Just seen that MobileMe is upgrading its calendar system and it will on 5th May. If you don't upgrade, then calendars will no longer sync with your Mac or iOS device.

Clicky



The prerequisite on the Apple Mac side of things is Snow Leopard 10.6.4 or later, users still on Leopard must upgrade to Snow Leopard in order to continue syncing calendars with MobileMe.

Clicky


The future is in the cloud, the future is platform independent; as long as you have the latest release of the platform...

The new formatting on the website looks good, but for long time users of Apple kit, who have older machines, it is another nail in that machines coffin, as Apple push you to upgrade to the latest shiny shiny. On the other hand, Windows users can use a 10 year old machine...

This is what's starting to annoy me about Apple, the differences between backward-compatibility on Windows and OS X systems. iTunes is bad enough, you need 10.5.8 to run version 10, so that locks out 10.4 Tiger users from using a new iPod/iPhone/iPad. iTunes is just a music library app, for god's sake, why does it need to have so high Mac system specs to run? The only possible answer is Apple's relentless push on trying to force existing users to buy new Mac hardware.

My G4/G5 systems are perfectly usable machines, reasonably fast and certainly capable enough to run iTunes, but Apple has deemed them obsolete, so you must go and buy a new Mac if you want to sync your new iPod. Meanwhile, on the Windows side you can run iTunes on an XP (SP3) machine - let's not forget that XP is based on a 10-year old system - OK, the SP3 bit came, what, 3 or 4 years ago? But still. Because they want to try and switch Windows users, they made the software work (albeit slowly!) on 10-year old hardware - they could easily do the same on the Mac side if they so wished. New features that use 10.6 technologies could either not work on pre-10.6 systems or use a simpler approach (i.e. fail gracefully) - if they can do it on Windows versions of their software, then it's certainly possible.

Most new Apple software is starting to lock out 10.5 now, especially if you're still on PowerPC Macs - which are still perfectly good Macs for most tasks. What the hell could a calendar syncing platform need that 10.5 couldn't offer? All it's doing is syncing data, surely? I'm at a loss to explain why 10.6 is required for such a basic task, other than because Apple wants you to buy a new Mac!

This is one area that Apple are really starting to p!ss me off - and I've been a Mac user for 15 years+

I feel exactly the same way. Until I put a processor upgrade in my home g4, I had to use my wife's netbook for my iPhone. My work g5 is still on tiger as I occasionally need classic.

The parts in bold tell you all you need to know

Shock horror, company that makes stuff tries to sell it!!!!!! Whatever next!

Kidding, slightly. I do feel that Apple should support older Macs to some extent. I can so no technical reason why new iPods shouldn’t be able to sync with older versions of iTunes, for example, though equally I can understand why Apple wants to ensure that the iTunes “experience” is consistent. It’s also a business, and will have a much better idea than anyone else of its user base. Given the level of Mac sales in the past five years, I imagine the number of PowerPC-based Mac users is a tiny percentage of its total user base. Commercially, it makes little sense to invest time and money in maintaining a separate product branch just for those users.

As for MobMe calendar, it’s not true that you can’t use it with Leopard, just that it’s not as well integrated as it is in Snowy. I’m assuming it relies on system components not found in 10.5 (though Apple could, of course, provide these if it felt the need).

Apple clearly wants Mac users to be running the latest software, to enable it to deliver the best software experience. To be fair the company has gone out of its way in the past to support legacy systems — first with Classic, as mentioned, and then with Rosetta — but you can hardly expect it to stagnate. It is, after all, in the business of selling stuff.