Arstechnica points out that a portion of Apple's new iLife '09 suite is now Intel-only. Specifically, the GarageBand '09 Learn to Play feature that was demonstrated at Macworld will not run on a PowerPC:
"GarageBand Learn to Play requires an Intel-based Mac with a dual-core processor or better."
This represents a long expected shift of support away from Apple's older PowerPC Macs. Apple first announced that they were switching from PowerPC to Intel processors in June 2005 and finally completed the transition in August 2006. Since then, all shipping Macs have contained Intel-based processors.
Apple is also rumored to officially drop PowerPC support from their next major Mac OS X release (Snow Leopard). Development, of course, has been ongoing, and Apple has recently begun seeding a new version of Snow Leopard internally. As a result, a new ADC developer version is expected very shortly. No word on what improvements have been made.
Snow Leopard is due for public release sometime this year.
