A few years ago, I lent my year 2000 Pismo PowerBook to a friend who needed to run some classic Mac software. My son had tripped over the power cord years before and had broken the connector, so I ended up buying a second battery and a separate battery charger to keep the thing running. Not an ideal solution, but it worked. My friend reported to me last year that my laptop had finally died, which I take to mean that he can no longer get the batteries to charge. I suspect that a few hundred dollars would get this decade-old Mac running just fine once more. (By the way, Rick, if you’re reading this, when am I gonna get my Pismo back?)

My point here, apart from teasing my friend, is that Macs are hard to kill. They work and work and work until you finally move on to something else, and even when you no longer have any use for them it’s hard to part with them completely. Heck, I still get nostalgic when I see my Pismo’s translucent bronze-colored keyboard.

Because we know many older Macs are still in circulation, we have always been committed to supporting them as far back as we can without limiting our future development. Users of very old Macs may not have access to a handful of Accordance features, but even to this day that list remains incredibly short. Even more amazing is the fact that the latest versions of Accordance still run lightning fast on these old machines. When my friend saw how quickly Accordance ran on my ten-year-old Pismo, he was quick to express his amazement. One user even posted pictures to our forums of Accordance running on a PowerBook 170, one of the first generation PowerBooks released in 1991!

Our commitment to users of older equipment is not half-hearted, as can be seen by how quickly we released Accordance 8.4.3. Yesterday morning I reported that Accordance 8.4.2 was causing problems for users of PowerPC Macs and that we would soon release a fix. Accordance 8.4.3 was released just a few short hours later. We refuse to use the fact that you’re using older hardware as an excuse for problems with Accordance. While there’s always the possibility that the limitations of older hardware may affect something, we will “not go quiet into that good night.” If your Mac still runs, chances are it will still run Accordance surprisingly well.