Time wounds all heals. Apple announced the end PowerPC Macs back in 2005 and shipped the last one about a year later. Although there are still regular Tiger (OS X 10.4.x) and Leopard (OS X 10.5.x) software updates from the company, their latest operating system, Snow Leopard, doesn’t run on non-Intel hardware — that’s life (and death).

There’s a single line buried in the Thunderbird 3.3 alpha release notes that’s sure to put a chill in the hearts PPC Mac lovers — “support for Mac 32/64 bit Universal builds (Miramar Alpha 1 will no longer support PowerPC on Mac).”

Mozilla began killing off PPC Mac support in Firefox back in August, when it said Firefox 3.6.x would be the last. Yes, there still might be an update or three for the older version, but Firefox 4 is coming early next year and it won’t support PowerPC.

Given that Thunderbird is built around the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, this was expected. Thereupon, for the venerable PowerPC Macintosh, the end is truly nigh…

What’s your take?

via News.com