Ask Apple Matters: Leopard on a PowerBook G4

With the announcement of Leopard at last months WWDC event, Mac lovers up and down the land have been popping questions that, unfortunately, many of us don’t know the answers to.

This week’s user Jackd wishes to know if his slightly ageing PowerBook G4 will run Leopard without too many slow downs. Obviously at this stage only Apple knows what specs will be required to run Leopard, but with the way that each revision of OS X seems to speed up, it doesn’t seem too unrealistic that a G3 processor will run Leopard—and that’s coming from Apple itself. Only two answers to this weeks question, so if any of you have the same query or idea about whether or not Leopard will run nicely under the following specs, feel free to drop by and leave a comment.

Question Of The Week

Leopard On PowerBook G4

Question by: Jackd

Hi to all

just wanting to ask if anyone knows whether or not os x leopard would run on a year old powerbook g4. i currently have panther installed. i wanted to upgrade to tiger ages ago but never got round to doing it. now that i hear leopard is coming out next year i just want to wait for that.

My PowerBook G4 specs are as follows:

1.2 (i think) GHz processor 
256mb RAM

I’m not sure what graphics card comes with it.

Any help would be appreciated. I can’t really afford to upgrade my laptop just yet.

Jack

Answer by: Frozencold

I’d love to help you Jack, I am 99.9% sure that your Mac will work with Leopard, since Leopard still supports G3 Macs. Although you may want to consider adding more ram. I would recommend using a minimum of 512mb of ram. Good Luck!

Answer by: Aaron Wright

Jackd,

As Frozencold mentions, Leopard is still going to support G3 processors, so there’s no reason why your G4 wouldn’t work.
I’d definitely consider upgrading your RAM if possible though. 256 doesn’t quite cut Tiger, let alone Leopard.

Apple’s Mac OS X Tiger tech spec page suggests using the following for Tiger (Minimum):

Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G3, G4 or G5 processor 
Built-in FireWire 
DVD drive for installation 
256MB of RAM 
3GB of available hard disk space (4GB if you install the developer tools).

Leopard should be fine with some more RAM, but I wouldn’t expect it to be lightning quick unfortunately.

View this thread.

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