Originally Posted by doglover
I think this would be a moronic move by apple. I've been a customer a long time. But, if they force me to repurchase all my software I will leave them for Linux or maybe even Windows.
I can't believe that Jobs would even consider blowing away his installed base.
It's official. I just watched the keynote.
All your software will work seamlessly on an Intel version of OS X when the boxes come out. No need to repurchase. It will not take full advantage of the performance possible from the processor, but, seeing as how the Intel chips will run faster than a PPC would anyway, it will be a wash.
Steve said that developers will be able to port their PowerPC software fairly painlessly and can produce hybrid binaries (able to run on either PPC or Intel) using XCode easily.
One of the demos during the keynote was Mathematica running on an Intel Mac. The representative from Wolfram Research, which produces Mathematica, said that they ported the OS X version this weekend to Intel in two hours.
I'm sure there will be some snags, and not all will go as smoothly as presented today, but considering that a production-ready, Intel version of OS X has been developed in parallel with the PPC version for each and every release of OS X (5 in the past 5 years), it's not coming out of the blue. It's been in the back pocket now since the beginning, as Steve said, "just in case."
There will probably be a webcast of the keynote available later today. I'll post a link as soon as I see it.