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Why are most files 2x as big for a Mac?
- Thread starter WillJS
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Were there separate files for Intel and PPC? If not, it contains both versions... Universal Binary...
Yup, it contains Universal Binaries, so there is a lot more information there than just the PC version.
No, I've seen it other places.. just using this as an example.
So it has the Universal Binaries.. is that for Intel and PPC versions?
A Universal Binary (also called a "Fat Binary") contains both Intel and PPC versions of the program. Upon runtime, OS X determines whether the app is running on Intel or PPC and chooses the proper binary to execute.
If you don't want your apps to have both versions of the code, you can use an application like Xslimmer to remove the non-native code (PPC-based Macs will remove Intel code, and Intel-based Macs will remove PPC code).
Only an application with no resources would be twice the size. It's only the code that gets larger. All the window definitions, icons etc are only in the package once. They normally take up more space than all the code put together. Stripping either PPC or Intel might well only make the app 10% smaller...
Firefox was about 10MB when it was PPC only AFAIR (to Window's 4-5MB), the problem with non Universal binaries is that they are confusing to normal people, though they could do both, the problem is that people would choose the non universal if they weren't sure (as it's smaller) and everything would go horribly wrong.
Yes... but you don't save that much space.
Linkety to a fast Google-found app (I haven't used it, beware!)
This is the download for PS CS2.
It's weird that the relative file sizes are inconsistent between languages... unless I'm misunderstanding. CS2/Mac/English is smaller than CS2/Win/English, and this is also true in Japanese, but in French, the opposite is true....
Try the post 5 above yours....there might be a link to such a program in there somewhere.
For example, downloading the CS3 trial..
The .exe version for Winblows is ~300MB
The .dmg version for OS X is ~700MB
Why's this?
Duh! It's because they have to squeeze in that extra bit of love into each application that is written for the Mac.
I can't believe you didn't know that!
Some say it's overflow from Steve's RDF but I'm not so sure about that.
It could do but that would be exceptionally rare. Almost all UBs out there are 32 bit only.
well, think about this photoshop cs2, apparentlt it would save me 300Mb, sure i dont mind the small apps, but for adobe, etc, separate pkgs sure would be very nice
fx is 17.6mb for mac, 5.7 for windows (7z compressed release version, normal zip version is 8.5mb),
Confusing normal ppl? well.. I guess we should at least have reasonable confidance on normal ppl, and try it out with clearly marked download options(like, a drop down menu asks user to choose what model of apple they have, etc). give it up without even trying, I think its unfair to others who know the difference.
Relatedly, I thought that versions of OS X up to and including Tiger did not generally allow Aqua / windowed programs to execute in 64 bits... although I'm not suprah clear on how an Aqua program is prevented and a terminal program is not....
The terminal and all the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X are 64bit. The GUI parts are not. This is due to change in Leopard. It is simple, basically you have a 32bit layer sitting on top of a 64bit core (which is Unix).