Unless you’ve recently been living in one of those places on Earth where there are no computers and no internet coverage, and I’m not casting dispersions, you will have innevitibly noticed that Apple have released Snow Leopard a.k.a. OS X 10.6. The official collective sentiment out of Cupertino is ‘No Biggie” , though of course the people on the interwebs have made that into a biggie. Why am I mentioning this to an Amiga audience? All will be revealed in due course; in the next few paragraphs to be exact.

Back in 2005 Apple announced it would move to the intel CPU. That whole week I was a mess, but more on that another time. With that announcement Apple shared its plan for phasing-out PPC support, first in hardware and then in software. Those of us that have been running Apple PPC hardware in the intervening years have felt some of the discrimination with the “you must be this high to go on this ride” policies of certain software releases; I’m looking at you Adobe. With the release of Snow Leopard “the ride” has been permanently closed for the PPC crowd.

A while back some of you may have read this post on OS News about Morphos on Mac Mini progress, and some of you may have seen this screenshot which is also embedded in this thread on Amigaworld.net. Some of you may have also noticed the pace of Morhos 2 updates vs those coming for Amiga OS 4, and some of you may have even read the recently published benchmarks of Amiga OS 4 vs. Morphos 2.3 on OS News. Yes, those guys at OS News certainly earn their keep.

What should be clear to most of you by now is that a lot of people are going to be getting rid of their Apple PPC kit over the coming months and it is an excellent time to pick-up a Mac Mini to run Morphos 2.x or 3. You might decide to get one when the Mac Mini port is available, but my advice is to take advantage of the immediate period, before sellers clue into the fact that the machine is worth more to you than it is to them. In the meantime you can run OS X 10.5.x or a PPC Linux distro, with UAE of course.

-Eddie Cejvan