Rubenerd

Having just spoken about photography, a few hours ago Apple released Aperture 3. One thing of note is the white box instead of black, shock of horrors! Of note for my own personal circumstances was the phrasing of the system requirements:

Aperture 3, which runs as a 64-bit application on Intel Core 2 Duo Macs running Mac OS X Snow Leopard […]

I've been saying on this blog for years that my 2006-vintage Core Duo MacBook Pro still works and does everything I need it to, but perhaps this is a sign that it's the end of the road for it as far as Apple is concerned. Perhaps this means Mac OS X 10.7 will only be 64-bit as well; could Snow Leopard be the latest OS X I'll be able to run on it?

I thought it was very odd that they timed the transition to Intel only months before the 64-bit Core 2 Duo processor, so they've had to support those precious few 32-bit machines like mine when they could have been entirely x64 from the start. If this is the start of 64-bit only applications at Apple, I applaud them for it; despite having a 32-bit MacBook Pro, the vast majority of the install base is 64-bit and machines like mine are weighing everybody else down.

Interim transition time?

Perhaps this may be the excuse I need to start rebooting into my FreeBSD partition on this MacBook Pro on a more regular basis to get used to it in anticipation of no more updates! I know it's not politically correct to admit it but I adore The Gimp, now I just need a photo management application that isn't some terrible Mono .NET thing.