I would hardly call OSX an 'upgrade' - it's a major investment. It's not just the £100 or so for the OS, it's the cost of all the new applications like an office suite and all the other stuff you need plus the installation time and hassle of migrating email accounts etc.
For testing purposes we run OS X 10.2 on a 400MHz G3 iMac DV and it's pretty slow. You can only install Safari 1.0 on this but at least you can install Firefox or Opera. You can't install newer versions of OS X on it because the required firmware upgrade kills the video card. I don't have current figure for OS9 usage but in June 2004 (i.e. 3 years after OS X launched) Steve Jobs announced that 50% of the 24 million Mac users were now using OS X. That means 50% were still on OS9 or earlier. In the developed world we're used to having pretty up to date kit but don't forget that a large proportion of the world's population can't afford this and still use much older kit, often machines that have been discarded here precisely because the software cannot be upgraded. Steve Green Director Test Partners Ltd / First Accessibility www.testpartners.co.uk www.accessibility.co.uk -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nick Lazar Sent: 02 August 2006 02:02 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WSG] Support for IE5/Mac? (was Browser stats) Out of interest, does anyone know how many OS 9 users are still out there? Nick. On 2 Aug 2006, at 10:55, Nick Gleitzman wrote: > Steve Green wrote: > >> One reason for continuing to support IE5/Mac is that OS9 users can't >> upgrade to anything better. > > Of course they can upgrade - to OSX. OS9 itself is, if not officially > obsolete, shall we say deprecated? Macs haven't been made to boot into > 9 for some time now. OSX *will* run on most Macs (albeit slowly) > unless they're *really* old and underpowered... > > Reality check: it's 2001. The world moves on, and I think that > delivering a typographically styled but layout deficient version of a > site (with a polite explanation of why the presentation is > limited) to users of obsolete browsers is far better than giving them > a site that's broken, especially if it's preventing usability. > It can only help to weed these browseers out of the scene, eventually > - and then we won't have to worry about them at all! > > N > ___________________________ > Omnivision. Websight. > http://www.omnivision.com.au/ > > > > ****************************************************** > The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ > > See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > for some hints on posting to the list & getting help > ****************************************************** > ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ****************************************************** ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
