Man have I been busy
AidenShaw still posts in these rags? Man have I been out of it.
I seem to remember some good arguments with Aiden a long time ago, I'll have to search the archives some time.
Here's my take.
As I argued from WWDC this year, I fully expect the Mini to be among the first machines to go x86 for various (many) reasons.
I'm still not sure about Powerbooks. Initially I had argued vigorously that they would not because Apple would do their 'test run' on non-Pro models.
This brings the ibook into question but what would justify the move better than a 1.8GHz P-M iBook embarrasing a 1.67GHz PowerBook in pretty much any benchmark you could devise (not that a 1.6 GHz PM wouldn't do the same).
As for Adobe, I'd be shocked if they have a fat binary any time soon. Far as I know, CS2 is still full of Carbon code because Adobe (and Microsoft) never bothered to re-write all their big apps. It was too much work when you could simply release another minor revision of the same 10 year old product. Strictly speaking, I think my favorite version of Photoshop was v.4.
I have heard that they are working altivec emulation into Rosetta so I do expect that we'll see pretty robust emulation in 10.4.4. The problem earlier was simply that Altivec was more comprehensive but you can always work around the lack of a hardware-level instruction with an algorithm. And of course, a dual core Yonah WOULD likely run emulated PPC code faster than a G4. Don't get me wrong, I love the 17" powerbook I'm typing on but this CPU is 1-2 years past pasture. Computationally speaking, this thing is strung together with bailing wire and duct tape.
As for ship dates...
Apple re-invented the wheel with the G5. I would be absolutely shocked if the first x86 Macs (and probably all others as well) weren't much more than Intel reference designs. Apple will save a bundle on R&D. They will have product out as fast as any other large vendor. Hopefully they'll pass cost savings on to the faithful. Intel has supposedly been in production of Yonah for a bit already. They've already given samples out to web sites to review. I suspect that they'll have the chip in volume by January 6th. I expect Apple will have product available at or very near January 9th.
For those citing the G5 roll out, I hope you recall that IBM appeared to be the bottleneck there. The slower cpu G5s were rolling in quantity long before the dual 2.0. That tells me the system was in production at Apple's end and this was just a volume issue with IBM.
ffakr.
