[Maflynn]

Ok,
so now apple has decided not to charge a fee for the cross grade for aperture but will do so for other professional apps.

My question is, why are they charging one in the first place? Jobs himself touted how easy it is to create the universal binaries. Apple should be giving away the upgrade as with any patch.

Mike

[brokenjago]

Maybe it's because some of the versions include slight feature additions/improvements, such as Logic Pro: the new release is apparently going to be dubbed Logic pro 7.2, and will add new features/improve old ones.

Maybe it's just cause they want money for all the work I'm sure it cost them to convert the heavily-optimised-for-AltiVec apps to Intel processors, which can't rely on AltiVec for very obvious reasons (read: Intel Processors don't have AltiVec.)

Maybe it's because Aliens abducted Steve Jobs and made him suggest it...

Just throwing it out there.

Steve Jobs has a history of trivializing things. You cannot get a program that was heavily optimized for one processor to magically run on a completely different architecture with 2 hours worth of work.

[Tsilou B.]

You cannot get a program that was heavily optimized for one processor to magically run on a completely different architecture with 2 hours worth of work.

That's the point. It's really easy to convert applications written in C or another high-level language to the Intel processor. The only real difficulty is with reading and writing binary data, because of the different endianess of the Intel processor. (0x1100 on PPC would be 0x0011 on Intel.) But if you have optimized assembler code in your application, e.g. Altivec code, then you have to rewrite that completely for Intel. That's why it's difficult to create universal binaries of Apple's Pro apps.

(Microsoft Office and some other applications have another problem: They do not use assembler code and should be easy to convert, but they are developed with Metrowerks CodeWarrior. They have to be converted to Xcode before they can be compiled for Intel. Here the difficulty is building the PowerPC version with Xcode instead of CodeWarrior and when that's done, it will be easy to create the Intel or universal version.)