Cogs can think.

And so Apple decided to turn up the heat under satisfied PowerPC owners by (most likely) dropping support for 800Mhz and lower PowerPC G4 Macs from Leopard. For me, this sucks major balls.

I have a PowerMac G4 Cube, with a 450Mhz PowerPC G4 with 1Mb L2 cache, 768MB of pc133 SDRAM, and an nVIDIA GeForce 2MX with 32MB of video RAM. It has a nice 128GB hard drive, AirPort Extreme, and of course a DVD drive. It’s a completely silent machine, and serves me extremely well as my main machine. It runs the latest OSX just fine (except for Flash). I can do a lot of stuff simultaneously, and therefore, am perfectly happy with the system’s performance.

And, lest we forget, it’s the best-looking computer man has ever conceived, and is a great fit for my living room.

Apple’s reasons for this decision are clear: financial gains. By cutting off a whole bunch of G4 owners, they will force them to upgrade to Intel Macs if they wish to continue to run the latest and greatest. On top of that, this cut off is completely arbitrary - I have received many reports from Leopard testers that Leopard ran just fine on machines similar to mine, including the new fancy effects. So, it’s obvious Apple wants to please their stockholders - which is fine by me, but that doesn’t make it nicer to its customers. Once again Apple is showing that it is not a single bit better than every other company out there - Apple is just like Microsoft. Make no mistake about it.

I wish Apple would go about this the same way as Microsoft: set minimum specifications, but let customers decide *shock gasp horror* for themselves if they are willing to run the OS slightly slower than His Steveness intends. Give us customers the freedom to do whatever the fcuk we deem acceptable. I have run Vista on machines way below the minimum specifications, and I could get acceptable performance out of them, simply because Microsoft allows me, as a customer, to have the freedom to actually try it.

Anyway, as OSNews’ managing editor, I find that I ought to always run the latest and greatest (software-wise), in order to make informed decisions as to what news items to publish, and to have good knowledge on what’s available on the market - knowledge I need for writing informed editorials and reviews. Apple is making that impossible for me.

You see, despite claims to the contrary, OSNews ain’t making any of us money. All our ad money goes to hosting, and whatever’s left goes to David to give us the odd present here and there. Oh, and of course, the company DB9 we all drive. So, in other words, I ain’t rich. I simply cannot afford to spend a 1099 1199 EUR on a new iMac (no, I don’t want a Mini, I don’t like it, it’s ugly, and it’s a toy, and in The Netherlands, way overpriced), just because His Steveness wants me to.

I’m genuinely pissed off about this one.