From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: June 28, 2007 2:58:25 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Astro IIDC 4 Feature List

Hi Doug;

Just to clarify what is on our web site with regards to x86 MacIntel port.

It's not that we don't want to do it - it's just that given how few MacIntel systems were out there 18 months ago that it made no economic sense to re-write it, especially since it does work under Rosetta as is.

At that time there were around 25 million PowerPC Macs capable of running OSX and maybe 3 million x86 Macs. Now it's better with around 8 million x86 Mac sold and the x86 Mac market has grown enough that we now feel it's worth re-writing 700,000+ lines of code specifically for x86. I'd much rather add new features than simply sit here day after day boringly re-writing code for an old ( or new) chip architecture.

As a real example of where sales numbers are, our PowerPC only DFG driver still sells 3 times as many copies as the x86 Universal DFG version of the driver, which is in line with the the existing PowerPC VS x86 Macintel ratio (25  / 8 ~ 3). I expect that it will still be another 18 months before x86 Macintel begins to be the dominant sales for Mac software, and within 4 years no one will be writing PowerPC software at all - just like it happened with the transition from OS 9 to OSX or 68K to PowerPC.

HTH..

Milton J. Aupperle

On 28-Jun-07, at 2:20 PM, Doug wrote:

I'll look forward to the upgrade Milton - especially since I just upgraded to a MacBook Pro 

with the Santa Rosa chip-set.   I'm glad to hear it because I thought I read previously that 

you had no plans to rewrite for x86 MacIntels?  Lots of great sounding additions too - 

thanks!!

Doug