Apple Logic Pro /LogicExpress Discussion

>  Someone chastised me for mentioning the rumor last week,

As long as you don't mention rumours as facts (especially not their 
consequences) no one needs to be chastised :o)

> but now its no 
> longer a rumour. I guess the the powermac G3..4..5.. line as we know it is
> over.

Why? Will Jobs come to my home, rip the G5 out my PowerMac and put an Intel 
chip in? If they want to make a new line based on Itanium chips or whatever, 
it's fine with me. Not that I would buy one, but I'm happy with my system for 
now anyway. Or you mean future generations? Well, the G3 was over when G4 
came, G4 was almost over when G5 came (if it weren't for the fact that there 
are still no notebook G5 processors, which is one of the reasons for this 
move).

> They say it will happen by 2007 and that they will need to rewrite code for
> the new chip, and that when future software comes out (e.g. 10.6 Lion, 10.7
> housecat, or whatever, Logic 9, etc) they won't work on our existing macs.

Well the next version of OSX is already quite far in development so it would 
surprise me if there wouldn't be a PPC version. After that well.. new 
generations of software require new generations of hardware. I'm glad Apple 
has never been afraid to jump legacy boundaries. Otherwise we'd be working 
with souped-up 2GHz 65xx processors (and I can assure you a G5 is 
faster). ;o) It's a pity they make a similar move to an inferior processor, 
that is if it really will be an x86 chip, but so far only the rumours 
"confirmed" this; it might just as well be Itanium family (makes more sense 
too, fully 64 bit). Anyway, the big advantage of this jump will be price 
rather than quality/performance.

Besides, you're misinterpreting what it says. Of course when you port binaries 
to another processor it will not work on the first one, but no one is 
preventing any developper from keeping two versions. Logic ran on OS9 and OSX 
for 2 major versions for example. (And in fact, OSX has been Intel-ready for 
a while now, according to another article).

> Great. I have gone through this a couple of times with apple already.

Yes and I still don't see the problem some people have with this. Why is it 
some people either want the latest hardware with old software, or the latest 
software with old hardware.. I'd say either stick with what you have if 
you're happy, or get something new if you're not. It's pretty naive to expect 
software written in 3-4 years not to run out of power on today's machines 
anyway. PC users simply buy a new PC every two years because their system is 
too slow for current software, but they don't complain because there's no 
real compatibility issue (so they don't feel "forced"). But the result is the 
same, except that on a PC you have all the complications that come with 
compatibility to old systems.

Besides, in all the articles people are waving with now, all I see is "..for 
the low-end machines.." (mac mini, ibook) because PPC chips are too 
expensive. I still have to see whether this means there will never be a 
PowerMac G6 for example.

Don't get me wrong, I think Intel architecture sucks. But in general I'm not 
worried about processor jumps and in fact what I like about Apple is that 
they're not afraid of them and actually has managed to make those jumps in a 
reasonably painless way.

Maurits.