New Intel Macs and AE

[Ron Lindeboom]

[riccardo sinti] “Any Ideas whether or not the typical Adobe programs will be able to make the best of the new intel chips or will I have to wait for new versions of PS, AE, etc..”

Let’s look at it this way: A PowerPC-based Mac will stand absolutely no chance of running the Adobe apps (other than After Effects). But an Intel-based Mac — if the long-promised dual-boot ability holds true (which I believe it will) — means that you will be able to run the Adobe apps under Windows running on an Intel Mac.

If it were me, I’d opt for the Intel Mac and if it doesn’t run the Adobe apps, you are no further behind than you were before but you have one helluva lot faster machine and one that arguably will not be suffering obsolescence as quickly.

While the jury is still out regarding how well Windows apps will run on the new Macs, there’s at least the chance and that’s more than you have with the PowerPC chip. (Virtual PC aside, which is really no option at all except in the most extreme cases.)

Those are my dos centavos.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Barend Onneweer]

On the short term though:

It remains to be seen how many of your favorite applications will be MacTel native in the next year or two.

The shift from Codewarrior (PowerPC) to XCode willtake a lot of resources from all the developers, basically needing to recode most of the application.

You will still be able to run your PPC applications on an Intel Mac, but it’ll make your brand new box feel like a G3 or worse…

And unfortunately it looks like running Windows on Apple hardware might not work for the time being:
https://www.betanews.com/article/XP_Wont_Run_on_Intel_MacBook_iMac/1137003330

Bar3nd

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[Ron Lindeboom]

Thanks for the heads up, Barend. What a disappointing move.

No G1 MacTel laptop in the future for the Boomie, I guess.

;o)

Boomer

[Steve Roberts]

Talk about your double-dealbreaker: slower PPC, no XP?

Thanks for the info, Barend.

Steve

[Barend Onneweer]

Yes… As cool as the transition to Intel may sound, this will once more take a lot of effort from the developers. The move to OSX forced them to recode their applications – and at that time they had to use Codewarrior, because XCode wasn’t available yet.

From what I’ve read here and there, when your application is developed in XCode, the transition to MacTel should be pretty easy. But all the applications that were ported to OSX in the beginning will need to be rewritten mostly…

And not only the big developers, but all of your plugins, too.

And now that Apple moved the switch to Intel CPU’s forward (it was originally going to be later), the pressure on the developers will be even higher.

Of course in the end, it should be a bit more efficient, because CPU optimisations can be shared across the different OS’s.

And I also wonder how long developers will be supporting PPC CPU’s after they switch to Intel for OSX. In other words: will you be able to run AE 7.5 on your current Quad G5? That would be a 3rd platform for Adobe to support and test…

Bar3nd

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