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Should Rosetta be avoided like plague?

daneoni

daneoni

macrumors G5
Original poster
Mar 24, 2006
12,035
1,954
I just read somewhere that getting a Mac during the transition is not really worth it and people should wait till its over. In that, Rosetta whilst good is not great and you'd be better off with a PowerPC mac for now.

In a way its true but with each revision and update, Rosetta gets stronger and current macs Core2Duo even Core Duo macs and current updated Rosetta combined together makes performance equal to that of any PPC mac and may even be greater BUT is it really...?

Its just a debate in my head i thought i'd throw down.
 
daneoni said:
I just read somewhere that getting a Mac during the transition is not really worth it and people should wait till its over. In that, Rosetta whilst good is not great and you'd be better off with a PowerPC mac for now.

In a way its true but with each revision and update, Rosetta gets stronger and current macs Core2Duo even Core Duo macs and current updated Rosetta combined together makes performance equal to that of any PPC mac and may even be greater BUT is it really...?

Its just a debate in my head i thought i'd throw down.
Click to expand...

This could probably have gone into another catagory but I'll bite... disclaimer: I don't have an Intel Mac, yet. There's lots and lots of Universal Binary software out there already, with more being released daily. The software that is not Universal yet runs like a fast G4 on the C2D (and CD) machines, from all reports, that is, fairly fast.

Only caveat is Photoshop. If you do a lot of PS a G5 would probably be better for you, if you HAVE to get a new machine before the new PS is released.
 
If you are heavy user of Microsoft Office, I'd advise you to carefully consider the decision to move to an Intel Mac at this time. Office is not yet available as a Universal application (and won't be until the Office 2007 release). It crawls on my 2 GHz MacBook and is (IMO) barely usable.
 
I use Photoshop and Dreamweaver regulaly and its not too bad to be honest. Its faster than my Pentium 4...
Really! I swear!
 
Lyle said:
If you are heavy user of Microsoft Office, I'd advise you to carefully consider the decision to move to an Intel Mac at this time. Office is not yet available as a Universal application (and won't be until the Office 2007 release). It crawls on my 2 GHz MacBook and is (IMO) barely usable.
Click to expand...
My experience is completely different. On my 2 GHz MacBook Word and the Adobe apps are perfectly usable. They take a bit longer to load but run just fine. In fact doing a Photoshop test via Rosetta in OS X performed faster than Photoshop in Windows, native, on the same computer in Boot Camp.

Just a guess, but I suspect you don't have much memory. My MacBook has 2 GB. Roseetta loves RAM.

Personally I think Rosetta does a fine job and unless you're a hard core Pro, any of the Intel Macs will suit a user just fine. Much ado over nothing, IMO.
 
Lyle said:
If you are heavy user of Microsoft Office, I'd advise you to carefully consider the decision to move to an Intel Mac at this time. Office is not yet available as a Universal application (and won't be until the Office 2007 release). It crawls on my 2 GHz MacBook and is (IMO) barely usable.
Click to expand...

This is one of the reasons I didn't waste over £100 on MS Office, and use OpenOffice instead. If you don't find Oo pretty enough, then NeoOffice is more Mac-like. I've never noticed much of a problem using PS on my iMac, but then, I came straight from a 1GHz G4.
 
Lyle said:
If you are heavy user of Microsoft Office, I'd advise you to carefully consider the decision to move to an Intel Mac at this time. Office is not yet available as a Universal application (and won't be until the Office 2007 release). It crawls on my 2 GHz MacBook and is (IMO) barely usable.
Click to expand...

Maybe you need to up the RAM?

Photoshop and Word run fine on my Intel iMac. A little slow to load, and some lagging here and there with large files, but it's still usable.
 
office is useable, but not great, but then, you can use neo office or pages, photoshop performs better, i use it regularily and im happy, Maya, (for those interested) is fine until you get into high polygon models or rendering, kinda like using a G4 with 32mb gfx card., so in other words, they are fast enough with new versions coming out soon enough for me to upgrade to intel.
 
extraextra said:
Maybe you need to up the RAM?
Click to expand...
Maybe so. I have 1 Gb of RAM, and I have thought about upping it to 2 Gb.

Entourage is particularly slow. I just did a quick test and it took Entourage twelve seconds to start up (i.e. twelve seconds from the time I clicked the icon in the dock bar until the main window appeared).

As for using OpenOffice (or one of its variants): For my work situation I need to exchange documents with co-workers who are running Microsoft Word. The document conversion can't be "pretty darned close"; it has to be identical. Granted, I haven't played around with Oo for over a year, but as I recall it had problems importing Word documents with some features. I specifically remember importing a Word document that had bulleted lists in it and finding that they'd become garbled in Oo.

This is not a slam against Oo. I think it's fantastic, and I wish that I was in a situation where I could just use it (or Pages, or pretty much anything else) instead of Word.

Update: I decided to download the latest versions of OpenOffice and NeoOffice and am still seeing the same problem that I remember seeing a long time ago (in the Oo 1.x days) with regards to bulleted lists. That is, I open a Word document with bulleted lists and they don't display quite right. Which is a shame, because it's definitely faster than running Word. :(
 
Rosetta works great for me with 1.25GB of RAM, and I'm sure it'd be even faster with more, but it's a good bit faster for Office and Dreamweaver than on my old PowerBook 12". If you're used to a G5, it'll seem slow, but not too slow, methinks.

jW
 
Rosetta is fine. Should be using a PowerPC? Get my C2D iMac to say that to my PowerBook. The iMac through emulation is knocking the crap out of my PowerBook in pretty much every category.
 
Rosetta is fine with enough RAM (I have 2GB). It is still slow to start up PowerPC apps, but once they get going it's ok.
 
Just finished setting up a refurb MBP CD for my boss and tested a word file with lots of graphics that loads on my PB slowly and it opened it very quickly on the MBP! Based on what I have seen so far no need to update office when they finally release the intel version.
 
I think the C2D is now on par with the PowerPC performance of most rosetta apps. Office opens a tad quicker than my G4 (and its a maxed out G4). I'd use Neo-Office/Oo but my work environment lives off Office 2003.

They won't even let me use Keynote for my presentations...ugh!. I hate powerpoint, its just not as intuitive IMHO.

Moral of the story is if you're gonna swtich to rosetta, use a C2D or higher processor machine and be running 10.4.8 which has now MAJORLY tweaked rosetta.

In my case though, office is the only powerpc app on my HDD. All others, i have swithced to their intel variants. For example no longer using Palm desktop and have switched to Missing Sync.
 
On my 2Ghz 2GB ram Macbook running Photoshop under Rosetta is laborious. Soon enough the fan kicks in and in some tasks runs so high it seems my MacBook will fly out the window.

So I downloaded GIMP.app which is a Universal app and haven't looked back. I can do everything I did in PS with it and more.
 
I use Dreamweaver often, and while it runs under rosetta, I've never really had any problems with it. I think I had only one instance where the interface slowed down for a few seconds, but it could have just been reading from the disk for all i know.

When I used Office, I did notice that the scrolling was a bit slower under Rosetta, but the difference between Office scrolling and OpenOffice's scrolling capabilities were more significant than running Office under Rosetta.

I actually switched over to Pages for my word processing, with NeoOffice as a backup when I get an odd word file. I've found that Pages does open word docs, so NO gets little use.

I use GIMP.app too, it's pretty sweet.
 
Application startup times are significantly increased by Rosetta. However, that's a rather weak metric to measure Rosetta's usefulness by. You'll typically only start the app once in a session.

In terms of usage, Office 2004 runs perfectly fine on my MacBook Pro 2GHz, both with 1GB and my current 1.5GB. There's no real 'but....' to append to that 'perfectly fine' :) It is noticeably faster than my 1.4GHz PowerPC machine even though there's translation going on.

Rosetta has quite a heavy RAM requirement, which can lead to the system and apps feeling slow if you're already tight on RAM. The reason is that once Rosetta's translated a set of code, it'll keep that cached in memory for future use to avoid re-translation. You'd be surprised how much of a program's execution is simply re-treading the same codepaths over and over again!

My rule of thumb is: Would the program you want to run, if it were native, tax your system? If so, with it running under Rosetta, you're likely to feel a speed hit. If the program, were it native, wouldn't tax your system, you're unlikely to notice any ill effects from Rosetta.

Microsoft Office shouldn't tax a 2.0GHz Core 1 or 2 Duo processor when native, and it won't cause any problems under Rosetta. Would it be quicker native? Sure! But is it unusable translated? Not at all.
 
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