I think by 10.6 I'll be ready to move on. I think getting another year may be possible of my G4 MDD. I think supporting the thing with a new OS 7 years out from it's birth is a bit much to expect. And it will run 10.4 & 5.

Really, what do you expect? try running Vista on a 7 year old PC. In fact, try running it on a 1 year old PC.

In my case I bought a DUAL PowerMacG5@2,3Ghz in early 2005... This machine is going to be 3 years old next January and it still runs like the monster it is... Everything runs smoothly and all my Intel friends get amazed while using it... I upgraded it to 8Gb's of Ram and an AGP 8x Pro ATI FireGL T2 graphics card... I think it can take way more OSÒ‘s for a few more years. The hardware cuts should go along gradually as requirements increase (like the 800Mhz cut in Leopard), there are a lot of users, developers and pros like me with this kind of G5's that want to buy 10.6 and 10.7 and 10.8 and even 11.0... Until the hardware doesnÒ‘t meet the limit to control the software it should be like this. ;=)

I own a dual 450 G4 Tower that came out in 2000. It came with OS 9. It currently is running Tiger, with 320MB's of RAM. It is very usable for Office, email, web surfing, and occasional photoshop work. It has essentially went through 5 major OS upgrades.

The PPC is dying and 10.6 will be its death knell. I'm selling my G5 while I can still get something of value for it.

I have a 2003 Powermac G5.
How long should I hold on to it?

I find the more that reasonable. If you are working with a ten year old system. Other things are pushing to upgrade. You ISP to software. By the time 10.6 is released my G5 and G4 powerbook will be 8 years old. I strongly doubt I will be owning either machine it.

I seem to recall Apple making an official statement as to the length of PPC support when they first announced the switch to Intel. Some quick searching reveals no such announcement, though, except from Microsoft regarding Office, so maybe I'm just confused. -_-


Apple made some arbitrary judgments about supported hardware with Tiger. Specifically, only Macs with built-in FireWire are supported. That means my old iMac DV+ is supported, but the low-end iMac from that same generation, which is nearly identical, is not. I'm pretty sure Tiger will install just fine on those machines without FireWire, but they are not "supported".

Regardless, that's a respectable range of Macs that are officially supported. The newest unsupported machine was released in the summer of 2000, just about 5 years before Tiger's release, and was discontinued in early 2001. The oldest supported machine was released in '99.

I would guess that 10.6 will have PPC support, but 10.7 will not. If Apple maintains a 2-year upgrade cycle (it's been 2.5 for Leopard, actually), that will put 10.7's release in late 2011, more than 5 years after the G5s were discontinued.