I hereby request ideas on the Lion and Rosetta divorce

Question

OK. The Rosetta and Lion divorce.
There are applications I purchased to run on my PowerBook G4 (from 2005), then MacBook Pro (2009) and now on MacBook Air (2009) on Leopard or Snow Leopard. Those apps, I use professionally, and I will not upgrade to any other versions (not even for free, let alone for a couple thousand dollars) because:
I do not need to functionality-wise
I like the low resource consumption they have
I am not rich
But more importantly, I will not do just because someone at Apple/Adobe tells me so (freedom anyone?)
These are
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Acrobat Professional
Logic Pro 8
So, faced with:
Reduction of my freedom
At least a few thousand dollars to upgrade key apps
Going against my own principles
What will I do? What should I do? What is reaslistic that I do?
I need ideas, not good to say stuff like: "move back to Linux"--I desinvested in the platform to move to the Mac for pro reasons, or "Get Windows 7"--I was done with Windows after the joys of Windows 95 (Windows 20xx Server is good for SQL Server and IBM Cognos stuff and other enterprise, risk averse, single IT supplier mentality, which pays quite well also as a pro, but is not the point of this request for ideas)
Really, what am I supposed to do, oh, buy an iPhone maybe?
Mikka

Answer 1

dwb wrote:
The problem with Rosetta is two fold: 1) Apple didn't own the technology, it was licensed, and 2) it was 32 bit and Lion is 64 bit. So there are three questions (a) had Transative rewritten Rosetta for 64 bit technology and/or was it willing to do so? (b) what kind of compromises would Apple had to make in Lion to allow Rosetta to work in a 64 bit environment (assuming it was possible at all) and (c) did Apple's license permit it to rewrite Rosetta, was it cost effective to do so, and if so did all that work revert to Transative under the license? To me, as a programmer, it is obvious why Apple chose to drop Rosetta support. When the company dropped the PPC platform for Intel it was vital. Five years down the road, not so much, and even worse, possibly detrimental.
This is quite interesting and useful to know. It mixes business reasons with technical reasons, which actually makes it better as one does not work without the other too good. As a programmer I can also see the benefit of simplicity. The world is not simple though, and sure, there are a lot of desirable technologies, also sure they will never make it very far for business reasons. Good answer.
I am a user here. Not the programmer nor the economist. It helps to know all the technical detail. But in this world of virtualisation, what is wrong with not being 100% Intel or not being 100% 64 bit or not being 100% gasoline or not being 100% organic?
I wish I lived in a pure world, but I don't. I like Lion a lot, look forward to the iOS influenced UI, I can see the day when the MBA has a touch screen too, somehow I guess. But I still use a keyboard, we kinda all do with a Mac. I still use Logic 8 and still use CS1.
From the answers above, I think this is a sensible roadmap
Not using Lion as the work OS nor my fun OS yet but as a test OS on a separate partition or drive
Wait for a .0.1 or .1 version to clear some of the initial issues and perhaps get patches for some apps (Logic)-->  2.1 Save money in the meantime for next step. Here, I wish Apple had taken care of the user (me) and told me in advance this was going to happen, wishful thinking, I know, but would have helped. It is hard to second-guess Apple when one is busy.
Buy new versions of older apps if I still want to use them in Lion in a few months as a main work or fun OS (Freehand is a very sad example of where I'd be losing a great old and trusted tool, but I got used to Illustrator anyway, Adobe do that all the time so I was ready)
Maybe Apple and its business partners (Adobe and the rest) authorise some virtualisation vendor to allow everything (in "Wine for Linux" style, not full Snow Leopard as it would be overkill, some 3rd party rosetta-style translation. Fast too.)
Pray that Apple does not become solely the greatest consumer IT goods maker of all time but also keeps some good stuff for professional users (like Thunderbolt as a theoretical replacement for FireWire and USB as opposed to just removing the ExpressCard slot, great for eSATA, and replacing it with a $5 SD card reader on MBP 15")
Pray that someone else does a good job at the pro market if Apple moves out of it
I can't help thinking, when JPEG is made obsolete and computer vendors stop supporting it and I am, let's say, 70 years old, how am I going to be able to see my wedding pictures? I mean, will I get optic nerve implants to decode JPEG or what? Or will I  be the obsolete piece?
Forced obsolescence is a bad business model, and it will show eventually. Still, I love Lion... darn faith...
cheers
Mikka