Universal Apps (Intel Macs)

5.11. Universal Apps (Intel Macs) By the end of 2006, Apple had switched its entire Macintosh product line over to Intels Core Duo processors (the successor to the Pentium)
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Universal Apps (Intel Macs)5.11. Universal Apps (Intel Macs)By the end of 2006, Apple had switched its entire Macintosh product line over to IntelsCore Duo processors (the successor to the Pentium).Yes, that Intel. The company that Mac partisans had derided for years as part of the DarkSide. The company that Steve Jobs routinely belittled in his demonstrations of PowerPCchips (which IBM and Motorola supplied to Apple for more than a decade). Thecompany whose marketing mascot Apple lit on fire in a 1996 attack ad on TV.Why the change? Apples computers can only be as fast as the chips inside them, and thechips that IBM had in the works just werent keeping up with the industry. As oneeditorial put it, Apples doing a U-turn out of a dead-end road.And sure enough, Intel-based Macs start up and run much faster than the old Macs,thanks to the endless march of speed improvements in the chip-making world. Andthanks to that Intel chip, todays Macs can even run Microsoft Windows and all of thethousands of Windows programs. (Chapter 8 has details.)At the time, though, there was a small glitch: Existing Mac software didnt run on Intelchips.Apple would have to ask the worlds software companies to rewrite their programs yetagain, after already having dragged them through the Mac OS 9-to-Mac OS X transitiononly a few years earlier.Fortunately, the transition wasnt as gruesome as you might expect. First, Apple hadalready secretly recompiled (reworked) Mac OS X itself to run on Intel chips, beginningwith Mac OS X 10.4.4.Furthermore, Apple wrote an invisible translation program, code-named Rosetta, whichpermits the existing library of Mac OS X programs—Photoshop, Word, and so on—torun, unmodified, on Intel Macs.They do not, however, run especially fast on Intel Macs. In fact, many of them run slowerthan they did on pre-Intel Macs.To make their programs perform at full speed on Intel-based Macs, programmers have toupdate their wares. All the big software companies promised to make their programs intouniversal binaries—programs that run equally well on PowerPC- and Intel-based Macswith a double-click on the very same Finder icon.Figure 5-21. Heres a quick way to tell if a program is an old one that will run slowlyon an Intel Mac (instead of a Universal one that wont require the Rosetta software translation). Highlight its icon and choose File Get Info. Near the top, youll see either Application: PowerPC (meaning old and slow) or Application: Universal (meaning runs fast on both Intel and PowerPC machines).It took two years for all the big-name programs to fall in line, but they finally did.Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office 2008, Final Cut Pro, QuarkXPress, FileMaker,Firefox…one by one, the worlds most popular Mac programs were reworked intoUniversal versions. (Theres even a list of them—over 7,000 so far—athttp://guide.apple.com/universal.)You have only two indications that youre using a program originally designed forPowerPC-based Macs: first, youll see a notation in the programs Get Info window (seeFigure 5-21). Second, youll probably discover that the program isnt as fast as it used tobe.If all this talk about architectures and chips makes your brain hurt, you can at least takecomfort in one fact: No matter which kind of Mac youve got Leopard installed on, everyfeature, tip, and trick youve learned from this book will work exactly the same.