First, an important addition to your already busy summer dance card. Next Tuesday, June 21st, at 7:00 PM, MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society), will hold its last meeting of the season before its two-month summer hiatus. Go to the Multi-Purpose Room on the second floor of Brunswick High School. In addition to Dave Koenig’s popular Updates & Rumors segment, yours truly will present an in-depth look at Mac OS 10.4 “Tiger”. Get there early to get a good seat.

As I outlined last week, Apple has announced it will transition its Macintosh computers from the current PowerPC family to processors manufactured by Intel. The first “Mactels” will arrive next summer (probably notebooks and consumer models). The entire line is scheduled for conversion by the end of 2007.

So, if two weeks ago you were about to get a new Mac, either as an upgrade from an older Mac, or as a refugee from “the Dark Side”, what on earth do you do now? It’s a fair question, probably with no real right or wrong answer. Here’s some random observations that may help if you’re facing a buying decision.

The Mac operating system, all of Apple’s great software like Final Cut Pro and the iLife suite, and third-party software from companies like Microsoft and Adobe, will be developed, updated, and upgraded for both PowerPC Macs and Mactels. The developer tools to migrate applications to “universal binaries” that run on both architectures have been distributed, and some major applications are already ported. Software developers would be foolish to abandon the PowerPC platform, as long as they can easily (and cheaply) port to both systems.

Let’s face it, personal computers are still just consumer electronics, and therefore are basically obsolete when you open the box. Think that those fine $399 Dell boxes with their Integrated Intel Graphics and 256 MB of RAM will be up to the task of running Microsoft’s “Longhorn” operating system when it’s released at the end of next year or the beginning of the next? No way, no how. Any Mac you buy today can handle the most advanced consumer operating system around (I’m talking “Tiger”, of course) with aplomb. Plus, when Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard” is released and staring Longhorn in the face when it finally plods off the truck, today’s Mac will run it.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski