Timothy A. Seufert (a G3 owner) sent comments typical of most readers:

" This is a terrible development. There have been hints since WWDC that Apple's upper management wants to release OS X only for Apple brand PowerMac G3 systems, but never before has it been directly stated without ambiguity.

The worst of it is that there is absolutely no technical justification for such a move; the only reason Apple can be contemplating this is a desire to force owners of older machines to buy a new G3 system. (See below for more on this.) I fear that this will backfire. Apple cannot afford to alienate its customers. Worse yet, it's wholly irrational: Software is a higher margin product than hardware, so it would likely be better to produce an OS compatible with as many Apple computers as possible and sell a whole lot of it than to get a few lower margin hardware upgrades at the cost of alienating users who have been waiting half of forever for a modern OS. And finally, you are right on about the dangers of developing a new OS and restricting it to a relatively small portion of your user base.

I could understand before when Apple decided to cut off NuBus support for future advanced operating systems. There were valid technical reasons for that. The NuBus PowerMacs were burdened with legacy NuBus and 68K era hardware, and lacked any standardized method of booting them. At the very least, Apple would have been hard pressed to support NuBus cards.

There are no such reasons in this case. The PCI era Macs introduced a great degree of regularity to Macintosh hardware. They were conceptually lead-ins to CHRP hardware. The I/O chipset on the very first PCI Macintoshes bore a close resemblance to the "MacIO" chip described in the CHRP documents Apple published. Close enough that Paul Mackerras, principal author of Linux-Pmac, was able to bring up Linux on PCI Macs shortly after their introduction by reading the CHRP document and other information he was able to root up. (This is not to be confused with MkLinux. MkLinux is a weird hack from Apple while Linux-Pmac is a true port of Linux not sponsored or assisted by Apple.) The I/O chip in the PowerMac G3 and PowerBook G3 Series is more like MacIO than ever; in fact it's named "macio" in the Open Firmware device tree.

So, there haven't been a lot of changes to Macintosh hardware since the first PCI Macs. And even if there had been, Open Firmware is present in all PCI Macs. The whole point of OF in PCI PowerMacs and CHRP is to provide an OS- and processor-independent boot system. OF initializes a lot of the hardware, bootstraps the OS kernel, and presents the kernel with a device list so it can load appropriate drivers for all the devices in the system. It even provides a mechanism for processor independent drivers written in Forth. OF achieves CPU independence by being written entirely in interpreted Forth, and you can include a Forth driver in the ROMs of any PCI card. This allows an OS which has no native driver for the card to use the OF driver to at least enable it to be functional, if slow. Open Firmware booting is used by Rhapsody DR2 (which works on plenty of 604e machines) and Linux-Pmac.

Open Firmware means that the task of making OS X run on all of Apple's PCI machines really shouldn't be very hard. Yes, it'll require work and extra testing. But my guess is that it's not even close to being so much that it's impractical. Linux-Pmac has been doing it on nothing more than volunteer part-time effort, *despite* the project's inability to get any documentation from Apple about Apple's I/O chips. If the volunteer community can do it despite a severe lack of resources (both manpower and information), Apple can too.

The rest of the ROM isn't an issue. Rhapsody and MacOS X are a clean break from the foundations of older versions of MacOS. Rhapsody doesn't need the MacOS ROM at all; it is loaded completely from disk. The same will be true of OS X (which is truly only slightly different from Rhapsody). In fact, even regular MacOS doesn't necessarily need the ROMs: the iMac has ROMs which contain nothing but Open Firmware. It boots the disk-only version of MacOS formerly intended for CHRP machines.

I'm mad. I'm mad even though I personally own a G3 and thus won't be affected. This is a moronic decision, probably driven by upper management out of touch with the needs of customers and the true costs of supporting older machines. I think that Apple may be floating a trial balloon to see what the reaction of the general public will be. Well, it's time to get out the old 12-gauge shotgun and let that balloon have two barrels of double-ought buck. Time to give Steve a reality check. Time for all of us out here who aren't fooled by the excuses Apple is giving for this new direction to write Apple and give them a piece of our minds. We shouldn't be rude, but neither should we mince our words. "

This is one of the few mails I received that supported the G3-only OS X approach: Tanner Ellen wrote:

" Mike,
I read the post on your site earlier today from the gentleman that seemed to be very angry. I just wanted to respond to that in hopes that you will post this.

I totally agree with Apple's move to only support G3 series computers. It will durastically cut down on developement time because they do not have to test it with as many systems. It allows Apple to fully optimize the code just for G3 or G4 processors.

They also will have the freedom to do many things with MacOS X that may just not be possible on anything less powerfull than a G3. What our friend is forgetting is that OS X is still a year away. That is a long time in computer years and if you want a cutting edge OS you will need a cutting edge computer. I personally have a 8600/300 and paid $3600 for it in september. I am sad that that happened but that is how this business works. I am very pleased Apple is finally realizing that to produce the best OS they may have to stop support on some older systems that is what has held Apple back all along, they keep trying to stay backward compatible with every mac ever made. It just doesn't work that way and every other computer company out there has already realized that. It's about time Apple followed.

Also apple will keep developing Mac OS 8 and Sonata in the future for older power macs. These are very powerfull operating systems also and would make me very happy to use. In conclusion suck it up, shut up and let Apple make a freakin awsome OS! "

My Comments:

I will never 'shut up' when thousands of mac owners are crying out. I'm supposed to "Shut Up" on voicing concerns that are shared by tens of thousands of Mac owners? Sorry, that's not in my nature - and I know most of you would not want me to. Maybe that's what makes this site 'different', it does not just regurgitate the party line. To 'shut up' and let Apple abandon millions of the long loyal installed base just to sell more new G3 machines is pure folly and will result in a loss of many of our numbers I think.

I personally know of at least one company offering to write patches for OS X to support older machines, but in talking with them it's as if they have to beg Apple to do so (hinting that they feared a loss of new system sales). Why do you think there are no Apple CPU upgrades for the G3 line or the PowerBook? Because they want to sell a new system. Face it - most of us can't afford to buy new machines just to run a new OS. Apple reportedly spent $100 Million plus dollars on iMac ads - would adding support for older macs cost more than that? Surely not, not even a fraction. (And letting others add support would cost them nothing - but maybe new system sales).

One of the primary principles of business is to *listen* to your customers. Regardless of what Apple does - they are better off to know what their customers think and what may be the consequences of their actions. That's good business practice don't you think?

Even Microsoft says Win98 and NT 5 (if it ever arrives ;-) will run on older machines.

Check the application performance, the G3 is not really that much faster and sometimes slower than my 350mhz 604e. In After Effects and Bryce2 the 9600/350 outperformed my G3/266MT. In fact many G3 upgraded older Macs are faster than most of the Apple G3 models - so performance is not the issue.

There is no "G3 optimized code". There are no PowerPC instructions that are G3 only, never was.

To further fragment the already tiny MacOS installed base is a serious mistake as it's tough now to get developers to do new apps - did you notice the missing companies at MacWorld? Were was Macromedia and dozens of other high tech software developers? What will happen when the market for OS X is 4X smaller? And from the mail I get there are many people that are very angry over this (they bought a 8600 in Jan/Feb for instance and now it's not supported)

I understand the logistics, development time, etc. But the potential profits are higher to Apple if they support more machines = more sales.

Let's just agree to disagree. From what I have gotten from readers there are two undeniable facts:

1) They will lose a lot of OS sales and hardware sales (far more existing owners are impacted negatively than would be new buyers - net result is an even smaller base of users).

2) This will be an excuse/reason for many to just buy a cheap PC (and at that time a PII 400mhz will be the price of an iMac or less)

It's one thing to say that older Mac owners have had years of use from their machines, but what about new Mac buyers of 86/9600s? They've just gotten started on what was the flagship of the line and now they are told that they need a new machine to run the next generation OS?

I hate to see us lose even one Mac owner to the other side, and as several readers mentioned - even Microsoft Windows 98 and NT 5 will run on older machines, and although the line may have to be drawn somewhere, to not support anything but the Apple G3 systems is not a smart move by Apple and one that will alienate a huge portion of loyal customers.

Here's a distrubing comment that also shows the negative reactions/consequences of such a policy:

" Mike,
As you've mentioned, you've gotten hundreds of emails, but this decision in particular is beyond all comprehension. While I can understand that they want to really push the G3 and G4 processor, to say that only if you have one of their machines can you run it is totally absurd. Once again, Apple is deciding to alienate their customers and cause decension among the troops. All of the power users who are sick of waiting for Apple to produce the machine they want have been busily working on their upgraded 9500's and Powertowers, and now they are getting screwed by Apple again. I personally am very happy with my 325Mhz G3 upgraded machine, and I have no reason to get rid of it. But now Apple is telling me that this machine (which is faster then anything they are making right now) is essentially obsolete, and that I am stuck in the MacOS track forever, with no option to run MacOS X? Incredible. How many times can Apple make these horrendous blunders?

I'm truly sorry to say it, but I recently had to get a PC for multimedia development work, and I was truly appalled with the speed of this mid-range machine. A 266 PII with Win 98 and 64 megs of ram is easily twice as responsive in daily chores as my 325Mhz G3 with 208 megs of ram and ultra SCSI. While I still use the Mac for all of my graphic creation work, I have given up fighting with the Mac for web browsing, email, word processing, etc. Two crashes in two weeks (both in a game demo) and programs opening in 2 seconds and closing instantly? And my Mac (which should be twice as fast, right?) can't do any better? Apple has the key, and now they are hiding it away.

Apple has to wake up, or NT 5 (even with all of its headaches) running on a dual 400 mhz PII machine is going to look pretty darn good in a year and a half. I've been using and defending the mac for almost 11 years, and I'm getting pretty sick of explaining my choice, especially in the face of moronic actions like this.

-Paul Carpenter "

I get hundreds of similar mails - this is why I urge Apple to at least consider the consequences of this move and to give serious thought the adding other model support down the road at least.

Copyright © mike, 1998.

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