quadgirl said:
With Steve Jobs announcing the 'Mac Pro' 3 days ago the 'transition is complete'. Well, it is for Apple.
Over a year ago the announcement was made that Apple will be switching over to Intel (shock, horror, at the time), and the developers received a loaned intel mac with software pack.
OK, so the developers have had lots of time to get their software Intel native, so they really don't have any excuses not to have it ready. Apple have completely transitioned their hardware, operating sytem, and software application in just 210 days, so the question is this: What the hell have the software developers been doing during this time?
One thing's for sure - Apple must be p'd off with the ignorance from some of these companies.
You have to look at the big picture.
First of all, Apple makes no bones about the fact that they are way ahead of schedule in the transition. Jobs said at the 05 WWDC that, by the next WWDC (06), they planned to have Intel-based Macs in the marketplace. They never said anything about having their entire line-up transitioned by that time, in fact, they specifically slated that to occur later. (I think by the end of this year, but I don't remember exactly). Apple never told developers they had revised their plans, they found out when everyone else did.
So the question is, why did Apple decide to move so quickly? I think there are two reasons: 1) To assuage investor fears of the so-called "osborne effect," where existing Mac sales would plummet as customers postponed Mac purchases and wait for the new generation of Intel Macs, and 2) to quickly establish an installed base of Intel Macs that moves from mere projections on a piece of paper to real world purchases and users. That's powerful medicine for software developers to show Universal Binaries is not only the route to take, Intel is here, right now. What were only theories and estimates at WWDC 05 are realities as of today.
Secondly, the majority of UB work in the Mac software world has gone extraordinarily well, but there are also realities at the moment that Intel Mac users have to come to terms with. Unlike Apple, companies like Adobe and Microsoft face the worst case scenario for porting their software to Intel, and it's further complicated by the perception (or expectation) by Intel Mac users that UB updates to their existing software are going to be free (or close to it). For some companies that face the worst case scenario for the Intel port, it's going to involve a serious amount of time, work, and testing to recompile their code, and Adobe and Microsoft in particular have an enormous amount of code to deal with for their Mac products. So it's unrealistic to assume that they could just press a button and it's all done, here you go. it's going to cost them serious time and cash to complete this project.
Both Adobe and MS have committed to porting their stuff and that's a good thing. I'm not sure what MS has said specifically about it's schedule, but IIRC, Adobe has committed to 07 for it's stuff. So what about right now? Well, they could probably figure out a very expensive way to accelerate the task of porting their existing products and charge appropriately for it. I think it's safe to say that most Intel Mac users won't like the bill when they see it. Or they could do what they have previously announced they would do, which is roll the port into the next version of their products. That way, in addition to being native Intel, it's an entirely new version, the latest and greatest. Since it's also part and partial to the usual upgrade process, there is no sticker shock, because as users of their products you are likely to upgrade to the latest version anyway.
In the meantime there is Rosetta, which for most users who have upgraded to Intel Macs, is likely to run this stuff at least as fast on the new Intel-charged powerhouse as it ran on your former PPC-based lamer box. If you're a pro user whose business depends on Adobe and MS products and software performance/speed is critical to your workflows (i.e., former Powermac G5 users) then the timing of an upgrade to Intel should be given serious consideration, as would any upgrade that effects strategic assets, and plan accordingly. That means you might be just fine with Rosetta for the time being, or it might be a show-stopper until Intel native software is released.
But if you just bought an Intel Mac just for local bragging rights for having the latest and greatest, you might have to be a little patient. Just a little. All the Software you had before now wasn't created equal.
