Slashdot Mirror
New Apples Next Week
Vicissidude writes "CNN/Money reports: 'Apple may be gearing up to unveil a new slate of mini-Macs and may also release updated versions of its popular iBook laptop computers as early as next Tuesday, according to unconfirmed reports on a Web site that tracks Apple.' The Web site Think Secret reported three new Mac mini and two new iBook part numbers have appeared in Apple's retail database, indicating that new models are imminent. Apple would neither confirm nor deny the reports. The new mini models will be priced at $499, $599 and $699, with new iBooks priced at $999 and $1,299, according to the original story at Think Secret."
Hmm I think you have it wrong there. You see, with Apple's Xcode development platform, all you need to do to compile of PPC and Intel is click both checkboxes. If your application ran in PPC at first, then the developer's guide will help you port to Intel. If you are developing an app right from the start, here is your chance to follow the porting guide and apple programmer guidelines and get your code right the first time. If you had been following apple's guidelines from the beginning then porting to intel is easy.
You don't want to alienate your customers... You want your app to run on both for a long while until PPC becomes obsolete. That's like, 8 years from now considering the higher resale value of macs
I can absolutely confirm this (dammit, I leave Slashdot one day & folks are already posting the answer *I* wanted to give).
As a Mac developer writing software that's in the hands of a not inconsequential number of people, I have on my desk one of the Intel-based Developer Transition Kits. The reason I have this is not because I'm now going to be building Intel-only applications from now on, but because in a year's time, when a client buys a new Mac an it's running on an Intel processor, they will still want to use my software.
As a result, I compile everything as a 'Universal Binary' -- which, to the uninitiated, is a new name for the 'Fat Binary' of yore; in other words, it's got the Intel and the PowerPC binary files concatenated together, with a little table of contents up front.
When I first fired it up, it took me one day to get a quite a few programs (components of one software product) to build & perform perfectly on Intel (one little problem - ntohl() modifying the source operand on Intel processors - caused 80% of the delay, due to it being a bitch to track down) and PowerPC. They even generate various files which can be passed between one another with nary a glitch.
And before people start whinging about applications doubling in size, take a look at the size of the actual program binary itself. Delicious Library is 908Kb. Final Cut Pro is 4.7Mb. Things like Photoshop will undoubtedly be larger, and will therefore be candidates for seperate Intel/PowerPC binaries (i.e. the installer detects what system is running, and installs the appropriate binary). It's worth noting, though, that applications which make heavy use of the OS X frameworks will be smaller, and much more palatable as universal binaries.
In short, as an Apple developer, whose software is installed on hundreds of thousands of Macs, it's actually more work for me to make my software work on intel only - after all, for that I would need to:
-Q