Thoughts on the Apple/Intel Switchover: Don’t Panic
For those interested, I’ve been posting a ton of stuff about this switchover and how it affects video folks and their purchasing plans over on my blog, HD For Indies.com. The best article on the subject I’ve written so far is here, entitled “Calmer Thoughts on Apple/Intel
The gist of it: Don’t Panic.
If you were going to buy a new machine this year, go ahead and buy it. There won’t be a replacement Intel based high end Power Mac until the second half of 2007 most likely. By that time, all of the software you care about (Final Cut Suite, Adobe’s Creative Suite and After Effects, and other apps) will most likely be ported to this new OS X86 (whatever they’re going to call it) on MacIntel hardware (or whatever they’re going to call it) by that time. And for your existing G4/G5 box, universal binaries (runs on both architectures under OS X) versions will be written for years to come. I bet it won’t be any sooner than Final Cut Pro 8 or later that doesn’t support G5’s, so fret not - your current or about-to-be-bought box will keep running as it has been.
The biggest concern I have is that there might be some defections from smaller companies that make plugins and tools that aren’t using Xcode (the tool to make universal binaries) and will decide it’s too much effort to port their code and support two hardware platforms. One of the good things about this move, however, is that eventually, developers will only have to support one hardware platform between Macs & WinTel boxes - they’ll only have to optimize their code for one processor in 5 or more years.
I’ve also linked to a ton of other articles on all this stuff, and commented on many of them.
