Carbon Dating
By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in utilities, Leopard, Apple on June 5, 2008 at 10:10 am
In the week following the latest Mac System upgrade to 10.5.3, the next upgrade to 10.5.4 is already under test and rumours populate the Net of the next biggie, Mac OS X 10.6 also currently known as Snow Leopard. The biggest surprise is that 10.6 will drop support for PowerPC processors and for Carbon – both yet unsubstantiated – so it can move to pure 64 bit addressing.
Carbon was a stop-over point for older applications when Macs moved from System 9 “Classic” to OS X. Any application written for Classic could take advantage of the Mac OS X architecture by being “Carbonized” rather than rewritten as Cocoa, Apple’s object-orientated programming originally derived from Next in the late 1980s, using Objective-C. Carbonized programs can use preemptive multitasking, better crash protection and virtual memory management but lack some of the other features of Cocoa.
In 2007 Apple announced that there would be no 32 to 64-bit upgrade path for Carbonized applications. While Carbon proved invaluable for software developers such as Quark and Adobe to quickly and easily make their major applications run natively in Mac OS X, Apple probably never intended it to hang around for so long even though some parts of Mac OS X such as the Finder were Carbonized. Then developers complained that Cocoa applications ran slower than Carbonized and many continued to avoid Cocoa.
It’s easy to tell a Carbonized program, none of the Services menu options will work unless the program has been specifically written to include them. Cocoa applications get them “for free”, sometimes too free unless you use something like Service Scrubber to keep the list in check. Such heavyweights as Photoshop, QuarkXPress and Firefox have all had the time to switch across to Cocoa but are still running as Carbonized.
If Apple does switch to an Intel and Cocoa-only Mac OS X, and we should know next week, it’s going to leave a lot of people miffed. Both users and developers.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Jacques Daviault - June 7, 2008 on 1:44 pm
The problem I have with Apple when it comes to dropping PPC support is as follows: if they can have a parallel covert OS X on X86 program running for several years, and obviously not generating any profit, then why drop PPC support so quickly, obviously, as they’ve told their developers, adapting the code is a snap. That’s assuming that the reason they drop PPC support is a cost-cutting measure only. But let’s face it, it always comes down to money, doesn’t it? I understand that PPC support is inevitably going to end, but three years after switching to Intel seems a bit hasty and arbitrary. Some PPC based Macs aren’t even off their warranty yet? It would seem to me that 5 years is a better target - and that security updates should go on even longer, perhaps another 2. My next Mac will be an Intel machine, but I paid a small fortune for my G5 and I’m going to be seriously pissed if is cast into the growing pile of unsupported legacy machines at a time when it still runs like new.
Perhaps it is simply an end to the dwindling number of Carbon apps, and not and end to PPC support. It seems with the admittedly less ambitious evolution of Leopard vs Snow Leopard (the names strongly suggests this) that it may be, instead, the final tweaking and streamlining of the OS X code for PPC computers, and that the next real update, 10.7, will be Intel only. Of course I’ve no way to support this assumption, but it seems more logical to me.
What say you?
Comment by Mark Tennent - June 7, 2008 on 4:51 pm
I guess we shall just have to wait until next week and see what the big Chief says. But it does make sense to abandon Carbon…
It will also spur people like me, with early G5’s, to upgrade. But this is the first Power Mac I’ve had that will probably remain with me rather than be traded-up. The G5 is just too darned useful as a server/scanning station/Mac Classic runner.
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