What's a SwitchBacker to do now?

[Swing]

:eek: Jeesh, now what do I do?

Perhaps this sounds heretical on this forum, but after yesterday's news of the 3d Transition it seems a bit goofy for me to buy into the current Mac PowerPC platform. Not only would I need to pay for different application software licenses now (primarily Adobe Creative Suite 1.x and Adobe Framemaker 7.1) but in a year I may need to do so again should I decide to upgrade whatever Apple hardware I bought now to whatever Mactel :o solution then meets my needs. And the Apple hardware I was to buy now would probably be worth much less in a year from now than the normal depreciation rate for old Mac products would otherwise indicate.

Is my thinking goofy? Seems I am damned if I do SwitchBack now, and also damned if I don't (because if I do not then I still need to upgrade my Wintel hardware now).

Incidentally, I am an old Mac user (my 2d Mac was a IIc and my last a Quadra) who moved to PC some years ago when software I absolutely needed was only available on PC. About a year ago I started planning a switch back to the Mac, and since that time I have been reading this forum. I was to time my switch for when I finally replaced my dual-PIII dual-channel SCSI system that I custom-built years back, and which really has only showed its extreme age in the past year or so.

P.S. I have searched the forums for a similar thread and surprisingly did not find one. If I missed a similar thread then flame away . . . (And I actually wanted my first post to be an enthusiastic thumbs-up for the Mathematica dude but could not locate the Keynote Speech/Intel News thread wherein he was mentioned when I decided to post this.)

[Swing]

I have been in touch with Adobe regarding their policies for: a) transferring software licenses from PC to the Mac; and, b) updating their Mac products to run on the intel based Macs. So I thought I would share the info.

On license transfers, an Adobe rep told me they will not charge me anything for existing license transfers from their PC products to their Mac products, unless they have a newer release and in which case I would have to pay the upgrade cost to the newest product (this is more generous than what I was informed a few months back). In any case would have to pay the shipping costs for the new software.

On the future Mac transition to intel chips, the Adobe rep told me if necessary they will probably have some kind of a patch available for free. I did not ask him details because he said he was reading from an email he had just received. He said there would be no charge.

[Franz Josef]

Sounds like you got the right answer - thanks for sharing this. :)

[Swing]

From http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1825046,00.asp:

"Apple promises that . . . new applications for Intel Macs will be designed to run on PowerPC Macs as well using universal binaries optimized for both platforms."

[Mac+]

Fat binaries and software support is metioned in this sticky (http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=7319) in the Speculation and Rumors forum.

But glad you got it worked out anyway Swing. :)

[Swing]

Hi Mac+, I did read that before posting and just figured I would add that other link, as it provided more general corroboration from a different source and I wanted to be sure this thread did not obfuscate on that point :no: . And so now I'll shut up. :)