iTunes: How long?

iTunes

Apple just announced the iPhone 6, and with it, a new version of iTunes (11.4).

All of this raises a question – how long will iTunes keep working for us PowerPC users?

It’s a darn good question, and unfortunately, there is no easy answer. Right now, iTunes (10.6.3) is still the de facto music player on your G5. You can buy music (even getting the new U2 album for free evidently). Music Match still lets you upload your music into the cloud to play on your various devices. That’s pretty cool.

But other new features are done. I doubt you could sync your iPhone 6 with the old iTunes. There is no fancy digital album experiences, no iTunes radio, and so on. This software has got an expiration date, for sure – but when? For how long? Only Apple knows.

I do recommend Music Match if for no other reason than it makes a nifty backup for your music in the mythical cloud. In case, iTunes suddenly quits working and your PowerPC dies a horrible death, you could still grab your music from Apple’s servers to place on a newer machine. It’s an easy way to back stuff up.

In the meanwhile, are there other workarounds? I have no idea, although open source audio/video players can probably rock whatever content you desire. That’s not really the problem, though. iTunes’ expiration is really tied to its still working access to the store and limited cloud features. When those go, the music player will still work – you just won’t be able to buy music like you once did.

Oh, and by the way, the classic iPod is dead. A moment of silence please.

– Nathan

Archived site updates

  • 5/6/2014 – I added a great link from TenFourFox to the Hardware page and a few tidbits of information on the Internet page. RSS feed to come.
  • 3/1/2014 – Quick morning updates to the Internet page. Read about a great workaround to speed up WebKit if you are having issues.
  • 2/28/2014 – First updates. Added more information about SSDs and liquid cooled G5s to Hardware page. New link at the bottom. And more information about opening .docx files on the Office page. A PDF section too with more links. Awesome!
  • 2/25/2014 – Site goes live.

I think I’ve got an RSS feed

It’s sort of ugly, but I’ve integrated an extremely simple blog script into the site and should be able to add updates and then create an RSS feed out of them. The RSS feed will be posted in the menu of the site and on the frontpage for your viewing pleasure. However, each time I add a blog post, I will have to regenerate the feed. Clumsy – but it was better than trying to rebuild the entire site in WordPress or something.

In G5 news

My G5 is plugging along fine, although I am in the market for a larger SSD like an Intel 530. I am getting nervous that my SSD is going to hit a brick wall since I never did over provision it during setup. I may do a fresh reinstall first until a new SSD falls into my lap.

Saulo is going to provide some video links to his G5 running dual SSDs. He says he tried them in RAID 0 but found no noticeable speed improvement over a single SSD. That matches what I have learned from others – even on newer machines, RAID 0 is not necessarily worth it unless you are doing some serious data crunching/caching.

-Nathan