& for $49 you get...

5 licenses, thats er, less than $10 a pop

Even if it is considered a service pack thats a hell of a lot less than the 'service pack' Microsoft will push out to Vista is going to cost.

Whats more Ive every confidence that like other Apple upgrades, it will work first time. Unlike the tangled mess some MS upgrades can create

Apple, masters of planned (early) obsolescence

Over the years, Apple has show utter disdain for their customers by very often throwing them out in the cold with updates targeted to hardware as little as 1 year old, and sometimes even less. For example, with the advent of Quartz extreme some years ago, Apple shut out users with relatively recent graphics cards, without bothering to at least secure any third party sources for reasonable replacement cards. Back then, the only "sanctioned" option for my G4 was to buy an ATI 9800 for an exorbitant price (I believe it was about $250-300.) I had already replaced the graphics card once, and that card was 8 mo. old.

True, that OS (10.2) worked on my machine, but without hardware acceleration, the new OS used the CPU for drawing the screen, and slowed way down accordingly. So Apple could say that it was compatible, they just never mentioned if it would be practical.

Thanks Apple, once again, for deciding that a 1 year old computer does not deserve to be compatible with new OS requirements. I have an 8 core "early 2008" Mac Pro, with the standard ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card. It seems that this card is not able to take advantage of OpenCL. Not as bad a slap as the example above, but still - it seems that Apple can't be bothered writing a few extra drivers . . .

Oh, I'm sorry, isn't this clear in their press releases?

From Apple's site http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html :

>Feature-specific requirements

>OpenCL

> * NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GTS, Geforce 9400M, >GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130.

> * ATI Radeon 4850, Radeon 4870

Yes, 10.6 will work with this Mac, but it won't be able to use OpenCL unless I "upgrade" to another video card priced anywhere from 2 to 4 times the equivalent price for the exact (except for rom) PC equivalent . . . if you can find one at all.

Want to get a new card from Apple? The only one they offer is the ATI 4870 for - get this - $350! And this "Mac" version only has 1 DVI port, in addition to a totally useless Apple "mini display" port.

Way to go Apple. No, really, Apple, just go . . .

No biggie

I knew when I bought my iBook in late '05 that PPC was headed for the bin one day and while I had a slim hope of skipping X.5 and jump straight to X.6 it looks like I'll have to pass. It makes sense that now would be a good time for the cut. Apple are supporting Intel and Arm so there probably isn't the budget for extending PPC any longer. Heck most of the new apps I've looked at and thought interesting require 10.5 on Intel anyway. Who knows, maybe in a year or two I'll have to upgrade and it'll be Arm-n-Android or webOS or something completely different.

@KiwiAndy

"On a Hackintosh I built, CS3 for Windows runs faster on Win7 than CS3 for Mac on Leopard. Not bad for a late Beta, Microsoft."

So let me get this right, Windows ran CS3 faster on a machine you built than Leopard did? This is proof of what exactly?

Two things: compare the speeds on a Mac Pro of both OSs; use CS4

Get back to us when you've at least tried OSX on a system it was designed for rather than your own Frankenstein creation.

(untitled)

i was just looking at the apple website, it would appear that 2-3 GB of the install space saved is printer drivers as these are now installed on the fly via the interwebs.

I would guess the rest is PPC binaries and demo software(hopefully)

(untitled)

"And although The Reg is a heatlhly, ongoing business, we simply don't have the travel budget necessary to track down and snuff each and every one of our millions of readers."

- It's nice to know that you would if you could though.

@RichyS ".....PowerPC binaries, which, for some reason, OS X insists on installing even on an Intel Mac".

I would imagine that is for Rosetta, leopard was supposed to be the transition between PPC and Intel.

Space savings

I doubt that the removal of PPC code amounts to much. Taking a random application in my apps folder: Preview.app shows as 70.2MB in the Finder. Digging into the contents of the package I can see that the actual binary is only 1.9MB and the rest is all resources. So I'd expect to save about a meg by stripping the PPC code out of the binary. Mail.app is 289MB in total, of which 5.7MB is code.

I'd be surprised if the PPC code amounts to more than a few hundred meg altogether.

They mentioned in the keynote about compression being a major reason for the reduced footprint. I haven't looked for any details, but I'd guess that they've changed the loader to allow it to read ZIP compressed resource bundles or something like that.

(Or conceivably they've extended HFS+ to support transparent per-file compression.)