Apple finalizes PowerPC divorce with OS upgrade

From CNET News.com: Apple, a company that's rarely namby-pamby about making technological changes, has put its foot down once again with its Snow Leopard upgrade to Mac OS X due in September.

When the new operating system arrives in September, it'll work only on Intel-based Macs. That means Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, will be the end of the line for those with Macs that use PowerPC processors.

Though the move led to some teeth-gnashing among those who felt left behind, it's not unreasonable in practice.

First, it was four years ago that Apple first told the world it was switching from PowerPC chips to Intel's x86 chips. Even though PowerPC models arrived afterward and the first Intel-based Macs didn't start arriving until 2006, three years is still a long time in computing history. Anyone who hadn't upgraded by now isn't the sort who demands cutting-edge technology.

Second, much of what's important about Mac OS X 10.6 isn't consumer-oriented features, but rather underpinnings to let Mac software take better advantage of new processor directions--Grand Central Dispatch for multicore processors and OpenCL to use graphics chips for general-purpose computation. Although Apple sold high-end PowerPC-based machines with two dual-core processors that could benefit from Snow Leopard's abilities to juggle multiple jobs at the same time, it's likely that many people with that large a computing demand moved on to modern machines.

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