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.
