My G5 tower died a few weeks ago, and a friend gifted to me a 2010 Macbook Pro she was no longer using. It's a 6,2 A1286 model with 4GB RAM. She kept the HD and I put in a 1TB disk drive and installed Snow leopard on it.

What is the current forum thinking on the optimum OS for this machine? So far the transition from 10.5.8 to 10.6.8 has been easy, and I would like to not have to update my PPC applications for as long as possible. Should I move to 10.7 or higher? Or stay with 10.6 for now?

Thanks for the advice.

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I would like to not have to update my PPC applications for as long as possible.

Staying with 10.6 is really the only way to meet that goal. 10.7 drops Rosetta, so no more PPC apps.

You can go 10.10 and then run 10.6 via a virtual machine. But you would need to set it up; I've done so for FMP; works ok.

Id stay with 10.6.8, just don't use Safari. FF or Chrome only.

Should run good. Dropping in a SSD would make it run great...

Under $100 for 256 GB SSDs.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

That's what i neede to know. I'll be staying with the Snow Leopard for awhile then.

Thanks!

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GGD

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RE:up
I would like to not have to update my PPC applications for as long as possible.

Staying with 10.6 is really the only way to meet that goal. 10.7 drops Rosetta, so no more PPC apps.

RE:

I actually disagree with the advice to stay with Snow Leopard. More and more hardware and software is going to require a newer version of the OS. At some point, you won't have a choice. I moved away from Snow Leopard for that reason shortly after the release of Lion or Mountain Lion. I forget which but it was definitely a while back.

I've no regrets. While I don't like some of the changes made to newer flavors of the OS, the move was worthwhile. There are a lot of nice features in the newer flavors of the OS. iCloud, Messaging, etc. This doesn't take into consideration security patches and such. Snow Leopard has been left behind in that regard.

The critical question is what PPC apps are you using? There may be low-priced intel upgrades or free or low-priced viable replacements available.

Robert

Apple is not providing security updates for 10.6. At some point, it's not going to be good computing practice to use that OS.

If you are only thinking a year, then keep it on 10.6. But that hardware with an add can run the latest OS. I think it's time to get organised and see what it would take to make the jump post-PowerPC. In our case, there really are not that many apps with no options.

There is always Sheepsaver to run Mac OS classic apps on Intel. I have one piece of software with old files I occasionally need to access using this approach. Works fine on 10.10.

PS why not find the apps that are PowerPC and post the list here to ask about suggestions for substitutes?