A note about Macintosh architecture

[richmond62]

Obviously some people have NOT done their homework, so a corrective is required:
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gettingItWrong.png (32.35 KiB) Viewed 1630 times

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Macintosh computers go a bit like this:

PPC G3, G4 & G5 running a maximum version of MacOS 10.5

ALL of the G3 & G4 PPC Macs were 32-bit, the G5 PPC Macs were 64-bit.

Intel Macs running MacOS 10.5 through MacOS 14 [and possibly further]

The very first Intel Macs were 32-bit, and as such, could not run any OS after 10.6 "Snow Leopard".

ARM Macs running 'current' systems.

[tperry2x]

Kind of. Yeah, that 'someone' - it was me.

I was waiting for someone to pick up on this
The G5's also supported 32bit instruction sets, due to most of the underlying OS still containing heaps of 32bit code at the time.
I missed out that 10.5 would run 32bit PPC and 32bit Intel. (which is why you can install 10.5 on G5 hardware - eMac) 10.5 dropped Classic support that was still in 10.4, just as 10.13 began to pop up warnings about 32-bit PPC support). Meanwhile 10.8 became 64-bit intel aware and would run both 32-bit and 64-bit until 10.15 came along which would only run 64-bit intel programs (and now in 11+ with it's support for ARM, and Intel being phased out entirely in MacOS 12 - only supported by one model that lacks the T2 security chip).

Bloody complicated, and you can understand developers saying 'to hell with Apple', but they stuck by the platform purely for the number of people who are using them. Where there are users, there is money... so there are developers too.

Actually, I have a 10.4.11 rare build of MacOS that is actually 32bit intel - it wasn't widely circulated though.
Not that the majority of people actually care anymore it seems. This is all 'ancient history' to most people.

[richmond62]

Currently my G4 Mac Mini is running "Siberian Tiger" [MacOS "10.4.12"]

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/shuriken

Having worked out it is a better bet than "Sorbet Leopard" [MacOS "10.5.9"] insofar that it is faster and runs 'Classic'

https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/intro ... nvigorated

[which is also a pain-in-the-bum as it has to be installed by messing around considerably with another partition.]

At one time I had Lubuntu crawling on the Mac Mini PPC [mainly in a daft idea of compiling a PPC Linux version of LC] . . . which was nothing but bad news and glacially slow.

[tperry2x]

...[mainly in a daft idea of compiling a PPC Linux version of LC] . . . which was nothing but bad news and glacially slow.

A bit like trying to run intel software will be on Arm-only processors. It'll require virtualisation of some kind. Do you remember how slow the likes of 'Virtual PC 5' was on PPC Macs? I remember trying to boot (back then) Windows 98 on a Bondi iMac in VirtualPC. Nearly killed it.

Will we have to rely on a virtualised intel processor when the only option is to buy an ARM-based one? Probably.
For anyone who is still on Intel at that point, and trying to emulate an ARM one, they are likely to see the comparable kinds of speeds of the VirtualPC days above.

Which links in nicely to the next topic:
viewtopic.php?p=3029#p3029

[richmond62]

Dunno: I had VPC running 'Millenium" on MacOS 10.2 ona Mirror-Door Mac in 2002, and I did, at least, manage to do the incredibly pointless exercises in Visual BASIC for my "Masters" degree at the sinkhole of Abertay on it.