RE: Mac OS 10.5 is "pretty old now" ?
RE: Mac OS 10.5 is "pretty old now" ?
- Subject: RE: Mac OS 10.5 is "pretty old now" ?
- From: "Dallman, John" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:11:41 +0100
- Thread-topic: Mac OS 10.5 is "pretty old now" ?
> To me, Windows XP seems "pretty old", but my company-deployed
> iMac 8 (my first Mac ever) shipped to me with 10.5 on it in
> 2008 does not seem "pretty old".
Apple updates its operating system more frequently than Microsoft
tries to update Windows. Windows XP has also had a very long life
because MS took five years to come up with a successor in Vista -
there was apparently a failed project at MS accounting for part of
the delay - and then Vista did not find market acceptance. Apple
has been more successful in persuading its customers to update.
I'd expect that when Mac OS X 10.7 is released, support for 10.5
will basically cease, and 10.6 will stop getting point releases,
and just get security packs. That fits the pattern Apple have used
for the last few years.
I have a similar need to yours to support customers who don't update
their operating systems to the latest as soon as they are released:
this is much commoner in corporate environments than it is for smaller
businesses and personal users. My customers are largely working for
large corporations, and don't have freedom to change their machines
around as they like.
Like you, the first Mac OS X I produced software for was 10.5. The
machines that build and test the versions of my product that were
released on 10.5 are still running 10.5 and Xcode 3.0. Since we
issue updated builds of those versions every few weeks, we have to
keep them running. My product also has a lot of complicated floating-
point evaluations, and is sensitive to compiler changes, so I'm
extremely reluctant to change compilers for updates to a shipped
version.
Since then, I have acquired another set of machines that run 10.6
and Xcode 3.2, and they are building and testing later versions of
the product, that run on 10.6 with backwards compatibility to 10.5.
Those machines will stay running 10.6 for years to come, probably
their whole lives.
Do you start to see why blithely installing Xcode 4.0 is an obvious
thing for me *not* to do?
Now, you may be able to substitute different partitions for different
machines. The testing for each daily build of my products takes
many hours, so it is done overnight, and that is a lot easier to
manage if you don't have to reboot machines to the right OS every
day. Irrespective of that, if you are going to carry on supporting
older versions of Mac OS X, you need to get away from the idea of
always using the latest Xcode, and get used to the idea of using
several different partitions, virtual machines, or physical machines.
--
John Dallman
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