Does the Mac Developer Program have old versions of Mac OS X?

Question

I'm developing something for Mac OS X. It's a port of a Windows product.

One of my boss' concerns is how it will run on older versions of Mac OS X. I know Xcode has facilities for compiling for old versions of Mac OS X, but QA would prefer to actually run the older versions of Mac OS X on a Macintosh.

Since we got into Macintosh development after Snow Leopard was released, all of our machines come with Snow Leopard (10.6). As far as I know, you can't really walk into a store to buy Leopard (10.5) and anything prior to that is basically extinct.

In a question on virtualization someone said that they've done multi-boot or multiple hard drives for other versions of Mac OS X, but I'm not sure how one would obtain the install media or the license for an old version.

I see Apple has their Mac Developer Program which touts as one of its features as "access pre-release versions of the latest software" which is cool, but I don't see it anywhere on there that old versions of Mac OS X are available. Does Apple have an MSDN-equivalent where old versions of the software are available for download?

Also, is there a reliable breakdown somewhere of the rate of upgrades/updates to Mac OS X? (i.e., what % of users still run Mac OS X 10.5, 10.4, PPC-based machines, etc.)

Answer 1

One option (besides acquiring old OS versions yourself) is to use the compatibility labs that Apple maintains. Lots of machines, old and new, already set up with many different versions of the OS.

I believe you can get a "day pass" to the labs for ~$100. Depending on where exactly you're located and the cost of getting to Cupertino, this may or may not be a viable option for you.

http://developer.apple.com/labs/

As others noted, a number of sellers on Amazon have boxed old versions of the OS.

Answer 2

In case you buy an old OS X from Amazon or other retailers, note that you can not install an OS which was released before the hardware was announced. Older OSes just don't have the required driver to be able to run on a newer machine, and Apple doesn't back-port drivers for older OSes. In other words, if you buy the latest new Mac from Apple, you can't install 10.5 or 10.4 or whatever. So, you need to buy an old Mac too, not just an old OS.

The breakdown of the OS ratio really depends on the software. For example, the veritable Omnigroup publishes this version breakdown of the hits of their software update server. There are many websites which tell you the version break down, see e.g. this site.

Judging from it, I would say Snow Leopard covers half of the Macs in the world. Supporting Leopard might be worth while if you have extra resources. But I would guess people who didn't buy Snow Leopard won't typically buy a new 3rd party app, so supporting Leopard won't give you 50% increase in the number of potential buyers. (I admit this last sentence is completely subjective, though.)

Answer 3

Apple Developer Connection does have most older OS version available for download, but it's not quite from a complete collection (specifically, they're missing a full install of 10.4.anything for Intel CPUs). They do have the GM builds of 10.6.0 (which is Intel only), 10.5.0 (Intel/PPC universal), 10.4.0 (PPC only), 10.3.0, and 10.2.0.

As others have said, you won't be able to use older versions of the OS on newer hardware, so you're going to have to get used computers for testing -- if purchasing doesn't like eBay &c, look for a company that specializes in used equipment, like PC Recycle. For maximum coverage, I'd recommend getting an Intel Mac that shipped with 10.4 (and make sure you get the installer disks that came with it), and a PPC Mac with that's as old as possible while still having a 867MHz+ G4 CPU (so you can run 10.5 on it, and don't have to worry about weird G5 builds) (again, be sure to get its original disks 'cause an older generic installer won't work).

Answer 4

Historically, people used to boot off external Firewire drives to use older or beta OS versions, but of course some of the newer machines lack Firewire ports. I know EFI does support some external boot options (netboot for instance).

It might be possible to boot newer Intel hardware using a late version of 10.4 - but I couldn't guarantee it (as another poster noted, 10.4 won't have relevant hardware drivers - but there are basic generic drivers that may work. Then again, is that a realistic test???).

As an addition to Yuji's post - there are some people who are forced to stick with Leopard or Tiger for compatibility reasons (my father can't upgrade all the machines at his school, because the A3 colour printer only has generic printer support under Snow Leopard, and they also have a lot of older Adobe software). I would say that generally this applies more with institutional customers - for educational software running on 10.4, and even running on PowerPC hardware, can still be a significant issue.

For consumer software - less so - the big spike in Mac sales came after the switch to Intel, and almost all active consumer software purchasers are on Intel machines running 10.5 or later.

The other thing that needs to be considered is that 10.4 is missing many APIs introduced in 10.5 and 10.6.