[angelmb]

I find "at least 256 MB of RAM" silly, kinda asking for trouble.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by Big Mac

That's a pretty substantially jump from built-in Firewire for Tiger to G4 or better for Leopard. I suppose Apple figures that since most of the defective iceBook G3s it continued to sell for so long are dead and gone by now, it does not have to care about G3 support at this point. At this rate 10.6 will list the G5 as a minimum requirement.

I think the PowerBooks stayed with the G4 too long to make it practical for Apple to say "G5 and Intel only" for 10.6. With Apple's 1-2 year release cycle for OSs, that would put a 2-3 year lifespan on some of the PowerBooks.

[imitchellg5]

Originally Posted by angelmb

I find "at least 256 MB of RAM" silly, kinda asking for trouble.

More like 768Mb or 1Gb.

[alphasubzero949]

6 GB? That is about double a typical Tiger install (before stripping unused lproj files). I hope the installer doesn't load all of the Intel bits into a PPC install and vice versa.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by alphasubzero949

6 GB? That is about double a typical Tiger install (before stripping unused lproj files). I hope the installer doesn't load all of the Intel bits into a PPC install and vice versa.

It wouldn't completely surprise me if the dev preview version did.

[Salty]

I imagine the G3 600Mhz and up will be the cut off. Frankly a 900Mhz iBook I had runs nearly as fast as my 1Ghz PowerBook and there are some slow G4s out there. I don't think all G3s will be cut out.

[Moose]

Originally Posted by alphasubzero949

6 GB? That is about double a typical Tiger install (before stripping unused lproj files). I hope the installer doesn't load all of the Intel bits into a PPC install and vice versa.

In terms of a software product in its entirety, a Universal binary doesn't take up a great deal more disk space than PPC-only or Intel-only.

[macgeek2005]

Nooo.. my iBook G3 can't run it!

My iBook is much newer than my G4 tower was, and the G4 would've ran Leopard like a dream!

Oh well, i've got my Mac Pro... shipping on the 20th of september.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by alphasubzero949

6 GB? That is about double a typical Tiger install (before stripping unused lproj files). I hope the installer doesn't load all of the Intel bits into a PPC install and vice versa.

As Moose said, UB code is only trivially larger. The vast majority of the space taken in an application is not for code, but for resources like images, language resources and .nib files.

I sure hope Apple releases it as UB only; having to maintain multiple installs is a potential deal-breaker for institutional use.

tooki

[Art Vandelay]

I'm sure they will considering that OS X Server is now only available as a UB.

[Chuckit]

But installing two archs (frameworks and everything) for the entire system would be quite a waste of space.

[seanc]

There may be an option not to install Rosetta or any PPC code.

[Tuoder]

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Leopard ran well on the later G3 iBooks (even if it had to be XpostFacto-ed).

[Eug Wanker]

Originally Posted by Salty

I imagine the G3 600Mhz and up will be the cut off.

I guess you missed this post.

Originally Posted by Salty

Frankly a 900Mhz iBook I had runs nearly as fast as my 1Ghz PowerBook and there are some slow G4s out there. I don't think all G3s will be cut out.

Go to this page and try to play the 41 MB 480p video on your 900 MHz iBook. Then try running it on your 1 GHz PowerBook. Better yet, try running it on an 800 MHz PowerBook.

I think all G3s (officially) will be excluded from the Leopard love. Now, a G4 450 is slow too, but it at least has all the right parts.

Originally Posted by Dark Helmet

Considering the hardware is 4 years old by the time 10.5 ships that isn't a huge surprise.

Strangely enough my 6 year old G4 Cube can run it.

Yeah, 'tis nice the Cube is included, given its age. I'm a little bit surprised actually, since I had guessed that a Quartz Extreme compatible GPU was going to be a requirement. I am a little disappointed though that a 4 year old machine (G3 iBook) isn't supported. But them's the breaks... I wonder if Leopard is truly being written in such a fashion that just assumes a SIMD-capable chip is present. It will be interesting to see what happens with Leopard transferred over to a G3 machine. Will it just run slowly? Or will some parts freak right out and crash/kernel panic?

Also, if Leopard truly is resolution independent, I'm guessing (with no inside knowledge, or even knowledge enough to really make an educated guess) that it would be impossibly slow without Altivec/SSE.

P.S. My Cube G4 1.7 with DVD drive passes the requirements with flying colours. I was readying this trusty little guy to be sold, and in fact I had just installed OS 9.2.2 on it for potential old-school buyers, but I'm tempted to just keep it now just to play around with it in Leopard.

[mitchell_pgh]

IMHO, those are rather reasonable system requirements.

The only people that should be upset are the Pre Oct. 2003 iBook users. It's only 3.5 years and they are left out of the OS X upgrade love... but what do you expect.