Of Intel Macs and Red Herrings
Scott Byer at Adobe put up a very nice post about the switch to intel and some of the growing pains many of us are going through. While I've added my own comments to Scott's piece, a number of my colleagues in Mac BU have asked me to weigh in on the subject here on my blog.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's confirmed move of the Mac lineup onto Intel processors has dragged the biggest Mac application vendors into a public conversation: [[a:none|Scott Byer]] at Adobe has written about the switch's growing pains, and colleagues inside Microsoft's Mac BU have asked their own blogger to weigh in on his piece.
The friction predates this week — back in November 2005 a commentator was already criticizing Acrobat Reader for lacking native ink support on Tablet PCs, and pointing to Acrobat 7's commenting and highlighting tools as partial compensation. Adobe's applications behaving awkwardly on hardware they weren't built for was an open argument before the Intel transition made it universal.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the first Intel Macs run PowerPC builds of Adobe and Microsoft applications through Apple's translation layer until Universal binaries arrive, absorbing a real performance penalty on the apps pro users depend on.
- Engineering teams at Adobe and in Mac BU now maintain dual-architecture codebases while explaining their porting progress in blog posts rather than release notes.
Second-order effects
- When translated applications feel slow, responsibility gets contested between the platform owner and the ISV — Byer's post and the Mac BU response are competing attempts to assign blame for perceived sluggishness in front of customers.
- Because the largest vendors' port schedules determine how usable early Intel hardware actually is, Adobe and Microsoft gain outsized leverage over whether the transition lands well with professional Mac buyers.
Third-order effects
- If every architecture change replays the native-versus-translated debate in public, buyers learn to discount day-one impressions and time purchases to when flagship applications ship native builds.
- Platform owners get a standing incentive to court their biggest ISVs early in any future transition, since the effort's public success depends more on third-party port timing than on the silicon itself.
The trend: Major platform architecture transitions turn application 'nativeness' into a public accountability contest between the platform owner and its largest independent developers.