: But PPC->x86, the prospects don't seem like such a great idea to begin
: with (and I suspect this is more an issue of supply problems than
: architecture, i.e. all three next-gen consoles using PPC variants and
: sucking up IBM and Motorola's fab time), AND the switch over is going to
: be as painful as 68k->PPC, with emulation and fat binaries and all the
: ensuing compatibility with older and non-mainstream software. I really
: don't see the point. Also, I've been very happy lately that computer in
: general are now all powerful enough that even my 4 year old G4 can still
: run the latest and greatest stuff aside from heavy media (video or 3D)
: work. But with the architecture change, how long until developers just
: don't bother with PPC versions of their programs anymore, even though my
: old PPC would handle them just fine?
Moving software to a new platform is seldom glitch-free and I can certainly understand D-M.A.'s frustrations. That said, apps written for Cocoa already can run on x86 hardware with only minor tweaks and Apple has been hinting for a while, after all, that Cocoa is the future. Carbon was introduced only as a transitional scheme - a bridge to help developers make the transition while they rewrote code for Cocoa - something that basically hasn't happened. I suspect that now it will.
Yes, we'll have fat binaries again - I can live with that. Just remember that the large size of most applications is due to resources - not code - and these resources are shared across platforms. And thanks to the magic of Transitive corporation (the unnamed developers of Rosetta, I'm sure), emulation has come a long way and running PPC Mac apps on Intel Macs won't be nearly as onerous as running Virtual PC. Like you, I'm a bit more concerned about the other way around - a lot of developers will simply stop compiling for PPC, leaving a lot of us in the dust. At least the two most important developers (from my standpoint, anyway), Microsoft and Adobe, have announced plans to support both platforms in the coming years.
The thing that really excites me about this move in the long term is that the move could encourage traditional PC developers to write software for the Mac. We already saw this with the transition to OS X in which we picked up a large number of traditional Unix/Linux developers. I had hoped that Apple would introduce a Windows compatibility layer but if so, it certainly wasn't revealed today. I just hope that Apple won't be so myopic as to fear that porting portions of Cocoa to Windows would amount to giving away their prime assets. By making some version of Cocoa and Xcode available to traditional PC programmers for free, Apple would be encouraging developers to write software that can run under either Windows or OS X. There is nothing Apple could do that would have a greater impact on increasing market share than this single action. Buy a Mac - run all your favorite apps. And for a lot of people like me who have to use Windows at work, being able to run it natively on my PowerBook would be a Godsend.
