Leopard Makes It Official. Say Bye To Mac OS Classic.

The end of a Mac era is upon us. The dawning of the new Golden Age of Mac™ begins. Soon. That would be OS X Leopard.

Meanwhile, with little or no fanfare, Apple quietly put to rest the Mac we all knew and loved. Well, some of us. Mac OS Classic is dead. Long live the Mac.

Apple watchers and Mac users have known this day would come, but it still seemed like a surprise, what with no announcement, or ceremony, or celebration. Mac OS X Classic, the remnants of the Mac OS that started it all back in 1984, is dead.

At least, Mac Classic is dead on PowerPC Macs running OS X Leopard. Mac Classic actually ran in Tiger, but only on PowerPC Macs, not on Intel Macs.

The Classic Mac era is over following the longest of long transitions dating back to 2001 when Mac OS X launched, fully capable of running Mac Classic. Starting with Mac OS Classic version 8.x, the Mac’s OS looked decent, and performed better than any version in the past.

The platinum GUI look continued into Mac OS Classic version 9.x, the last to run side-by-side with Mac OS X. The early versions of Mac OS X were slower than Mac Classic, but by the time Jaguar made an entrance and Microsoft Mac Office and Adobe’s Photoshop suites were ready to run on OS X, Classic was lost to many Mac users.

I know a lot of Mac users, and there are still holdouts, faithfully booting up in one version or another of Mac OS Classic. Some corporate IT staffs keep old Macs lying around with Classic just for compatibility with various files or applications.

Personally, I have not used Mac Classic since OS X Panther, never in Tiger, and now, with OS X Leopard, no one gets to run the creaky old Classic on a new Mac or a new Mac OS.

It’s the changing of the guard, even though the new guard has been running things for years. The old guard is retiring.

Now, that whole, quiet scenario brings up an interesting question about transitions, legacy systems, and the like. For example, OS X Leopard will not run on some PowerPC G4 models, requiring a minimum CPU of 867mhz. Some Macs up to six years old are OK, but a bunch of iBooks and iMacs with slow CPUs won’t make it to OS X Leopard.

What? You’re a Mac user and you have not purchased a new Intel Mac yet? What about that old PowerPC Mac you’re running now? Odds are that the next version of Mac OS X, whatever it’s named, Mac OS X Hello Kitty, or whatever, will not run on most PowerPC Macs. Apple is herding the herd along into new hardware and software.

That means that unless you’re running a PowerMac G5 today, whatever shows up after Leopard may not run on your creaky old PowerPC Mac. Got a problem with that? Sure. Talk Back to Mac360 and share your outrage (or, your inevitable sadness and remorse) about all these changes taking place in the world of personal computing, and do so in the Comments section below.