I've Got the PowerPC Blues

"Oh, no, momma can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of Apple with the PowerPC Blues again?"

Bob Dylan, the prophet from Hibbing, Minnesota, was not thisaccurate, but the handwriting has been on the wall long enough thatit's impossible to erase.

It's Intel, PowerPC fans, and you're stuck with it.

I own a couple of PowerPC icons in the Apple lexicon of laptops. Ihave my ever-faithful PismoG3 with two bad batteries and a homemade DVD burner. My currentcomputer is a 12"PowerBook G4.

In order to keep up to date, I am going to have to my hands on anIntel Mac one of these fine days.

PowerPC Support Is Disappearing

Firefox is the latest toannounce that it is abandoning the PowerPC processor (version 3.6 isthe last to support Mac OS X10.4 Tiger, and recent 4.0 betas only partially work on PowerPCMacs). Chrome, my favoriteInternet browser, is not available for PowerPC processors, so I am leftwith Safari.

When will Safari reach the point where it is not updated for the G3,G4, and G5 brethren?

iTunes Has Abandoned the G3

Apple already have with iTunes support. I recentlyupdated my PowerBook to iTunes 10, because Steve Jobs told me to.

It happens to me every time I watch one of his keynotes. I want tobuy a new iPod touch, but then I learned that the camera is not as goodas the one in the iPhone. Guess I'll have to watch the next keynote tosee if Apple corrects this oversight and introduces an iPod touch withan iPhone camera.

What was I talking about? Boy, did I get off topic.

Anyway, my PowerBook G4 has the firepower to run iTunes 10, butApple also had a link forMac G3 owners. I followed it, and it took me to iTunes 8.21.Apparently, Apple feels that G3 users can't run any version of iTuneshigher than that - starting with iTunes 9, a G4 has beenmandatory.*

This looks like a banzai challenge to me.

Let's just fire up the old Pismo. Okay, so much for the challenge.iTunes 10 needs to have OS X10.5 Leopard to install, and Leopard requires a G4 or newer.Darn.

At least I can get iTunes 8.21 into the old Pismo and can do HomeSharing between computers. But I just can't get that Intel feeling outof my soul.

That Intel Feeling

My wife has an Intel MacBook, my kids have Intel MacBooks, and thedog and I are the only ones without an Intel Mac. Other people arewatching Hulu, but not me.

"The times they are a-changin' "

That's enough with the sixties references.

If only Apple made an Intel Pismo.

* Publisher's note: For the record, iTunes 10 iscompatible with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and requires at least a1 GHz Intel or AMD x86 CPU. This means that a mid-2000 (when thePentium III hit 1 GHz) Windows PC is capable of running iTunes 10,as is a 1999 Power Mac G4, but a 2003 900 MHz iBook G3 is not.dk