Is it only some type of apps that need a intel update...

Question

reason and ableton needed an update but office seems to work......is it only certain type of apps.....does an old version of creative suite run on intel macs or is that one that needs an update? is there a universal binary discussion page ...cannt see it?

Answer 1

Most applications use general frameworks that are available within Mac OS X for a lot of what they do. Any such app will work with Rosetta just fine.
Ableton and Reason, along with Protools, Logic, and probably Digital Performer being audio applications require some pretty interesting tweaks to ensure the best performance. As such they sometimes do things with unusual frameworks, create their own frameworks, or occasionally directly access specific abilities of specific hardware. All of those applications surely were tweaked to do certain functions directly on the PPC chip, many utilizing Altivec.
As such they might not be compatible with Rosetta if Apple didn't include those specific chip features knowing that only a small handful of developers where accessing them. It breaks a few programs, but if it only effected a handful of developers out of thousands, and saved Apple a lot of time in development and support they would think it worthwhile.
Especially when you consider that all the Audio and Video vendors really appreciate the performance they can squeeze from the Core Duo chips, so they all started updating as quickly as they could.