Please help: installing FP 10.3.183.90 on iMac 10.5.8

[Sallijane]

Attempting to download Flash Player 10.3.189.90* on an iMac using Leopard (10.5.8); after multiple tries, have gotten to a point at which clicking the Install icon opens a window asking if I want to install (considering this a victory; something is happening, at least!); then, when I choose Open, it immediately “quits unexpectedly” and offers me the chance to relaunch.  So I relaunch, choose open, and it quits (not so) unexpectedly again.  (Rinse and) repeat, presumably ad infinitum.  Help?  (prefer to stay with 10.5 rather than move to 10.6)

*computer owner clicked on general software update without paying attention, after which there were problems with YouTube videos that had not been there previously (video area shows “missing plug in”, which changes to request to load most recent Flash Player—but the Intel iMac is running 10.5.8, with which the owner, not a computer expert, is comfortable; he prefers NOT to go to 10.6—how can we just restore what was?) (Library contains a Flash plug-in dated Oct. 5, 2013; removing it form the Library folder did nothing.)

[C_F_McBlob]

Flash Player 10.3.183.90 (Mac only)

That's the ink to the latest download for 10.5.8

Follow the instructions here: How to perform a "clean install" of Flash Player in Mac OS X to do it properly.
As to the issue of upgrading, the user would be well advised to know that 10.5.8 is just about to reach the end of support even through Apple (as soon as OS 10.9 "Mavericks" is released, Apple will no longer support Leopard). There's a whole world of software that WILL run on 10.6 and WON'T run on 10.5. And since it looks, and acts like 10.5 and only costs $19.99, there's no reasonable, logical, sane excuse for not upgrading.

[Sallijane]

Thanks; I’m sure you did not mean any insult, but I don’t appreciate your tone here.

Apple has a lot to RElearn about backward compatibility and customer service (I realize that you are not an Apple employee, I am reacting to the comments about lack of support for systems just a few steps back). It turns out, that the owner and I realized that the move to 10.6 is inevitable and ordered the Snow Leopard disk.

The Apple with which I have been dealing regarding my own upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.8 is not the same Apple with which I have been dealing for the past 31 years, I am sad to say.

[C_F_McBlob]

I wasn't trying to be insulting. The REALITY of the situation is this:
OS 10.5.8 was the ONLY "Universal Binary" OS Mac EVER Released, and they ONLY did so because they were in a transition from PowerPC processors, to Intel. PowerPCs ran hot and IBM REFUSED to make the necessary changes to them so that they could keep up with changes in technology that were necessary for Apple to stay competitive in the marketplace. Thus the switch to Intel (faster and cooler) processors, which allowed Mac to become the dominant force in computing they are today, but then you probably KNOW all that already.
Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who still had PowerPC Macs in 2005 and they wanted the latest OS for them so Mac made 10.5 a "Universal binary" as a concession. It was NEVER intended to be a "lifetime OS, because it was meant to run on an architecture that Apple was going to abandon, which they did in 2009. Thery no longer support ANYTHING Power PC - hardware or software. There are people who paid thousands of dollars for Final Cut video editing software for OS 10.5 and if something goes wrong with it, you know what Apple tells them? "Buy a new Mac and get the new "Intel" version of FInal Cut, but we won't lift a finger for it on THAT system."

Backward compatibility has nothing to do with this. Providing backward compatibility for OS 10.5 now would be NO DIFFERENT than developing new software for OS7. They aren't going to do it - NOT because they want to force everyone to buy a new Mac, but because the architecture that the OS was designed for is obsolete and they no longer support it because it HASN'T been manufactured in EIGHT years. It's gone the way of VHS, phonograph records and 8 track tapes.
THAT's what I meant by reasonable, logical and sane regarding the upgrade. Trying to force the entire computing world to "time warp" back eight years because a user is too stubborn to upgrade is unreasonable. Expecting that ANYTHING in computing will remain current, or updatable for eight years or more is illogical, and demanding companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to continue support for obsolete hardware and OS's when there's a $20 upgrade that will eliminate the problem... is anything but sane.

As far as upgrading from 10.6.8 to 10.8... it's NOT as simple as one might think. There are ONLY so many Macs that will run the OS, and THAT'S no different than Windows. A six-year-old PC isn't likely to handle WIndows 8 or even 7.

[Sallijane]

Thanks, C.F.; the details help!  I have a refurbished Mac mini that is running 10.8; the Migration Assistant made the actual transfer very easy, but little things are bothersome (and the tech support person that could not explain to me how to bring all my old data from those programs that showed up as little NO symbols before that [“what do you mean, my iCal data are lost because this machine uses Calendar!?”] did not help matters.)

I remember the PowerPC/Intel transition; my parents are still using their Mac mini with 10.4 and PowerPC chip; I think my G4 (just replaced with that mid2011 Mac mini) is also PowerPC—it came with Classic 9 and OS 10.2, which was also a HUGE transition, although we got to make it gradually.  In fact, knowing that Classic was there as a backup was a great factor in my buying the new computer at that point—I don’t know how involved it was technically, but it was a brilliant marketing decision.)  My laptop is 10.6.8; no plans for an upgrade at the moment.

It was not the price of the upgrade that kept us from considering it (I was actually unaware of what the cost was), but the fact that the cause of the need to reinstall Flash Player was probably his nonthinking click on an update without realizing that it was meant for a newer system; I did not understand why that simple error should require the purchase of new system software, or why the version that the Adobe page seemed to indicate would work was instead not working (still don’t, really, but I guess it is moot now).

Again, thanks for taking the time to write a very educational response!

Message was edited by: Sallijane

[C_F_McBlob]

10.6 was the last OS that had "Rosetta". A nifty little app that allowed Power PC apps (those are the ones with the ∅ symbol now) to run on the Intel only OS that 10.6 was. Rosetta was dropped with 10.7 and it won't be back. Those "∅" apps are now obsolete. aside from getting a used PPC Mac, there's nothing you can do with them now.

I appreciated PPC Macs, and I owned five of them, but there are things I do, like authoring DVDs that even my G5 took hours to do, and the Intel Macs do in minutes. I do miss "Stubbs the Zombie". It was a great game but Aspyr only made it for PPC and my Windows version WON'T run on Win 8

It was more than a "simple error" that caused this dilemna, though. Websites constantly update code and part of that code is a "version check" for Flash, so they don't have to keep multiple versions of videos for "backward compatibility" (there's those two words again). Eventually, with OS 10.5.8, NO Flash content will be available because of the outdated Flash Player that is the only one it can run anymore.
I actually think Apple has a really great deal for OS 10.5 users with the $20 price.
Hell, Microsoft offered Windows 7 "upgrades" for the poor saps who bought Vista, but they wanted $40 for them and they only offered the upgrades for six months. After that it was $249-$499, and still is. Apple offered the Snow Leopard upgrade for FREE for a little over three months to new mac purchasers from September 2009 to January 2010. It went ti $129 until Mt. Lion was released and now it's $19.99, which is a great deal for a $129 OS. I got my MacBook the day before Snow Leopard was released, and I didn't get it from the Apple Store for three days because of a RAM and HD upgrade I ordered. My OS 10.6 disc arrived BEFORE the MacBook was ready. It had 10.5 on it for all of half an hour while I set it up, and got ready to install Snow Leopard.

[Sallijane]

Interesting; the Migration Assistant somehow got the iCal data into Calendar, so that is O.K.; they are providing a path to upgrade that is relatively painless.

We would have been more upset at a $129 price tag for Snow Leopard, to be sure.

The automatic version check is one thing; not sure how I feel about that intrusion (guess I don’t like it), but a sophistacated user (or semisophisticated, like me), can choose to update or not, realizing that there are consequences both ways; someone like my friend simply accepts what is offered, not realizing that it might break something on an older model. When he got to the Adobe page that offered only a 10.6–10.9 version, he did not know that there was a link lower that brought you to older versions; I found that, only to find that the download of the older version did not work. I still do not understand why it didn’t.

The thing is, for someone like you, who needs all the processing power, keeping up with the latest and greatest has real value. For my friend, who was simply trying to watch a YouTube video, and after 4.5 years still has 213 Gb of free space on his computer, rarely does anything more than check e-mails, surf the Web, and type a letter, it is unnecessary. The $20 is not the problem, and it was probably worth doing, even if this hadn’t happened, but in principle, pushing folks to upgrade a system that is working perfectly well FOR THEIR NEEDS is annoying to me.

Thanks for the enjoyable conversation!