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Originally posted by vmarks: It wasn't something that was 'taken away' - it was just something that wasn't added. Each new machine model uses different hardware (or else why would you want a new machine?) Each new machine had to have parts of OS 9 re-written in order to be able to boot on the new machine. Apple has decided that devoting development dollars and manpower to OS 9 is a losing proposition, and has straddled supporting two very different OS releases for long enough. OS X is far more flexible in addressing the hardware it can run on. This means that each new release of hardware won't require a specific OS X cd for that model unless it's something as huge as the processor changeover in G5, which required 10.2.7 while everyone else used 10.2.6. If you could make a dollar-value case that Apple will make X hundreds of thousands of dollars by continuing to update OS 9 to boot on new machines, I'm sure they'd be happy to consider devoting one or two developers to the task, but unless you can come up with a way to pay the developers salaries and show a profit, it just no longer makes sense to devote that effort. If you truly need OS 9, get one of the last top of the line powermacs that ran it, or pick up a gigabit ethernet or newer machine and upgrade it's processor and enjoy all the blazing fast OS 9 you like. |
Victor - I hear you, and this is a much more reasonable argument than those before you. However, Apple would not be the first company to have legacy obligations. I say it's all part of the business. If you are going to sell computers and you want to have loyal customers, sometimes you have to spend some money to keep them happy. This includes writing sofware for older machines, developing upgrades, etc. I am disappointed that Apple hasn't spent the time and money to keep new machines bootable is OS 9.
EDIT: There is one guy in here who said that the only thing keeping him from buying a G5 is that it's not bootable in OS 9. Sure, this is not a statistical random sample, but if there is one guy in here, then perhaps there are more elsewhere. Apple might lose some money doing it, but I doubt it would be as much as you think.