MacBook System Upgrade Requirements Provoke Brit Columnist’s Wrath, But How Far Back Should Legacy Support Be Reasonably Expected?

The Guardian’s Rupert Jones is an unhappy camper because he’s discovered that his four-year-old MacBook running contemporaneous OS X 10.4 Tiger system software needs a system upgrade in order to support his new iPhone 4 and his daughter’s iPod shuffle, both of which require iTunes 10 application software which in turn demands a minimum of OS X 10.5 Leopard.

TUAW’s Chris Rawson comments on Mr. Jones’s vigorous grievance at his middle-aged MacBook not being able to run current software or support the latest Apple idevices without its original operating system being upgraded. Rawson observes that being able to distinguish the difference between updates and upgrades can save users from a lot of angst, something especially worth keeping mind with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion poised to spring sometime soon and likely to drop support for the earliest Intel-based Macs. However Rawson contends that as long as your Mac is capable of running the latest OS, there’s really no reason it shouldn’t be doing so, and if instead of ponying up around 10 percent of the cost of a new Mac (or less) to bring your system up to spec., you choose sit on your hands and pout, you really haven’t been paying attention or getting with the program.

Still on the topic of software evolution and backwards compatibility, Jerry King, president of the Naples MacFriends User Group (NMUG) in a column for MarcoNews entitled “Making Old Macs Work With Lion Takes Some Tinkering,” notes that Apple’s new Lion (OS 10.7) operating system is expected this summer is widely anticipated to drop Rosetta Power PC application support, but that there is an easy method to determine what legacy applications this elimination will disable.

King observes that longtime Mac users who’ve migrated from OS 9 into OS 10.6 will probably find four kinds of software on their hard drives: Classic, PowerPC, Universal and Intel, and that Classic applications already will only run in Macs using early versions (up to and including OS 10.4) of OS X, and that PowerPC applications need Rosetta and therefore likely won’t work under Lion. Universal and Intel applications will be fine under Lion.

Options? Well you can of course choose not upgrade to OS 10.7, and indeed won’t have any upgrade headroom if you’re still running a PowerPC Mac, having already been cast by the wayside with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard which only supports Intel-based systems. However, for folks still running early-generation Intel Macs, Snow Leopard will remain a very capable operating system for years to come yet.

On the other hand, if you buy a new Mac after Lion is released it will have Lion installed as its default operating system, and will not be capable of running earlier, Rosetta-supporting versions of OS X. King suggests another potential workaround is to keep an older Mac in service running Snow Leopard to support mission-critical PowerPC applications (or even OS 10.4 Tiger if you still want Classic support), and while this is a cumbersome solution, he says he often wishes he’d kept a computer running OS 10.4 Tiger so some Classic applications’ archived critical data files would still be accessible. That’s been my strategy, and I’m planning to keep a couple of G4 upgraded Pismo PowerBooks running OS 10.4 in service for as long as they’ll continue running. I also have an old 604e UMAX SuperMac S900 tower that even has a floppy drive for really “deep” legacy support, but that’s just me.

A less radical Rosetta termination workaround if you’re running a computer that supports OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (or if it’s old enough even OS 10.4 if you want Classic Mode), it’s also possible to partition your internal hard drive with multiple volumes and install two or more versions of OS X that can be booted respectively using the Startup Disk Preferences panel.

King’s article also profiles strategies going forward for several specific Power PC applications.

You can check it out at:
http://bit.ly/jF2jqY

For more on NMUG, visit:
http://www.naplesmug.com