Removed Elements From 10.5 Support List

Tomorrow is Leopard Day, and my family has gotten an overnight shipment confirmation on our order. But in this final day pre-10.5 facts come up front showing parts of 10.5 that were originally included that now aren’t included.

First of all, Time Machine was able to back up to an AirDisk (Airport Extreme hard drive). But yesterday it became known that the final (and shipped) build of 10.5 didn’t include that support. That’s interesting, because both Personal File Sharing, and Mac OS X Server are still supported backup options. Those both use wireless technology, and so clearly they haven’t distrusted wireless backup, but have with AirDisk. That means that a later update to the Airport Extreme firmware may re-enable the capability.

Secondly, iPhone Notes have been dropped. For a while they were in the OS as the ability to sync your iPhone notes to your Mail.app notes. Now, this feature isn’t there.

Thirdly, though this isn’t one that has been dropped from an earlier support list, there is no more Classic. Apple has quietly stripped OS X of all signs of it. This makes a ton of sense as the Intel macs can’t run any pre-10.4 OS, and 10.5 only has true optimization for the Intel macs. If you want (or need) to continue using a pre-OS X Mac OS for some of what you do on your mac you’ll need to trust an emulator like Mini vMac.

Wel, this is it. Sometime tomorrow those of us that pre-ordered the OS will receive it and install it. At the same time, Apple Stores worldwide will be flooded with people buying the OS. It’s been a long and hard wait, but we all made it and will be rewarded this weekend by installing the new OS X onto our macs. Enjoy, Alex.