Apple Archive

Panther: Time to Pull the Plug on the Beige G3

- 2003.07.03

We've all heard how great the new Power Mac G5 is going to be - and I, just like everyone else on the Mac Web can't wait to try one out. The G5 is a completely new chip, the PPC 970, which of course means that additional hardware support has to be written into the OS to support the CPU as well as the new hardware architecture of the Power Mac G5.

Yet another model Apple has to support.

Does this mean Apple will start to drop support for more machines? Possibly. Dan Knight's recent article speculates that the beige G3 may be dropped from the list of supported hardware in the final version of Panther; it is not officially supported in the prerelease version.

At this point, the oldest beige G3s are almost six years old, which seems to be the point where Apple starts discontinuing support - the LC II was no longer supported six years later with Mac OS 8, for example. It's not that beige G3s are too old to be useful, but it's a pain for Apple to support them with their no-longer-standard serial ports, ADB ports, SCSI ports, and floppy drive.

I happen to really like mine, and I can't bring myself to get rid of it, even though I have a new G4 PowerBook that runs circles around it. The nice thing about my beige G3 tower is that it works well with all of my hardware and software, and it never has any major problems (which is more than I can say for other computers I've used in the past).

While I didn't have very good luck with my beige G3 desktop (which was one of the early ones), I think later model beige G3s are extremely reliable computers. Perhaps that's why so many people still use them.

But the G5 adds another series to the list of computers Apple supports with OS X. This means Apple must write in support for all of the machines from the beige G3 on up. Eliminate the oldest of these, and the task becomes a little bit easier and faster.

Both arguments are valid. On one hand, the beige G3 was really never supported well anyway - the floppy didn't work, most serial printers didn't work, and many SCSI scanners and other peripherals ceased to function.

On the other hand, someone who may want to try OS X but can't (because of unsupported hardware) may decide to stick with OS 9 instead.

I like Dan's idea of having an "unsupported installation," but I don't think Apple will do this. It means more software they have to write, more complicated options in the installer, and then, if the user goes to install a third party application and it doesn't work, imagine what a waste of time the phone call will be - only for the software company to find out, "Oh, I forgot to mention, I have OS 10.3 on a 7600."

And guess who these companies will complain to - Apple.

I complained at the lack of full support for OS X on the beige G3, and Apple has done a little bit (especially the video card drivers), but the facts remain - X is very slow on a 233/266 MHz G3, and it's still not supported as well as it should be.

I really feel that if Apple's not going to support it as fully as they support their other machines, they should discontinue support. There remain, of course, XPostFacto and other unsupported installers, if someone really wants to run X on their older machines without Apple's blessing.

As much as I like my beige G3, it's old and not up to the task of trying to run a new operating system. I think it's time that Apple realize that, too.

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