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Comment by scrod | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really concerned with Apple's financial interests. I'm concerned with their software tools and their demonstrated willingness to support the hardware they sell.

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Show me a mass-market PC manufacturer that continues supporting 6 year old consumer hardware.

Nope, don't try to shift the issue. We're talking about simply allowing others to compile code for PPC — not releasing brand new operating systems. Apple isn't merely ignoring it — they're going out of their way to prevent even third-parties from supporting it.

I don't understand this belief that Apple should support obsolete technology.

Lion is the _second_ version of OS X not to even run on PPC. Why should the developer tools they distribute for Lion support it at all?

They're not "going out of their way to prevent third parties from supporting it" any more than everybody else who doesn't ship an operating system with a PPC compiler. That includes Windows, most Linux distros, your grandma, the corner grocer, President Obama…

Apple isn't actually stopping you from compiling for PPC. They just aren't shipping the compiler themselves. AFAIK, they don't ship any compilers for hardware they don't support — no VAX, no MIPS, no M68k — PPC is not special in that respect. I don't see what's so terrible about that.

I just downloaded Xcode Tools 1.0 from Apple's developer site, for free (I'm not a paid developer). Xcode 1.0 was released in 2003 for OS X 10.3.

Also available are 1.5, 2.3, 2.4, 2.4.1, 3.0, 3.1, 3.1.1, on through to the latest 4.x versions, free for the taking. All versions prior to 4 will happily build code for PowerPC.

What is it you think they're preventing anyone from doing again?

That's great. Now install one of those on Lion. And you can't run anything earlier than Lion on any Mac sold today.

If you are compiling for PPC architectures, why are Snow Leopard/Lion of any concern? This is just a pointless whine about nothing in particular. If we all shared your attitude to the advancement of technology, we'd all still be using punch cards. The PowerPC platform is dead. They announced it's death at least 7 years ago. Move on.

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