MacDevCenter: Jaguar: Time to Stop Pussyfooting Around. Derrick Story takes on a touchy point: the masses of Mac OS 9 (and 8???) users who still haven’t upgraded to Mac OS X. My dad is one of those users; he has a first generation beige G3 and less than 128 MB of RAM. While I would love to spend the time implementing one of the hacks that would allow him to run OS X, I can’t recommend it unless he ups the RAM at least.
Derrick says, “If you would have told me a year ago that we would have an OS as good as 10.1, plus all of these vital applications, and only a 20 percent conversion rate, I would have told you that you just don’t know the Mac community.”
Unfortunately we don’t know the whole story. How much of the remaining 80% is like my dad–stuck on old hardware without the discretionary cash to move to something more powerful? And it’s not just retirees, either; think about how underfunded your local school district is. Do you think their Macs are able to run OS X?
I want my family’s Macs to run OS X, because then I can write software for them. (By choice, all my Mac development has required features only available starting in OS X 10.1, such as XML-RPC and SOAP calls.) But I don’t have the discretionary income to upgrade all their hardware.
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