Socially|Mundane

Linden Lab leaves Macintosh behind, At least, that's how it appears and only partly so.

Granted, the Official SL Viewer 2 is beta, and there is a lot of work needed on it still (okay, a lot of work) - one thing that is not made clear before downloading is that it is an Intel-only application. Perhaps it states this in the "system requirements" area, but it is not made clear beyond that.

There is a lot of talk about Viewer 2 (which I'll just call V2 hence) and a lot of it is about the exciting new features. I have several Macs in my home and one Windows PC. The PC is pretty much for SL and a couple other "entertainment" things because the Mac is such a pleasure to use in comparison, I reserve it mostly for actual "productive" venture.

So I want to write about a few things in V2 that I haven't seen written on yet (such as how there are a couple "features" that will allow extreme shamming and deceit across the grid and real ripping-off of Linden Dollars). So, I download the V2 beta on the current Mac I am using so I can do a quickie log-in to do a screen-grab of that and other preferences and the first thing I notice is the odd icon:

At first I (foolishly as it is a 'duh' moment for Mac users) assumed it was a Linden Lab creation to indicate this is a beta, even though I have seen Snow Leopard show this before. The circle-slash indicates the application will not run on this machine - which in this case is a PowerPC G5 model (all my others are Intel-based).

Since the beta is widely expected to go "golden" in the next few weeks and a possible upgrade in the next few months, and with that: the discontinuation of V1 versions... what will happen to all the Mac users still on PowerPC CPUs?

No, not going to bother contacting Linden Lab directly (except a tweet to M) about it because one thing is clear: Apple doesn't sit still. They move forward at the speed of light and quickly as is possible and feasible will drop "old technologies". Most new software available on the Mac is all now Intel-based and doesn't support PowerPC at all. And in the next few years, Apple (ARM) -based so it's only a matter of time before they drop Intel as well. So why not Linden Lab? If Apple is pushing forward so hard, Linden Lab might as well also, right?

Is this an oversight on Linden Lab's part? Or, is it a "branch" (or whatever they call it) that simply has not been implemented yet (the PowerPC-supporting code)?

Is SL and Intel-based CPU-only platform hence forth?

So long PowerPC Macintosh: it was fun while it lasted, sorry can't wait for you, have a good life, whatever is left of it as you die a slow, agonizing death.

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