"PowerPC applications are no longer supported" What? Who?

[h4lp m3]

I started this journey with a 12" PowerBook running Tiger and over the course of 7 years, I've migrated through 5-6 Macs (via FireWire/Migration Assistant) to a 15" i7 MBP.

Just this morning, while looking for the generic scanner utility, I found something called ABBYY ScanMan X and when I opened it, it said "PowerPC applications are no longer supported".

Maybe I put too much faith in OS X, but I figured it would have deleted those obsolete apps in the migration process. This got me wondering exactly how much more crap is on my computer? Is there a tool that will hunt down all of these obsolete apps?

 

[maflynn]

The migration assistant just copies data from your old computer to your new computer. Its really not in the position to judge what it should or shouldn't copy.

Personally, I don't use migration asst and restore my data from a backup and install my apps. That way I only have what I need on the new computer - YMMV.

 

[Fishrrman]

I guess you already know that with the latest versions of the Mac OS (and no more "Rosetta"), you can't run older PowerPC apps on the new MacBook.

If you want to see WHICH of the apps that have "migrated over through time" are still PowerPC (and un-runnable), do this:

Launch "System Information" (in the Utilities folder)

On the left, find "Applications" and click on it.

On the upper right, you should see a list of all apps. You should also see a designation of what KIND of app each is (i.e., Intel, PowerPC, or "Universal Binary").

If you click where it says "Kind", you can sort the display list so that all the apps are "grouped by kind". That will help you to locate and clean out the old stuff...

 

[davidlv]

Try this:
http://brilorsoftware.com/ppctotrash.htm

 

[Nermal]

I see from the screenshot that the app itself isn't directly in the Applications folder, but is a few levels deep. When tidying up, you will likely want to remove the entire "ABBYY" folder (especially if you haven't used it since 2002!) and not just the .app bundle.

By the way, just in case you don't already know, "Image Capture" is the built-in app that handles simple scanning. However, some third-party scanning software may disable Image Capture (Epson, I'm looking at you) so I can't guarantee that it'll work!

 

[Brian33]

If you want to see WHICH of the apps that have "migrated over through time" are still PowerPC (and un-runnable), do this:

Launch "System Information" (in the Utilities folder)

On the left, find "Applications" and click on it.

On the upper right, you should see a list of all apps. You should also see a designation of what KIND of app each is (i.e., Intel, PowerPC, or "Universal Binary").

If you click where it says "Kind", you can sort the display list so that all the apps are "grouped by kind". That will help you to locate and clean out the old stuff...

Hey, this was really helpful to me. I found several useless PowerPC apps and recovered half a gigabyte of disk space.

Thanks!

 

[Boyd01]

This thread got me thinking I should do some housecleaning too - thanks. If you just open your applications folder, the PowerPC programs have a circle with a slash superimposed on their icons, indicating that they aren't compatible. Makes it easy to delete them.

I found all kinds of relics that have "migrated" across the many different Macs I've owned - even a software updater from my PowerBook G4! Some stuff was quite large, like an old version of FileMaker Pro, AppleWorks and MS Office X. I still have all this stuff (and more) on my 2008 MBP running 10.6 - and some of it is needed to open old files.

When all was said and done, I gained almost 9 GB of space on my MBA SSD.