“Just six months after announcing the change, Apple has released its first Macintosh based on Intel architecture,” Andy Ihnatko writes for The Chicago Sun-Times. “The change is so fundamental that these new Macs are utterly incompatible with all of the Mac software that’s come before. But Apple has done a great job hiding that from the user. All apps now ship as ‘Universal Binaries,’ with both PowerPC and Intel code baked right in. Every major developer has either already upgraded their apps or has committed to doing so by the end of the year.”
MacDailyNews Note: Not Adobe, which now also owns Macromedia; for more information, see Adobe: no native Intel Mac support until 2007; Photoshop could be 14 months away.
Ihnatko continues, “Apple claims these new chips benchmark at two to three times the performance of the 2.1 GHz G5 iMacs they replace. But the coolest stuff is yet to come. PowerPC G5 chips burn way too much power to be used in a notebook, and thus Apple’s portables have always lagged Windows machines in performance. Lo and behold, a new MacBook Pro is due to ship in less than two months. And the entire Mac line will be Intel-based by the end of the year… An Intel Mac can also potentially run Windows apps at near-PC speed. So Apple got what it wanted: a faster and more versatile CPU, and it’s making the transition so smoothly most users won’t even notice. For all that, Apple kept the price of the iMac where it was. The only people who won’t like this iMac will be those who bought a PowerPC iMac last month.”
Full article here.
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