Apple Intel transition: third-party app killer?

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It is clear that several of the top third party applications on Apple Macs will only run under the Rosetta Stone emulation, which renders them slower on the Mactels than they would be on the G4/G5 being phased out. This would include Microsoft Office (which competes with iWork) and products by Adobe and other graphics specialists (which compete with the "Pro" applications, such as the new Aperture). Interestingly, Apple made sure that other crucial applications, such as Wolfram's Mathematica, were swiftly ported, and helped them do so. I've no doubt that Apple's own applications are already available as Universal Binaries, and will run at native (Intel compiler?) speeds on the Mactels.

Needless to say, Apple would also be doing the open source movement a favour if it contributed to breaking the MS Office lock-in (and note the fact that Mac OS X has allowed creating PDFs from MS Office documents for a long time, whereas in Windows, you needed PDFCreator to do so).

tags:apple, mac, macintosh, ppc, intel, mactel, adobe, x86, mathematica, aperture,apple-intel, apple-intel transition, microsoft, microsoft office, macintel