[vlc-devel] [RFC] Dropping support for OS X 10.5

[Warren Young]

On 8/17/2012 10:10 AM, Rafaël Carré wrote:
>
> maybe there are not much 10.6 users?

There are at least three reasons someone would have stayed on 10.6, even 
now that 10.8 is out:

- They're just conservative.  Too many bad upgrades in the past, etc.  A 
lot of professional users are like this: OS upgrades only happen between 
major projects, if at all.

- They have software that won't work on 10.7 or newer.  A huge class of 
such software are PowerPC apps.  10.6 was the last version of OS X to 
ship with the Rosetta PPC emulator.  And yes, there are still PPC apps 
people are stuck using.  You also have situations like Adobe CS3 users 
who are unwilling to spend hundreds to upgrade that just because 
upgrading the OS breaks it and Adobe won't release patches to enable 
compatibility.  (And before you say "Boo, bad Adobe!" take a look in the 
mirror.)

- 10.7 or 10.8 doesn't run on their machine.  Apple is aggressive about 
dropping support for old CPUs in their newer OSes.  10.7 dropped 32-bit 
CPU support, which means there are systems released in 2008 that are 
stuck on 10.6.  (Yes, I'm aware that there are hacks to get around this. 
  Some people are unwilling or unable to hack their OS installer to fix 
the problem.)