iLife ’11 Only Works On Snow Leopard

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iLife '11 react

At this point, we’re not really surprised when Apple’s new software drops support for old PowerPC Macs. Apple’s been building PCs on Intel hardware for four years now: at some point, going through all the expense and bother of coding for obsolete hardware just stops being worth it.

So when iLife ’11 dropped PowerPC support, we weren’t surprised. It’s not really a big deal: the previous version of iLife works just fine on the PowerPC architecture, and if you’re going to work on a five year old computer, you can live with a two year old media productivity suite, we reckon.

More surprising to us is iLife ’11’s strict requirement for a minimum OS install of Snow Leopard. That’s more than a little strange, although during the presentation, Jobs did mention that iLife ’11 was built upon many of the core technologies introduced in Snow Leopard.

How do you feel about this? On the one hand, it seems strange to abandon millions of customers running relatively modern Macs on Leopard… but on the other hand, considering the fact Snow Leopard only costs $29, we’re hard pressed to think of any reason why users wouldn’t have upgraded to the more stable and snappy latest OS already.

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