My iBook is living on borrowed time, and I’m going to need to get another laptop at some point. This could be a good time to move to one of the Intel-processor Macs, like the MacBook, but I’ve made a substantial investment in software for my current Macs and I’ve heard many and varied rumors that the old software does not work on the Intel Macs. Primarily, I have the Adobe Creative Suite and don’t want to have to upgrade to CS3 just yet. ($$$)
So, does the old software work with the Intels or not?
I have Creative Suite on my MacBook and it works just fine, if a little slow. If you do get a new Mac, be sure to max out the RAM, which will help with speeds greatly. I couldn’t stand to run CS with only 512 MB, but after I upgraded it to 2 GB, it’s fine.
It is important to note, though, that Intel Macs will NOT be able to run Classic programs. So if you still rely on software that runs in OS 9 or Classic mode, you’ll need to hang on to that iBook. But all OS X native software can be run on Intel Macs.
It runs it in an emulator, and it does a pretty darn good job.
The only PPC software I regularly run is Warcraft 3. Now, granted, it’s several years old at this point, but they’ve put a lot of work into it to be able to run a 3d game in an emulator effectively.
Didn’t the PPC macs use an emulator to run the Classic/Sys 9 software? Why can’t you just run that stuff in two layers of emulators? I mean, it’d be way slow, but the increased hardware speeds probably take up a lot of slack.
Is there a way you can run pre-OS X software in a VM? Would I have to get a copy of System 7 or 9 or whatever and install it inside the VM?
(I have some Mac software that my friend wrote way back in '94 or so; I think it’s pre-PPC, but I’m not certain about that. Come tom think of it, I’ll need to get a floppy drive to load it…)
Rosetta? Plenty fast – for the most part you won’t be able to tell which apps are running in Rosetta and which ones aren’t. I don’t think I’ve found anything that runs noticably slower on my Intel iMac than my G5 tower (although you need to remember that the iMac is a much faster processor, and dual core, which the G5 is not).
Rosetta’s plenty fast. My iMac runs PPC software faster than my Quicksilver did, but then again the processor runs more than twice as fast.
Keep in mind one very important thing about Rosetta – it only needs to emulate the PPC code. All of the Mac toolbox calls are already written for Intel, so if your PPC program uses all of the goodies that are provided for in the Mac OS, those routines run at 100% native speed.