New Apple Computers!!! (1 Viewer)

[Michael_K_Sr]

I've only used it for the last day Mark, but they definitely seem to run cooler than the G4's did. I don't know if Apple gave an estimate on the battery life, but I'm only averaging about 3 hours and 15 minutes on a full charge. Might need to pick up an extra battery for long flights.

I think what Guo was getting at was that Adobe wasn't going to rush to release their applications as Universal before the next major revisions of those products. That said, their applications will run on the new machines, but not as fast as they would if they were released as Universal. They run though the Rosetta emulator that Apple uses to run older software. If you have any really old software that ran in Classic (OS 9 or earlier) then you're out of luck because Classic is not supported on the new Intel machines. The Internet plug-ins that have not been recomplied will not run on Universal web browsers. That is only Safari for now, although a Universal version of Firefox is supposed to be released in the near future. Even though the plug-ins don't work within Safari, they do work in the other browsers for the Mac. Additionally, the applications that the plug-ins are associated with (RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, Windows Media Player, etc) will all run on the new Macs. They just are run through Rosetta. If all this sounds intimidating, it isn't. Rosetta runs seemlessly...if you launch an application that hasn't been recompiled yet, that application just launches as it would on any other Mac, albeit a bit slower.

 

[Ken Chan]

I guess it works like this: for non-Universal -- i.e. PowerPC only -- apps, the whole thing, browser plus plugins, runs under Rosetta. But for a Universal app, the OS sees that it can run the Intel version, and does; but when it gets to a plugin compiled for PowerPC, it can't run it, because the app is already running native.

So it's probably not that big a deal. If you don't use any third party plugins, it won't affect you at all.

Other apps may need updates, either as Universal binaries, or to run properly under Rosetta. You need to check with the makers of your favorite apps. It's often a FAQ item.

 

[Thomas Newton]

There's a note on the Apple site that

 

[Thomas Newton]

This means bye-bye to many classic games (pun intended) -- like Spectre VR and the Pro Pinball series.

 

[Citizen87645]

Intel Mac Minis announced today: http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/...28140422.shtml