End of support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5

Running numerous PPC desktops & Powerbooks, and have neither the need, the inclination, or the funds to upgrade to Intel Macs.
Dropbox, please reconsider this thoughtless move to cut us off.

I just asked my clients how many are still using these older systems... 38% have them in their workflow. I think it would be a smart business move to find a fix.

I too, have PPC machines that I use with Dropbox. One of them is a G3 PowerBook that I use daily. It runs OSX 10.4 I would be greatful if you didn't discontinue support for these devices.

What is the point of disempowering thousands of happy users? I happen to have an OS 10.9 laptop, but I should not have to be forced to download everything there instead of to my desktop computer. I can understand not offering an upgrade path, but I can't understand yanking the rug out from under an existing happy user base. PS--when Microsoft did this to Skype, I started using Google hangout.

Jon C, wrote: "It would be helpful if folks could post any recommendations for alternative utilities which do work with Os 10.5."

Carbon Copy Cloner can do Dropbox folder backups to a Mac OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard) workstation, either by pulling from 10.5.8 with CCC 3.4.7 (if you can get it), or by pushing hourly to 10.5.8 from an Intel Mac (10.8+) with CCC 4.x. See https://bombich.com/download

Dear members of Dropbox team,

today I received your e-mail about ending support for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5. and I want to say something about that.

I am member of small but not-dead-yet worldwide community of users of Mac computers equipped with PowerPC microprocessors. Since 2005, when Apple announced switch to Intel CPUs, support for our computers vanished from almost all kinds of applications. Dropbox was one of the last still supporting us and I want to thank you for that effort. Let me just ask you not to cut us off.

You advise us to upgrade to OS X 10.6, which will still be supported after May 18th. This makes little sense to me, since there are just seven Mac models from 2006, for which 10.6 is the final version, all newer can upgrade to 10.7. On the other hand, Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5 is the final version for much more computers, all Apple computers from summer 2000 to the end of 2005 to be exact. There are even some 1999 Mac models that can run 10.4 and many older can be upgraded to do so - with proper CPU upgrade it's possible to use Dropbox from Mac made in 1995. So with this one step you will cut off the whole decade of computers, but you will still support seven models from 2006, some of which have less CPU power than final PowerPC models from 2005.

I started with Dropbox five years ago on my on PowerMac G5 and now I still use it on that very same PowerMac G5 with OS X 10.5 as well as on PowerBook G4 with OS X 10.4, Lenovo T400 with Linux, HP desktop with Windows 7, iPad and BlackBerry Z10. You can probably say, that removing two computers from this list will do a little harm, but the opposite is true: I have Dropbox installed on all my computers to get my data to the PowerMac G5 on which I do all my typing, programming, photo editing, etc. Two months ago I even bought Samsung camera with Dropbox support to get pictures to this desktop without wires, now my complete ecosystem will be broken with demise of its central element.

Without my PowerMac, it has no sense for me to use Dropbox on other machines and devices. Even after you stop supporting 10.4/10.5 there will probably be some ways how to sync on these systems, like installing qemu (or other x86 PC emulator) with Linux and sync Dropbox via shared folder from this emulation. But I don't want to do things this ridiculous just to have my favorite cloud service on my favorite computer. So please, reconsider support for 10.4/10.5, you still support Windows XP (2001) and our systems are no older than this one.

Thank you.

Martin Kukač, Dropbox AND PowerMac user

Notice: This is an open letter from http://vivapowerpc.blogspot.cz/2015/01/an-open-letter-to-dropbox-team.html

I need 10.5.8 PPC to run 68k os9 emulation for accounts package with 20 years accumulated data. I like having that backed up by Dropbox but I guess there are other options I can look into.
Like everyone else I want to know why there is no option for "let the old app run", and to SEE the reasoning (which may well be reasonable in terms of security or whatever).
Where would be a good place to share ideas for lua/python/other scripts to provide single file get and send from Dropbox scripts?
Dropbox folk: would you support and help such ideas? It is tough not knowing your thinking on why the chop!!

"Corporate Phone Number: 1-415-986-7057
Customer Service Number: Online Only"

Good idea but..."We are unable to return calls at this time."

For sharing of individual files, I've been very happy with WeTransfer.com

This kind of corporate idiocy is really frustrating. Unfortunately, it's becoming an epidemic. Skype (owned by MS) also pulled the plug on OS 10.5 and earlier, and I discovered the hard way that Apple's latest IOS for iPad has a "security feature" that, if you're unlucky enough to have it kick in, locks the machine and offers NO way to recover your data. According to the Genius Bar, a web forum, and an outside technician,my choices are wipe the hard drive or throw the thing away. And these companies actually expect us to be loyal to them,.

They could all take a good lesson from Carbonite. Carbonite's backup works far more smoothly on 10.6 and newer--but it DOES continue to work on 10.5, though the company no longer supports that version.

Hi everyone,

We understand this is disruptive to some of our users and that's why we've announced this many months in advance. I’ve read all of your responses and wanted to provide some additional background on why we’re ending support for OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

Supporting these old versions of OS X would come at the expense of improvements for more recent versions of OS X. Allowing people to continue running what would become an old version of the desktop client is not an option because sometimes we must make non-backwards compatible changes to the way the client talks to the Dropbox servers.

Read on for more details…

Continuing to have our desktop client support 10.4 and 10.5 would come at the expense of improving the experience for more recent versions of OS X. The latest versions of several important components (3rd party software libraries) we rely upon no longer support 10.4 or 10.5. These updated versions have important improvements, bug fixes, and additional functionality. It would be a disservice to the vast majority of our Mac users running recent versions of OS X if we did not update to the latest versions of these components.

Several of you have suggested allowing people to continue using the current version of the desktop client (which in time would become an old version of the desktop client). This would not work because from time to time we must make non-backwards compatible changes to the way the desktop client communicates with our servers. For example in the coming months we will need to make a change to how we represent the underlying identifier we use for certain types of folders. This change is needed because Dropbox has become so much more popular than we initially imagined that we’ll need to switch from using a 32-bit identifier to a 64-bit identifier. This is just one example of a breaking change that periodically must be made.

@JoshK: thanks for being the man to share the reasoning. I get that and see a possible easy way to leave legacy support....
A few old servers, old existing s/w, serve the fixed size (&declining) "original" mode users, the clients would just need to address some form of subnet address which I'm sure a bit of network whizzadry can do - at worst we all move to legacydropbox.com or whatever.
The trick is to gateway between data on these servers and the newstyle supporting new clients - and I can see that is another layer of the version resolution handling that already exists from client A overlapping client B updates - just here A is legacy land and B is main land. I guess that depends on your architecture and hits your 32 - 64 bit ident thunking issue.
Can that not just be all 32 bits codes are treated as 64 bits by with leading zeros and reserving these for files used by the merry band of those with a foot in legacy land.

I'm sure my thoughts are somewhat simplistic and there may be a bit of work but not insuperable. Maybe it could be crowdsource funded...?

As you say, other breakers may roll up in future - but all it needs is a "gateway" solution and, we hope, that can continue.
If not how aboput spinning-off legacydropbox.com with some old servers and code and you are done? keeps the size down and leaves any new to old world issues up to us users... At least there is a future for those that need it then.