Apple ahead of schedule 3132
Ported by fans, as I understand it. Games makers do not, as a rule, bother with stuff like this.
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Yes, indeed: developers who make that decision are clearly leaving the platform. Yet they may do it anyway.
In many cases it would be cheaper, since they *already have* a Windows version. If the Mac market isn't worth the investment, they'll leave it. That's more likely when Apple makes the investment required higher...
There are also less radial cutbacks they can make. Consider how MS is dropping VBA support from the next Mac Office: it's too hard to port to Intel, so they won't. They are buttuming, perhaps correctly, that nobody else will implement this, so they can get away with it.
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Yes, and that's something that will make Apple's row easier to hoe here.
OTOH, sometimes the Mac and Windows versions aren't ports of each other. Office: Mac is not a direct port, for one I know about.
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Well, they need to do that anyway or suffer Rosetta. And do not imagine that Rosetta is forever; if Clbuttic could be dropped so soon, Rosetta can too.
And some are available on Windows today at full speed, but only for PPC on the Mac. Photoshop is in that category, and it's a performance critical app where emulation is not realy adequate.
How many users will decide to not wait for the Mac-Intel version of Photoshop, but to buy Photoshop for Windows today?
It all depends on the mix of apps for a given user, and the timing of their upgrades. But Apple's going to lose some users over this for sure. Could be a lot of users, depending on the breaks.
The whole idea of Adobe leaving the Mac is ludicrous. Given what I suspect the platform sales breakdown for Creative Suite looks like, Adobe is probably about as likely to leave Windows. This kind...
For Apple, the most important issue is how fast apps make the transition. If there's a very long period where Photoshop, Office, and many other important apps are PPC only, then Apple stands to lose a lot of users who discover, when they upgrade their computers, that they can't get versions of their apps for current Macs.