Apple (sort of) confirms Leopard will not run on G3 Macs
Posted by Dr. Macenstein
Not that it should come as much of a surprise to anyone, but Apple may have made it semi-official that the next iteration of OSX (Leopard) will not support the “ancient” G3 processor. A posting over at the theappleblog notes that just after Monday’s WWDC Keynote speech, the Leopard Preview page listed a line of copy reading “From G3 to Xeon, from MacBook to Xserve, there is just one Leopard.â€?
However, a day later, the line was removed.
Now, while the odds are quite good that the line was removed so as to not get the hopes up of any bondi-blue iMac owners who thought they’d be screaming through Leopard’s Core Image effects, there IS another theory we would like to put out there.
The line “From G3 to Xeon, from MacBook to Xserve, there is just one Leopard.â€? is technically inaccurate. There are TWO Leopards; consumery Leopard, and Leopard Server. And in theory you are supposed to run Leopard Server on the Xserve they mention in that same line as well. So while I do not doubt that Leopard will either run grudgingly (or not at all) on a G3, we have no official word yet from Apple. It could just be a poorly worded sentence that Apple’s marketing guys eventually caught.
So keep those candles burning, “Clamshell” iBook owners! There is always hope!
The last G3 was made, in computer terms, ages ago and I wouldn’t expect support. If you’re a G3 owner and upset that Leopard may not support you, it’s really time to evaluate your position. Many Mac users agree that MS is in trouble partly because of their insistence on supporting legacy hardware. Let’s not hope that Apple and OS X follow that path.
If you have a Bondi-blue iMac, it’s time to start thinking about a new Mac rather than being upset that you’re being left behind.
While I agree with Christopher, I still hope there is at least partial (whatever that may be) support. I have an iMac G5 20″, but my wife is still very satisified with her (maxed out) iBook G3 500MHz. Then, of course, there’s XPostFacto. How will it play into this scheme? My PM 9600 Mach V 1GHz G3 w/ 1.5GB RAM and Radeon 9200 runs Tiger surprisingly well. And when Sonnet releases its 1GHz G4, it will [probably] run even better! Will I be able to put Leopard on there somehow? 1997 and 2007 unite! Wow, what a prospect… or am I just fantasizing?
I just attempted to install both server and ‘client’ on my B&W G3 tower, and it will not install. I then tried to boot it off a firewire disk that had 10.7 installed, and it would simply bypass the firewire and boot to 10.4.6 instead.
So, yeah, not a good sign.
🙂
10.7? woooow jking i know what you meant!
Do waist you’re time trying somthing im trying to get leo on my g3 imac, so far i think all i missing is some drivers for the disk i have, im doing the 2006 Bata as it runs on a g3 fine as i herd, but its more like 10.4 and i dont care much, then im going to coppy some of the key text files over and see if that works, also i may have to edit the installer a bit but thats all