Are requirements attributed to aqua?

[natepalmer]

Am I to assume that the steep system requirements are attributed to the aqua interface. (not just the 128 megs of ram, but require at least a G3 and not supporting all PowerPC processors).

If this is the case couldn't they make the aqua interface an option and have a less eye pleasing and non-animation drivin' interface for the less powerful computers?

[wmoss]

If there is one thing that makes the requirements so steep it's hard to say what it is.

I've seen some people use some benchmarks to try and see how much processing the Mac is doing when some of these effects run, but I'm not sure they are using the tools correctly. They may be misrepresenting relative benchmarks as absolute ones.

I've seen some people say that they've gotten Mac OS X to run on 68040 class machines and that the G3 requirement is simple greed on Apple's part. I'm not sure I believe either half of this statement.

The overall experience certainly seems so overwhelmingly impressive that it's suggestive that the Mac must be doing a lot of work to have such a fluid display. But perhaps that isn't the big deal. Maybe to have an imaging engine like Quartz is the bottleneck, or perhaps the input and output to the video card is the bottleneck right now. It's hard to pin it down to the Aqua interface widgets and animations as the culprit.

I have no desire to get rid of the I/O kit or Quartz. Perhaps Apple will offer another set of widgets or behaviors if they get enough feedback from their beta testers. Perhaps the won't. I don't think that anyone other than Apple can make the call as to where the problems are and fix them. But if there is a problem, it's certainly a good idea to make them aware of it.

[natepalmer]

My idea was this. If there was a way that apple could disable some of the fluid aqua behaviour to bring the system requirements down, it would be a better business plan for them to support more systems with an optional Aqua Interface than to support less systems with a required Aqua Interface.

Personally I love the interface, with a couple of exceptions that I hope get fixed (but that's a whole other topic).

But I guess to a companies standpoint if they make Carbon applications it will run on Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X which will reach most of their target market. I'm not sure what the System Requirements of 9 are, but I'm sure they are much lower than X. But also I don't believe we will see full stream Cocoa apps coming out right up front because they don't support old systems running OS 9.

But if OS X could support the same systems that OS 9 could (if that's a possibility) than this problem wouldn't show itself for the companies could program directly for Cocoa.. which would also alleviate the need for Carbon.

woah.. i think I just confused myself.

alright so since I just ran myself around in a circle, maybe apple has the right idea. Although if you go to xappeal.org you can see OS X running on systems other than G3's or G4's which is promising.