G3 Support in Leopard or Not?


Although many might argue the G3 processor should be allowed to die a quiet death, there are just way too many fruity iMacs, Beige G3 Power Macs and PowerBook G3 Pismos hanging around. Not to mention a huge number of G3 iBooks of both the ToiletBook and iceBook generations.

MacBidouille noticed a contradiction in the publicity and release notes for OS X 10.5 Leopard: the advertising says, "From G3 to Xeon, from MacBook to Xserve, there is just one Leopard." Seems pretty clear.

But the Read Me file says something else: you need a G4/G5 or Intel processor to run Leopard.

Of course, Apple has been gradually phasing out G3 support. Even my ancient (1999) Lombard PowerBook G3 has been officially declared 'obsolete'. As obsolete as the Mac Plus. But currently, with OS X 10.4 Tiger, all Macs with built-in FireWire are supported. Naturally, that hasn't stopped people using XPostFacto to install OS X 10.4 on officially 'unsupported' machines.

Some find this an unfortunate policy. After all, the instruction set the G4 follows is really no different from the G3 and OS X releases have always run faster on the same hardware, a major departure from the Classic Mac OS: the later the system, the more like treacle the system became. But 10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 delivered real-world performance increases on the same hardware.

Hardheads at Apple will figure (a) few G3 users will buy Leopard and (b) it's about time you bought a new Mac anyway. So the incentive to support older hardware is simply not there.

Consequently, this sounds like a new mission for Mr. Rempel, developer of XPostFacto, should he choose to accept it.