First some good news. Apple must have read my mind along with the minds of many of its customers. Mac OS X is a great operating system and the current version, 10.5.3 has a lot to offer. Unfortunately, many of Apple’s customers have complained about speed and stability issues.

If the rumor is true, then this December that will change when Mac OS X Snow Leopard is released. Yes, that’s right- 10.6 might be available this December.

My only concern is that the rumor also states that support for the G4 and G5 PowerPC Macs will be entirely discontinued. While the G4 architecture is a bit long in the tooth, the G5 still delivers sufficient performance. Bear in mind that an EMT64 only Snow Leopard would preclude certain Macs (iMacs and PowerMacs) that were only three years old. While I am not one for prolonging the life of legacy hardware, a quad-core PowerMac G5 does not quite meet the criteria of “legacy.” Midlife, yes. Legacy, certainly not.

Below is my suggestion for Apple’s transition away from the PowerPC with Mac OS X. I’m sure Steve is reading:

10.6 — G4 support is dropped entirely. All G5’s still supported.
10.7– Partial G5 support for Dual Processor Machines/Dual Core/Minimum Clock Speed ~ 1.8 Ghz
11.0 – No G5 support 

Oh and 10.6 is supposed to be all-Cocoa too

In unrelated news, there is an ongoing and lively discussion regarding the minimum system requirement for Windows 2003 Server among my class ( CIT 225 Windows Network Operating Systems). Here are a few nuggets of vision offered by yours truly on the subject of whether it is wise to use the minimum hardware requirements on a Windows 2003 Server:

 Here’s another example of this phenomenon [trying to get away with the base minimum hardware specifications] that I have personally witnessed- Windows XP installed on a low-clocked Celeron and only 96 MB of RAM. I have seen car accidents that looked better. Yet people choose to do similar setups with their servers and complain when performance is less than what they expected.

My response to the suggestion it was okay to use a low end drive and upgrade later:

The smallest hard drives you can purchase are 40 GB. If you find anything smaller in a Win2k3 server that was built even remotely recently, someone has decided to “recycle” a hard drive from an older machine- a hard drive that has several years worth of bad blocks, that is out of warranty, and may not support SMART III that would give you warning that there was an imminent failure approaching.

Hope your files are backed up somewhere…

I love being opinionated