Yeah, I know.
But I'm going to diverge from the topic for a little bit.
The first release of Dropbox was in September 2008, almost a year after the release of Leopard, and two years after any PowerPC systems had been sold.
Most people who have been crying the loudest about Dropbox seem not to remember that at the time, there were no server or network-based solutions for that task on the Mac, at all. Dropbox is a new thing that was invented well into the Intel era, and sync-based cloud storage has essentially become the standard since then. iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and I'm pretty sure Amazon's new consumer-focused cloud storage solution all use desktop sync clients rather than doing something akin to mapping a drive or using a specialized client to transfer files to and from the storage location. (Unrelatedly, I actually wish there were a few storage solutions that did allow you to just map an AFP, SMB, webdav, etc drive, but that's another issue.)
So, it's really interesting to see one of the more active PowerPC-focused areas to be almost completely up in arms about something that literally didn't exist yet when their machines were built and sold. You'd think somebody issued a software patch that disables all word processors, and suddenly nobody can do any writing on PowerPC Macs.
The official reason from Dropbox for the change in support is because the development workflow needed to support 10.4 through 10.10, which is what they currently "support," if I remember correctly, is totally insane, and they may want to make changes to the application and the architecture of the whole system that make a "present but unsupported" dropbox client unsuitable.
Despite the fact that I personally believe G4s and G5s were horrible, even when they were new, I do think it's a shame these machines are starting to miss out on things. Of course, they wouldn't if they were running Linux or BSD, and Windows PCs from the era can all typically run Windows 7 and will as such have support for this kind of thing for the forseeable future, which is one of the unfortunate things about, well, any platform that's not linux or Windows. It'll be interesting to see how long Mac OS X 10.10 supports things that get introduced in the future, or how long today's Macs are supported by new releases of Mac OS X. The "Late 2007" MacBook Pro is still receiving new software, at least as of this wriitng.
But I'm going to diverge from the topic for a little bit.
You know, it's actually really interesting. Before dropbox, there was no automatic, continuous, multi-endpoint syncing for consumers. There was rsync, but it wasn't really continuous, nor does rsync really use a single repository. There are code management solutions, but those aren't meant for the same thing dropbox does. There was Microsoft Groove, SharePoint Workspace, OneDrive for Business, but that all required that you have a SharePoint server. Even Apple's online storage, whatever it was called at the time, was just a folder you mounted on the desktop using AFP, and stored files directly online, instead of syncing them.
The first release of Dropbox was in September 2008, almost a year after the release of Leopard, and two years after any PowerPC systems had been sold.
Most people who have been crying the loudest about Dropbox seem not to remember that at the time, there were no server or network-based solutions for that task on the Mac, at all. Dropbox is a new thing that was invented well into the Intel era, and sync-based cloud storage has essentially become the standard since then. iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and I'm pretty sure Amazon's new consumer-focused cloud storage solution all use desktop sync clients rather than doing something akin to mapping a drive or using a specialized client to transfer files to and from the storage location. (Unrelatedly, I actually wish there were a few storage solutions that did allow you to just map an AFP, SMB, webdav, etc drive, but that's another issue.)
So, it's really interesting to see one of the more active PowerPC-focused areas to be almost completely up in arms about something that literally didn't exist yet when their machines were built and sold. You'd think somebody issued a software patch that disables all word processors, and suddenly nobody can do any writing on PowerPC Macs.
The official reason from Dropbox for the change in support is because the development workflow needed to support 10.4 through 10.10, which is what they currently "support," if I remember correctly, is totally insane, and they may want to make changes to the application and the architecture of the whole system that make a "present but unsupported" dropbox client unsuitable.
Despite the fact that I personally believe G4s and G5s were horrible, even when they were new, I do think it's a shame these machines are starting to miss out on things. Of course, they wouldn't if they were running Linux or BSD, and Windows PCs from the era can all typically run Windows 7 and will as such have support for this kind of thing for the forseeable future, which is one of the unfortunate things about, well, any platform that's not linux or Windows. It'll be interesting to see how long Mac OS X 10.10 supports things that get introduced in the future, or how long today's Macs are supported by new releases of Mac OS X. The "Late 2007" MacBook Pro is still receiving new software, at least as of this wriitng.