Mac on Intel
Yeah, this is late. I’ve been busy.
I see that a lot of people are quite ticked off at the fact that Apple’s going to be using Intel chips in their new machines. Can you blame them? Steve Jobs promised dual 3.0 GHz G5s two years ago. The best we have now is dual 2.7 GHz. I’m sure that Steve’s not too happy about the situation and decided to jump ship.
Personally, I don’t care. It’s going to feel strange having a Mac with an Intel chip in it, but the bottom line is this: does it work like a Mac should? If so, bring it on.
My only concern is from a programming point of view. I downloaded Xcode 2.1 and started converting projects to Universal Binaries which have PPC and Intel-based code in it, the same this as when we had “Fat Binaries” when Apple moved from the 68K to PPC chips. Progress has been slow. Part of the problem is that I have to depend on external frameworks for some of the build to work right, and nobody’s done the conversions yet. I’ll have to do them myself. Also, we don’t have Intel developer boxes to test with.
There’s still a lot I have to learn about moving the projects to Intel. We have some Cocoa apps, command-line apps, and other misc. tools. They’ll all work on Intel boxes since the new boxes will run PPC code, but I’d rather have native apps.
The only casualty I see in this whole scenario is CodeWarrior. These people put their heart and soul into CW for many years, and now it looks as if Apple’s forcing them to disappear, mainly because CodeWarrior’s owned by Motorola, and I can’t see them putting out an app that created Intel code. Also, there have been official posts by CW reps saying that they won’t support native Intel binaries. It’s sad. CW was great in the day when the best you could get was MPW from Apple which was a dog to use. At the same time, I’ve been disenchanted with CW for a few years now so maybe it’s just time to move on and store a few old CW CDs for nostalgia.
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