Does anyone know when Classic will be dropped from OSX ?

catalyst · 21 Jan 2006 at 20:01

I have been doing some research to help decide what hardware to buy at work and can't find anything discussing an 'official' dropping of the Classic environment in OSX... anyone have some info or even a link to a roadmap for OSX ?

I do know that it is not supported under OSX Intel so I guess by 2007 it will effectively begin to be phased out as you will no longer be able to buy a new Mac that supports it.. other than that, I can't find anything concrete :confused:

cheers

Ghost in the Shell · 22 Jan 2006 at 00:23

try the apple/discussions and see what they say

OllyM · 22 Jan 2006 at 01:05

Apple's official line is that they're not going to keep it working on Intel - so I guess 10.4 will be the last version of Mac OS to support Classic.

Personally, I can't see what applications you'd still want to run in Classic nowadays... most/all software has either been ported to or replaced by something that runs natively in OSX.

ic1male · 22 Jan 2006 at 12:57

Is it likely that OS X 10.5 Leopard will be the last one to support PowerPC and therefore Classic?

OllyM · 22 Jan 2006 at 13:02

I don't think 10.5 will support Classic at all, why would they bother building it in if they're discontinuing support for it in 10.4.4 for Intel?

OS9 is so old nowadays, anyway - I truly can't see one reason why you'd want or need to use it.

catalyst · 22 Jan 2006 at 16:00

OllyM said:
I don't think 10.5 will support Classic at all, why would they bother building it in if they're discontinuing support for it in 10.4.4 for Intel?

OS9 is so old nowadays, anyway - I truly can't see one reason why you'd want or need to use it.

They didn't introduce it for Intel as it essentially would be another emulation layer on top of Rosetta and a lot of work for virtually no payback.. doesn't mean they will drop it for 10.5 PPC, though I do think it's inclusion is 50/50.

Yes, ideally you could just drop all your Classic apps.. but if you are a company with a sizable investment in certain pieces of classic software (over £1000 per client, and thousands of clients installed) then it is a very expensive proposition to upgrade your software for no real gain. I'm just glad its not coming out of my pocket

Caged · 23 Jan 2006 at 13:25

If you have a ton of licenses, why would you upgrade? More to the point, why are you paying £1000-per-license to a company which insists on coding for a platform which was discontinued five years ago?

Berserker · 23 Jan 2006 at 21:32

Some companies still run all their systems on Windows NT 4.0, which is even older (and totally unsupported now), so what's your point?

In a lot of industries, change is expensive. If you've got to roll out a whole new system to 10,000 desktops worldwide, with all the new training and faults and whatever else you'll get as a consequence, I'm sure you can figure why some IT directors might be reluctant.

Caged · 23 Jan 2006 at 22:27

Ok, but that doesn't mean Apple dropping support for Classic is going to ever be a problem, just don't upgrade your OS.

Berserker · 24 Jan 2006 at 10:41

Caged said:
Ok, but that doesn't mean Apple dropping support for Classic is going to ever be a problem, just don't upgrade your OS.

Absolutely - and most companies in this situation simply won't until they're forced to (e.g. by no longer being able to get hold of replacement hardware).