Universal binary anxiety is picking up pace
Was I right when I asked about the anxiety revolving around the current Macintosh application market, and those that are updating to universal binaries?
As I mentioned, I think the real impetus these developers feel stems from their fear of being left behind by their competition, more than the performance differences between running natively and letting Rosetta do her thing. The evidence of this has been the countless number of applications making point-release updates since early in January which claim to be universal binary releases. Even those that do not have access to Intel-powered Macintoshes were able to bring their source to Macworld and start to convert their applications beginning last year, so it is of no surprise that we are starting to see these application upgrades popping up.
It appears that Apple is buying, or perhaps prodding, this feeling of anxiety by releasing a site that lists the applications that have made the switch to universal binaries. But doing this, they will ensure that almost every application that is available for the Macintosh, and which is under active development, will be converted to run natively even prior to the large-scale upgrades of the current user-base to Intel-powered Macintoshes.
Again, this is definitely a good thing. Competition usually ends up benefiting the consumer, so I’m happy to see all of these developers doing their best to release universal binaries as fast as they can.
I think the question that remains is, which version of the Mac OS will be the version that halts the universal binary and is Intel-only, forcing the user-base to buy new Macintoshes to benefit from the software upgrades.
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I think it will be the OS after Leopard. Give everyone one full OS release to get up to speed. I wouldn’t blame Apple for trying to push native releases faster for Intel than they did for OS X.
Mike Stickel on January 30th, 2006 6:33 pm
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Mike, you mightn’t blame them but there’d be millions of people who would. OS X is still supported on G3s with 256MB of RAM fer chrissakes! And how many people who are buying Quad G5s TODAY are going to be pleased with an announcement two years from now telling them there are no OS updates for them any more?
In all, there’s really no reason to do it, no advantage other than being able to target a very specific family of machines with a known performance baseline. It’d make QA easier, sure, but it’d be PR suicide.
Chris Clark on January 30th, 2006 8:43 pm
I’d have to disagree with Mr. Clark. There are certainly advantages going with Intel. Cost, speed, low-power consumption. I’ve heard Jobs wanted to make this transition years ago, but felt moving to Mac OS X was more important at the time.
If it’s any indication with 10.4 Tiger and G3’s and 256 MB RAM being supported today (the earliest model is the PowerMac G4 PCI, the AGP model I happen to own) and those computers were released in 1999, SEVEN years ago, BEFORE OS X came out.
I don’t see any reason why Apple won’t support any of the computers currently out for at least 5 years. (They certainly NEED to for 3 years because of AppleCare and ProCare.)
Mark my words: Apple will support G4 and G5’s for at least 5 years. 10.5 will definitely support G4’s and G5’s, and 10.6 probably as well (at least the G5’s). There’s really no need to worry. Apple wants people to buy new computers, but they want to sell OS X as well.
Proud on January 31st, 2006 12:54 am
Proud: While you say you disagree, it appears you agree far more than you disagree.
I always make it a point to agree with “Mr. Clark”, because he is usually right.
Colin D. Devroe on January 31st, 2006 1:59 am