Rosetta speed A concern for majority of Mac Users!
Even as Macworld spreads the fud of the Rosetta developers after an interview at the Intel Developer Forums I strongly believe that 1/3rd speed slashing Rosetta and the whole transition has deep implications for Mac users that do more then using the machine as a modern typesetter or an expensive HiFi part.
There are still virtually no Intel versions of ANY professional Programm out there. No Publishing, No Vector art, No Video, No Audio, No 3D. What this means that in the last 3 month all vendors of such product either have a wait and see stance or are actively porting their huge codebases over to intel. Apples claim of a "seamless transition that takes only half an hour for the average application" can be called as extreme fud... What else that means that at the moment there is SubZeroInnovation to be found in any Mac version of such programms. That means that in the last three month and the coming three to six month we will see SubZero features added to the High End market of professional applications. With Apple still making over half the money in computer purchases on pro equipment I would counter the claim that "Rosetta speed is of no concern to the users" as MacFUDworld does. Its not that there is a huge demand for UniBinaries at the moment with apple shipping only one Pro Hardware that is even crippled (no FW 800) for Pros just about this week. The more fundamental problem is that a lot of really Pro Apps not coming from Apple have already a feature set that is way behind their Windows counterpart or are highly more unstable then Windows versions. Another six month away those will be even more buggy and have even less features because the developers needed the time to get the code running on two different platforms a daunting task for programms like Maya for exemple that has more lines of code then MacOSX. Also this kills the possibilities for new Apps coming to the mac before the transition is complete. Take the renderer market for example. Multiple render solutions exist for Maya on the PC side yet on the Mac only the absolutely too slow for a small company Mental Ray that comes with Maya or the Pixar/Jobs/Apple owned Renderman that is highly expenisive is available. Other renderer where forthcoming but seem to be put on hold to come out probably Intel only in six month leaving the PowerPC users in the dust - a PPC/Intel devide is propable in six month creating a compatibility nightmare for the current small office mac users.
Not all is bad so. There will be new Apps writen in the meantime especially with Apple tech as UniBinaries that have the potential for true innovation against big players and some decade old codebases will finally have to be cleared (photoshop?!) and put into modern programming metaphers using modern day OS technology. I still have a very mixed feeling and think the next two years will be a mess on the Mac if you are a pro and rely on lots of software to get your thing done.