[muglo] Further to OS X Panther

  • From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 11:27:33 -0400

Hi, further to my OS X supported comment:

Someone on www.xlr8yourmac.com wrote that the developer preview for OS X
10.3  *only* supports USB-native G3s. This suggests that the Beige G3 (& the
All-in-One) and the Wallstreet laptop are S-O-L (which'll raise the value of
a B&W compared to a Beige G3 or, depress the value of a Beige G3 relative to
a B&W... time to ditch your Beiges (provided you were planning on running
Panther) before too many people figure this out... Disclaimer: this is
speculation on my part (and on that of others)).

The change in support follows the "New World" vs "Old World" ROM split since
the Beige and the Wallstreet are the last of the Macs to use Old World ROMs
(i.e. ROMs entirely contained in ROM vs. 1 MB ROMs with the rest being read
into RAM by the OS at boot time... makes patches much easier, and also
allows a computer to be a lot more flexible in terms of the OSes it runs...
Linux developers had a relatively easy time migrating to the New World ROMs
b/c of fewer complications).

However, I imagine this is partly in the realm of planned obsolescence (as
opposed to simply technology). From this move I'll postulate that Apple
plans to drop support for its computers 4-6 years after they've been
discontinued (so, I guess in the next upgrade we'll see the Pismo and B&W go
down... though, they may have a hard time getting rid of the Pismo since the
2002 iBooks are essentially sped-up Pismos (same video RAM) and they'd be
alienating a large segment of the consumer population relatively soon after
they'd bought their computers so perhaps the Pismo will have a longer life
:).

Hmm. I completely forgot about the early iMacs and early iBooks (can you
tell what my personal opinion is about those computers ;). They'd be ripe
for the chopping block next time round -- small video RAM (2, 4 and 6 MB)
and for the iBooks, small (800x600) screens.

Eric.


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