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

I just did some more looking and all I could find was that Carbon might not support 64 bit yet, I guess I must’ve read something that was incorrect.

Never mind Classic… I think the big news is that Carbon-based apps won’t work anymore. I might be wrong, but I read that somewhere. Does anyone know for sure?

What to do about all those GlobalFaxes that seem untranslatable?

Our company has over 100 Macs scattered here and there, and a bunch of them are old Macs running OS 9. We have specialized applications which require the so-called Mac Classic. Since we started buying Intel machines last year, there are fewer and fewer Macs here that can even run OS 9. New Mac users probably don’t care because all they know is Mac OSX anyway, but some of us put in a lot of years running the old Macs.

Why is anyone surprised at all that Leopard won’t support Classic? Actually, why is this even big of a deal enough to be a topic?

It’s been almost 7 years since OS X has been released and I’ll be fair and count only 10.2 as the first truly useable OS X not only in terms of OS features but also the number of OS X compatible software. Considering that, OS X has been useable for almost 6 years. That’s a LONG time in computer terms.

Now assuming for whatever reason, you still need Classic, you can still get a pretty fast machine that would run it. I mean, can you imagine running Classic on a Power Mac G5!?

“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.”

Actually Steve Jobs and Apple declared OS 9 dead back in WWDC 2002, 5 years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7xQ8i3fc0

Well, it’s too bad; there are still a lot of great freeware apps out there that run on Classic. I have an old g3 iMac running Panther that I could have installed OS 9.2.2 on and run it under the Classic environment, but you know what? I couldn’t be bothered. When I saw that the Mac was now running a “Unix-based” OS (now Unix for real!), that’s what it took to draw me in: A real operating system instead of the congeries of progressively more incompetent hacks that Microsoft was putting out. Sure, Mac OS was much better, that’s a given, but it was time to move on. They’ve been very generous in giving Classic an extra five years of life (if you count to when the Intel Macs came out) but in addition to incompetence and stupidity, a lot of Microsoft’s problems can be attributed to their struggle to achieve backward compatibility for the DOS diehards. OS X really is much faster and more efficient; it may not seem that way because of the much more complex apps that we have nowadays, but can you imagine how slow they’d be under OS 9? So farewell, Mac OS, you revolutionized the industry, you had a 22-year run, people can still use you as long as they want on machines that will run everything but the new OS that comes out tomorrow; Rest in Peace!

If you’re still using OS9, you also probably still wear an 80’s style mullet and love your acid wash jeans and everyone knows the exact year you stopped caring.