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"That could be an good thing because software developers may put some speed into their development.

Horray! Hastily ported barely tested unstable new software for our brand-new Rev A iMacs!

Well, that is one way to see it.

The way i was thinking was that developers has had the dev. version of intel macs for some while now and still a lot of developers don´t do anything with their software until the new machines has arrived on the market. That could be an dumb idea becuase then we have to wait for the software even longer.

I do not mean that every developer does like this (wait and see), but i have heard and talked to a few and some of them think that it is better to wait until the machines are released for the public. Waste of time, i say.

It's not a waste of time, it's for the customer's best. Just because your software runs on the developer box doesn't mean it'll run on the iMac just as well - the new iMac has a different CPU, a different graphics chip, a different firmware and a different version of OS X. A responsible developer will not release software until he was able to test in the exact same machines as his customers use, and thorough testing takes a while.

From: riha
The way i was thinking was that developers has had the dev. version of intel macs for some while now and still a lot of developers don´t do anything with their software until the new machines has arrived on the market. That could be an dumb idea becuase then we have to wait for the software even longer.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really cover the whole story:

(1) The development boxes were only available to paying ("Select" & "Premier") ADC developers, membership which starts at US$500/year. The boxes themselves were made available at US$999, and have to be returned to Apple by the end of this year.

Now that Apple are shipping Intel-based Macintoshes they are offering a one-for-one swap of the development transition hardware to a new iMac at no extra cost, but that wasn't announced ahead of time. Most likely, smaller developers decided to keep their US$1,499 as savings towards a new Intel-based Macintosh, and let Rosetta do the legwork for them in the meantime.

(2) For larger developers, having the development transition boxes wasn't necessarily all that great; anyone writing software relying on hardware interaction would have only been able to do limited integration testing on their applications post-port. Product cycle deadlines would also have played into the equation in a number of cases, Adobe being one of the most notable.

Finally, assuming all other factors most favourable, the use of those boxes just for transition work would have been a major inconvenience in larger development houses because it would not have fit particularly well into their workflow.

(3) I can't put it any better than stew did above:

From: stew
A responsible developer will not release software until he was able to test in the exact same machines as his customers use, and thorough testing takes a while.

This is important not just to ensure that the software works, but for support purposes as well. Developers are obligated to support what they release, and this translates into major costs in time, effort and money in larger development houses.

Based on all of this, it doesn't surprise me in the least that there haven't been a lot of Universal Binaries to date. Furthermore, I would entirely expect the dearth to continue until all of the non-server product lines migrates to Intel-based processors. That's going to suck a bit for the early adopters, but then, it was like that for both the 68000 to PowerPC and System 9 to Mac OS X transitions, too...

(P.S. I'm curious to see how the XServe will be transitioned to Intel-based processors... or even if it _will_ be fully transitioned!)

Edited 2006-02-05 04:33

Well they have an intel iMac for the same price as the old 17'' one... Maybe they stopped making them and then ran out? Although this is a bit sooner than I was expecting...

Not if they had stopped production months before and planned to coast along on warehouse stock until launch. The last thing Apple would want is a lot of unsaleable machines.

It's the old G5-based 17" iMac.

The 20" G5 iMac had a much better TFT screen, last time I looked, so it's probably better to get that one, if you're still interested in a PowerPC-based iMac.

Yeah, the 20" G5 iMac displays are a lot better than the 17". It may only be three inches, but they are a lot bigger, and you can definitely tell a difference in quality when you see them side by side.

Yeah, the price is the same but Photoshop (and others) runs natively only on the G5 iMac (until next year).