Apple are finally turning to the darkside, and early next year we will see Intel processors appearing in our favourite Apple Mac computers.
Speculation is high at the moment, with the rumour mill at full power - all over the net people are talking about this issue - what does this mean from a Photoshop users point of view - well, its all good I think! If Intel can deliver less progress bars when processing images, its gotta be a good thing!
Wouldnt it be great if us Mac users could upgrade the processor a bit easier too - as long as Intel stay with a given architecture long enough for it to be worth it!
Gotta feel sorry for Mac application developers though - all software will have to be recompiled to run on Intel architecture - thats gotta hurt! Good news is Adobe have already committed to this re-engineering roadmap for Macs, so we need not worry about our favourite Photoshop.
Adobe where pretty fast to respond to OSX when they released a rock solid native OSX version (Photoshop 7). There is no need to doubt they will be one of the first big companies to respond with an Mac Intel version. With a release date of next summer for the processors and initial release speculated to be limited to Intel based Mac Minis first, it would be reasonable to think may co-inside with the launch of CS3 - dam these upgrades come fast these days!
There is much speculation about MacOSX running on X86 architecture, and some of my friends have been getting all excited that they will be able to run OSX on their humble PCs. Although this would be a great marketing and strategic move by Apple, it is my opinion that it’s a little more complicated than that!
In theory this might be possible, but Im lead to believe that to get OSX to run on Intel based Macs it has to run through a translation layer of code. Although Unix based, it is written for the Power PC architecture and instructions need to go through this translation layer to effectively talk the same language as an Intel processor.
It is therefore my opinion that it will be some time, if at all before we see OSX running on an off the shelf PC… and wouldnt you want to keep an operating system that beats any Windows system hands down installable only on your own platform… I know I would!