[Interest] Building 32-bit Qt 5 on Mac

[Stephen Chu]

On 4/23/12 4:49 PM, Michael Jackson wrote:
> I am going to do this from memory but www.apple.com is going to be the source for the exact answer.
>
> OS X 10.5 was both PPC and Intel and 32 and 64 bit (Kinda/ sort of).
>
> You could install OS X 10.5 on 32/64 bit PPC and some Intel machines. Apple did early on use the Intel Core Duo and Core Solo which are 32 bit processors. So there are some intel machines that can run OS X 10.5 (even 10.4.11) but only in 32 bit mode.
>
> OS X 10.6&  10.7 Requirements:
> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4949
>
> OS X 10.5 Requirements:
> http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3759
>
> The question you need to ask yourself is how many of your customers are still using OS X 10.5? If you have a relatively "new" app I would ditch 32 bit support and just go with 64 bit support from here on out. If you have some sort of custom app for an internal IT department or something special where you need to support back to OS X 10.5 I would just stick with Qt 4.7.4 which should have support for building all the way back to 10.5 with Cocoa or Carbon.
>

We definitely have to support 10.6 and that means some of the customer 
may have 32-bit machines. And in my industry, it's really common to have 
older Macs running our software. They don't update very frequently, if 
at all.

We just finally got rid of PPC support this year. :(