[Ti] like hell freezing over ?

[Kynan Shook]

Yes, they do have the cash to make Macs for quite a while and just  
hand them out without being paid, for that matter.  Apple won't be  
going bankrupt any time soon.

However, I see no reason to not buy a Mac right now.  While Apple is  
making it very easy for developers to leverage OS technologies like  
Core Data and Core Image that would require 10.4, they are making it  
very difficult to justify producing anything but a "Universal  
Binary."  All it really takes in many cases is to check a box in  
Xcode and recompile your project.  I am at WWDC right now, and have  
in fact already produced a Universal Binary, which includes Intel- 
native code.  It took me 5 minutes, of which I spent 4 minutes and 55  
seconds searching for the checkbox telling it to compile for Intel in  
addition to PowerPC.  I then tested it on a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4  
PowerMac, the same style as the one Steve used in the keynote, and  
the same as the development machines Apple is loaning to developers  
starting in a few weeks.  I also tested it with Rosetta, the  
emulation allowing a PowerPC binary to run on an Intel-based Mac.   
Everything worked quite well.  And why shouldn't it?  Apple has been  
building OS X for Intel for 5 years now.  This is something that has  
been in the works for a long time, should it become necessary.

Apple's big message to developers is to make one application that  
will run on either platform.  For some applications, this can be done  
with no code changes.  For most, it will require a small investment  
of time.  Very few will require significant resources.  If your  
favorite application isn't native in *both* PowerPC and Intel on the  
first day Apple ships an Intel-based Mac, it's because the  
programmers are lazy.

As the folks from Mathematica said during the keynote, they ported  
their app to Apple's Intel architecture in 2 hours.  Granted,  
Mathematica is probably a good thing to demo because it is already  
cross-platform, and their developers probably took some of the  
architecture differences into account when writing their code.   
However, on the flip side, they do a LOT of math (obviously), and  
that's something that can be quite troublesome with the architecture  
change.

The best thing here is that Apple now has freedom.  They can choose  
from many different chip makers - it's Intel today, but they could  
relatively easily switch to another architecture if it again becomes  
necessary.  They could even ship PowerBooks with one architecture and  
PowerMacs with a different one (which is what happen during 2006-2007  
anyway).  It's not a perfect situation, but it will probably turn out  
to be the right move in the long run.

Peter Krug <pkrug at mac.com> writes:
> I just hope Apple has the Cash (~5 billion, right?) to weather the
> lack of revenue they will see for the next year.  Who in their right
> mind would buy a Mac now when there's a good chance that programs
> released in 2006 won't run on it?