So it is official. With today’s release of Leopard, Apple officially drops support for all Classic environments. This move probably comes at no surprise and is understandable when you consider that Apple also migrated all of their products to Intel chips, no more POWERPC. Further, all of Mac OS X is either Unix-like, and with Leopard a real UNIX.
Engadget comments on the end of an era with this.
Of course, Intel Macs have never been able to run Classic anyway, so only like Hypercard user groups and the three printshops still running QuarkXPress 4 will be affected by this. But this does mark the end of the road for the venerable and oft maligned OS, which ushered in the mainstream GUI era with the 128K Mac in 1984 and remained the default boot on all new Macs until OS X 10.1.2 was released 18 years later in 2002 — prompting Steve to stage a melodramatic mock funeral for OS 9 at that year’s WWDC.
Good night and Good Luck: Classic is finally retired with today’s release of Leopard.
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