October 2, 1991: As the Cold War comes to an end, hell freezes over a second time as Apple and IBM agree to put aside their differences.
Having been bitter rivals for the past decade, the two tech giants host a press conference at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco to unveil their new partnership. “We want to be a major player in the computer industry,” Apple CEO John Sculley says. “The only way to do that is to work with another major player.”
A rover that recently landed on the surface of Mars uses the same processor that powered the 1998 iMac. NASA built Perseverance around a chip from decades ago because reliability is more important than being cutting edge when the computer is 130 million miles away.
Developers have been slowly ditching support for PowerPC processors since Apple made the switch to Intel, so if you still have an old PowerPC Mac lying around, it probably doesn’t get a lot of use. But if it’s a Power Mac G5, then there us one way you could put it to work.
Pull out its insides and set it alight and you have a gorgeous aluminum BBQ grill.
PowerPC-based Macs have long been considered dead and buried by Apple, but the company just put a few more nails in the coffin to prevent any corpse risings. With the release of iTunes 10.7 this week the ubiquitous media control center becomes Intel-only, requiring at least a Core Solo processor and Mac OS X 10.6.8.
In a related one-two punch, Apple has also stopped providing online Software Updates for Mac OS X versions 10.0 through 10.3, as well as Mac OS 9. These items are now available only by direct download from Apple’s support website.
While Steve Jobs famously liked to take credit for others’ ideas, he also gave a lot of credit to the amazing people he employed at Apple who enabled the company to create all of the incredible products it has released over the years. In many interviews, Jobs praised their creativity, passion, and drive, and their determination to build the best product they could build.
Ron Avitzur is a great example of that. While working at Apple in August 1993, the graphic calculator program he and his team were working on was shelved. Avitzur declined the opportunity to transfer to another project, but he continued to turn up to work each day, sneaking into the Apple camp in Cupertino until his project was complete.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkEYzS8zHok
If you’ve plowed years of hard work into maintaining an iWeb blog, you must be concerned about what will happen to your site with the impending death of MobileMe just around the corner. But thanks to this handy conversion tool from RAGE software, you can transfer it all to WordPress within minutes.
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.
