Unraveling The PowerPC Obsolescence Myth

According to proponents of this myth, Apple and third party developers will soon stop making software that runs on PowerPC Macs; even Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X, will be Intel only! They're wrong, here's why.

Why the Myth was Woven

This myth is the opposite of wishful thinking; let's call it pandemoniac fear. It's the sort of panicked revelation that kids nowadays preface with OMG. Fear is a great tool to get attention and develop a following. Plus, there’s a FUD component behind documenting "concerns" that the current Macs might be obsolete while the new Macs can't run certain software titles natively yet. OMG! That's a lot to worry about dude : (

The Myth Weavers

This myth is so fantastically absurd that it has to involve Mark Stephens, writing under the name Robert X Cringely. Remember, Cringely was also involved with spreading the Red Box Myth, the Mac OS X Microkernel Myth, and the Mac OS X Needs a Linux Kernel Myth.

His recent speculation that Leopard would not work on PowerPC Macs managed to imply some sort of Osborne Effect for Intel Macs that could only be managed by Apple actively obsolescing all PowerPC Macs this year:

"Speeding-up performance is great, but normally a system vendor won't want to do that for older hardware, which might encourage some users to keep their old box and just add a new OS. [...] For this reason alone, I'm guessing that the new OS X Kernel won't be backward compatible to PowerMacs. But this is just a guess."

Just a guess. Well it's time for an unraveling.

Unraveled with Extreme Prejudice

Anyone paying attention to Mac OS X development knows that every release has increased performance on the same hardware. I can't think of a system vendor who "wouldn't want to do that," but even so, it's a bit odd to suggest that Apple wouldn't want to sell retail boxes to existing Mac users, but would prefer to sell them a new Mac instead.

Selling users a copy of Leopard would actually increase their chances of buying a new Mac in the future, and would be more profitable for Apple short term, because the profit on a software sale has zero overhead when compared to a new hardware sale, where the profits are razor thin and similarly include the new software at no extra charge anyway. Delay $1000 of revenue to earn $100 more profit? Sounds like good business to me.

Will Apple stop selling new versions of iLife, so that potential buyers would be forced to buy a new Mac just to get it? Of course not. Why would they do the same with Leopard?

And what about Universal? No, I'm not thinking about the media empire destroyed by Steve Job's nemesis Ed Bronfman Jr, but rather the marketing catch phrase Apple has created to pacify users and developers. Universal's yin yang logo was designed to capture the hippy harmony in Apple land between PowerPC and Intel Macs.

Universal makes the processor not matter. Users don't have to worry about buying the right version of software, and more importantly, developers can ship a single product that abstracts away any differences and simply works seamlessly on whatever Mac the user has.

More Nails in the Coffin

The Universal strategy really deflates any fears about PowerPC software availability from third parties. Still not convinced that Apple will release a Universal Leopard?

Consider that, according to Apple's fiscal quarterly reports, there have been around 14 million Macs sold in the last four years. Some percentage of another 7.5 million Macs are still in normal, regular use: titanium PowerBooks, PowerMac G4s, white iBooks, Cubes and early Xserves dating back to the 2000 release of Mac OS X.

Apple needs to sell as many copies of Leopard as possible when it ships in early 2007. Will they sell it exclusively to users of the 3 million or so Intel Mac sold by early next year, or to a potential Universal market of 14 million Macs which are less than four years old, or the 20+ million Macs which can run Mac OS X?

Of course, some of those 20 million Macs have been run over by cars, burst into flames, turned into fish tanks, or simply won't be able to run Leopard; many however, will, and certainly far more than the 3 million Intel Macs sold before Leopard comes out.

Since new Macs sold in 2007 will ship with the new OS, making Leopard Intel-only would artificially limit the entire potential for retail sales of Leopard to the 3 million Intel Macs that get sold this year! How ruthlessly absurd.

Again, Apple will be happy to delay $1000 of hardware revenue to earn $100 more in software profit from those millions of PowerPC users. And will those PowerPC Mac users be happy to buy a software upgrade that makes their existing Mac faster, more reliable, fun, and just generally more spiffy? According to readers who have written in on the subject: yes.

Put that way, it's also hard to fathom why any software developer would target developments that were Intel only, unless they were building a PC virtualization tool that simply couldn't run on PowerPC Macs. Microsoft and Adobe are unquestionably going to release Universal versions of their software to tap that 15-20 million Mac audience.

If Apple continues to sell new Macs at current rates, it will be 2008 before Intel Macs begin to outnumber PowerPCs, and that assumes that every year, 4 million old PowerPC Macs will be destroyed. There will be a significant proportion of PowerPC Macs still buying software well into 2010, and the market will accommodate them.

On top of all those installed base numbers, developers simply have no reason not to support PowerPC. It requires very little development effort to make sure their applications work on all of the large installed base of Macs for years to come.

The transition to Intel is very different than the transition to PowerPC a decade ago. Back then, while developers could distribute their applications as "fat binaries" that would work on both architectures, it was nearly double the work to code new applications in both 68k and PowerPC.

There was no development tool like Xcode, and there was much less hardware abstraction in the Mac OS libraries. The former transition mostly involved tricking as much code as practical to run in emulation, where today's transition to Intel is about cleanly recompiling code to also work on the new platform, using a system and libraries designed from the start to accommodate such portability.

So there you have it. PowerPC Macs are not any more obsolesced by Intel than the PowerMac G4 was by the G5. Depending on the software you use, you might be better off holding onto your PowerMac.