10.7 Lion drops support for PowerPC applications

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the writing on the wall for Apple to completely drop PowerPC support. Snow Leopard was the first Mac operating system to not work on PowerPC machines, yet it still ran PowerPC software through Rosetta. Even more, Rosetta was an optional download in Snow Leopard. Now in 10.7 Lion, Rosetta has vanished and Apple’s operating system launching this Summer will not support software built for PowerPC Macs.

This change will surely upset some longtime Mac users, but through our research it seems that many modern, supported Mac applications have been rebuilt to work on Intel machines. Also, every app on the new Mac App Store will work seamlessly with 10.7 Lion as they are all compiled, by default, for the Intel computing architecture. Users on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion who attempt to run a PowerPC application will get the alert shown above. Thanks, anonymous