I'm sure the people who develop XPostFacto are already hard at work figuring out if they can make Panther run on "unsupported" machines, and I wish them luck -- but it's a hack at best.
Ryan Rempel says he is working on it. It's not going to be easy - but then he's no slouch.
For best results (ie taking advantage of Quartz Extreme), the best machines for Panther are G4s and G3s with a good video card (32MB or better) -- and obviously the G5s when they emerge. But the Beige G3s, being now more than five years old, are no longer supported by the latest OS. Hardly surprising.
I wonder - completely off-topic of course - how much 64-bit native code will be available in Panther for the G5. If as much of the OS that is optimised for Altivec is also optimised for 64-bit on G5s t could be something of a screamer on those new towers : o ).
That aside - 5 years is a pretty god record compared to your average PC, it's pretty par for the course for Apple - for e.g. the 040 Macs that came out between 92-95 were still supported in 98 in OS 8.1 but from 8.5 onwards the support ceased. Anyway it'll run on anything with an iMac badge on....
I don't have any inside information on this except one remark from Greg Joswiak that amounted to "the G3 is not dead yet," which might imply new life for the G3 with IBM, but I guess the only way to know is to wait and see.
I have heard tales of IBM buying out or licensing Altivec to build into G3 cores. That'd be pretty cool - might finally mean a high speed (read 800Mhz) G4 equivalent upgrade for the B&W G3/Yikes G4 :)
As for the iBook itself, it's future is hard to predict. There's no doubt in my mind that the 12" Powerbook is cannibalising a lot of potential iBook sales, but the model continues to be VERY popular in schools, so I doubt it'll be discontinued. Hopefully they can get a low-cost, low-power version of the G4 chip (something newer and better than the current G4 portable chips) and take the iBook into G4 territory, or maybe they'll go with IBM as you suggest.
I *do* get the impression that this whole new age G3 thing looks set to be for iBooks and maybe the eMac. I can't see Apple doubling back on the decision to use G4s in the iMac.
The G3s really are very good chips, and for consumer-level apps they can still be very useful. One gigahertz plus G3s would be welcome, particularly at low cost.
Yes, they offer a serious challange ti the like of Intel and AMD in the low-cost bracket. A G3 with Altivec running at 1-2Ghz would seriously challenge most Celeron or Duron chips.
Who knows where it's all going. I just hope my new iMac doesn't go out of date to quickly :D.
-- Mark Benson
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