some time. Maybe they'll be extremely nice and release some version(s)
for free after PPC boxes are very outdated much like they do 7.0.1 and
7.5.3/7.5.5 today. We can only hope :)
Scott
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