As Chris Adamson notes on O’Reilly’s Mac DevCenter, the release of the Mac Pro means that Classic, the system that allowed Mac OS X to run old Mac OS 9 software, no longer runs on any new Macs. Chris asks the question of whether this actually matters:
Of the really important apps I used in Classic, most have been Carbonized (Graphic Converter, Quicken, Mariner Write, etc.), so even if they’re not Universal Binaries, Rosetta can do an on-the-fly recompile into x86 and they run. And a few others got Carbonized, but I moved on (goodbye, Internet Explorer, hello Safari and later Shiira).
There are, however, a couple of applications that need Classic and that have yet to find an adequate replacement: most notably, Outlook for Mac. While Entourage makes a great stab at working with Exchange Server, it still lacks a couple of the features of Outlook – most notably, support for shared calendars. This could still be an issue in the future.
