On Jan 11, 2006, at 7:44 AM, Sylwester Pietrzyk wrote:
I just hope that "universal" applications will be
available a little longer than "fat" ones as it was during m68k ->
Power PC
change.
"Universal" in the sense of Mac OS X is somewhat different from what
"fat" in that era meant. Both the OS and the tools required to
product Universal application bundles are much much much improved ...
Mac OS X was designed from the outset to promote processor agnostic
development and to be able to have applications with multiple
binaries for different environments.
That was one part of Mac OS X and the tools strategy that I
participated in making happen. ;-)
Their marketing is strange too - it was not so long ago when they
showed superiority of RISC based Power PC processors over old, still
somewhat influenced by 8086 Intel CPUs. Now it is just contrary
situation.
RISC vs CISC is purely a matter of development money by the chip
vendors at this point. Apple's primary chip vendors were putting the
company into a bad position due to lack of development investment
when this effort was started, 7 years ago. It is why the effort was
begun.
Updates to universal binaries for Apple's pro apps will cost $49
each. Knowing how this works, that's near to cost recovery for the
packaging, shipping and media.
They could provide online updates for free :-)
It's not without cost even then ... and the convenience/reliability
of moving multi-gigabyte application installation packages over the
networks leaves a lot to be desired.
Yes, but people who buy these new Macs can be surprised that their $
$$$
applications refuse to work.
Creative professionals are not stupid.
I mean: Apple should have upgrades for their
flagship software ready before they introduced intel based machines.
Timing is everything, and the professional/commercial market, with
income dependent upon their equipment and software, moves slower than
enthusiasts and consumers in many aspects. The consumer/computer
enthusiast market is already taken care of ... iLife 06, iWork 06,
etc are all native, these and the other applications delivered with
the OS are generally speaking adequate for 80-90% of the users,
Rosetta is good enough for most others until Universal versions
become available. ... And these people will be the majority
purchasers in the short term until March.
This is exactly my position. I do photography as part of my
livelihood and when I consider equipment/software purchases, I invest
only when I know that the total package is ready. I'm happy to wait
another six months and buy a new system plus whatever software
upgrades are necessary when they've been in the market for a little
bit and some of the inevitable teething problems are worked out.
Same goes for Photoshop (which
does run in Rosetta) and other high-end applications used by the
professional creative community.
So far no Macintel native Photoshop is ready. But it is interesting
how fast
would rosetta applications run? If similar to 68k emulation on
Power PC,
than such a applications on a fast G5 will be faster than on Macintel.
Emulating a chip like a G5 on an Intel dual-core design is far far
more difficult than emulating a 68K chip on a PowerPC chip ... If
they make 50% efficiency, I'll be surprised. But I'm heading up to
Macworld Expo today and will see if I can try Photoshop on Rosetta.
I'm going to carry a couple of RAW files on my flash drive...
Godfrey
