Way back when, when the first Power Macs hit the streets, I found performance with older Mac apps to be perfectly awful. It seemed as if I had gone back two generations in chip design, from the PowerPC to the 68030, and that was being generous. So when another emulation scheme was announced, Rosetta, which allows Intel-based Macs to run PowerPC software, you had reason to be concerned.

Although they are being coy on the details, Apple’s Rosetta technology is based on QuickTransit, an emulation method from Transitive Corporation. When I taped an interview with Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold for this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, I had to forgive him if he danced around a few key details because of the company’s deal with Apple.

But here are the basics: When you launch a PowerPC application on a MacIntel, Rosetta translates chunks of code into memory. The code is reused as needed when various application features are run. How much memory? Well, in general, according to Wiederhold, their technology will exact a 50% overhead. So, as an example, if a PowerPC app needs 128MB to run, another 64MB will be required for emulation. You’ll need to think about this overhead carefully when you decide how much memory you need to get the best performance for your new MacIntel.

Now Transitive’s own presentation materials on their technology estimates that Rosetta will run at sixty to seventy percent of full processor speed. The tests published so far by Macworld and others are less optimistic, putting the speed hit at fifty percent. So why the disparity? Is Transitive fudging its numbers just a little bit?

Well, the magic bullet may very well be RAM, and most of the new iMacs tested so far appear to come with the default 512MB allotment. What if it was increased to, say, 1GB? Good question, and I’ll be interested in seeing the comparisons as testing of the new products continues. Now in normal circumstances, particularly if you stick with Apple’s own applications that have been ported to Universal status, and older apps with modest memory needs, performance should be pretty decent with the stock configuration.

When it comes to Adobe Photoshop and other high powered software, things get muddy. Photoshop, for example, loads an entire image into memory, large color illustrations, for example, could suck up RAM with abandon. You might just want to open Mac OS X’s Activity Monitor, which is located in the Utilities folder, and monitor the requirements of different applications as you move from one to the other. This will help you decide whether to max out the memory of your new MacIntel.

Now in the end you can’t expect miracles. Whether Rosetta runs at half the speed of the native processor or up to seventy percent, as Transitive claims, isn’t all that significant in the scheme of things. Mac OS X for Intel seems to be pretty snappy, and it’ll do its thing at a pretty good pace. Sure, Photoshop rendering functions won’t be so swift, but if you’re upgrading from a very old Mac, it’ll still be a lot faster than what you’re used to. Bear that in mind when you look at the reviews of the MacIntel version of the iMac. Remember that the comparisons are usually being done against current hardware, so you have to be realistic as to how those results will impact you.

As I said, the Intel-based Macs are among those rare personal computers that will continue to become faster over time, as more and more developers make Universal versions of their software, and continue to optimize their code. Already well over 300 applications have made the voyage, and more are added every single day. It won’t be long before the total will exceed 1,000.

However, the sprawling productivity applications with ancient code bases will require lots and lots of work to bring across the finish line. Quark Inc. has already done a lot of the heavy-lifting, which is why a public beta of a Universal version of QuarkXPress 7.0 will be available real soon. However, I don’t expect to see native versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite until this fall at the earliest, if then. Adobe not only has to update its software in Universal form, but it’ll need to be compatible with the forthcoming Windows Vista, and what that may require is anyone’s guess at this point.

Microsoft will no doubt face a similar dilemma. Months and months of work, and one only hopes that next version of Office will also sport a generous selection of new features to justify the upgrade price you’re going to pay.

For now, however, if you’re interested in buying a new iMac or ordering the MacBook Pro, you’ll want to approach the process realistically. Don’t shortchange yourself on RAM, especially if you have a bunch of PowerPC applications that will keep Rosetta real busy.

Related Articles:

• Was the Steve Jobs Health Admission Too Little Too Late?
• The Microsoft On-The-Skids Report
• Is Apple’s Leadership Change in Progress?
• Will Apple Be Forced to Build Cheap Computers?
• Newsletter #473 Preview: More Leopard Annoyances

When Apple introduced iWork as the intended successor to AppleWorks last year, it didn’t seem to set the world on fire. Sure Pages was a neat concept: A simple page design program with adequate word processing capabilities. Keynote gives presentations the flair they lack with the ever-present Microsoft PowerPoint. So it seemed to have potential, but little was heard of it until Macworld San Francisco 2006.

The release of iWork ‘06 seemed an afterthought during the Steve Jobs keynote, and he barely mentioned it other than the fact that it was released, had new features and was a Universal app that would run native on the new MacIntels. Except that, like its predecessors, Keynote 3 was used in a somewhat fancier version of the slides you saw during the great event. If you really cared, you had to check out Apple’s site for the particulars.

After installing iWork ‘06 and playing with it briefly, I had to wonder if it would become just another program that would sit on my Mac and receive little use. When the original, iWork ‘05, came out last year, I noted, in passing, that the interface, particularly on Pages, was clean, uncluttered, that it handled Word documents with reasonable fidelity, but it seemed rather slow. However, it would have been nice to see a spreadsheet component, which remains the missing link.

In short, I wasn’t tempted to switch from Word anytime soon, and I simply let the matter rest. That is, until I read an article about the popularity of Office alternatives by CNET’s Ina Fried. I had always assumed that, in the PC marketplace, Corel WordPerfect Office was a somewhat healthy number two and that iWork was largely an afterthought. I even recall a rumor or two that sales of Apple’s new office suite hadn’t been terribly significant, and perhaps that’s why it got short shrift at the Expo keynote.

But the statistics seem to show otherwise. According to NDP, a market researcher, iWork’s share of retail sales in the U.S., after just a year on the market, is 2.7%. This doesn’t seem like much, unless you consider that it accounts for both Mac and Windows sales, and there’s no Windows version of iWork. Even more fascinating is the fact that Corel’s applications garner a mere 1.6%. Microsoft Office has 95% of the market.

In the Mac universe, iWork earns a whopping 17.4% share, compared to 82% for Office. Now that’s a whole lot more significant than I expected. Unlike recent versions of AppleWorks, Apple doesn’t bundle iWork on its consumer Macs; all you get is a 30-day test version, and you have to buy a user license at full retail to continue to use it. All this in just a year on the market. Fascinating!

Now to be fair, Corel claims that its sales are significantly larger if you factor in commercial sales, and bundles on new PCs. But since WordPerfect left the Mac market years ago, that matters little in the scheme of things.

As to iWork ‘06, I haven’t had the chance to review it yet, but I’m highly tempted. It appears to have gained far more traction than I expected. Version 2.0 isn’t feature-rich, but here are some interesting additions. There are, for example, more templates, the ability to use calculations with tables, 3D charts, freeform curves, shapes and masks, and a staple of the word processor world, Mail Merge. The latter feature requires Apple’s Address Book to function, by the way.

And there’s one more important feature, one that, until now, required Microsoft Word, and that’s Reviewer Comments. If a document is going through several readers, perhaps fellow writers or editors, the ability to insert comments is significant. It’s not near as fully developed as World’s Track Changes feature. For example, you don’t see revised text sporting colors representing various editors, nor does it give unique identifiers for those making comments, but it’s a start in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the new feature still doesn’t let you properly translate Word documents with Track Changes activated; when I tried, in fact, Pages would crash, so there may be a need for a forthcoming 2.0.1 revision.

Keynote 3 inherits some of the same changes that are part of Pages 2, such as additional themes, the 3D charts, the freeform shapes, tables with calculations and those Reviewer Comments.. Apple also promises “Cinema-quality Presentations,” and without testing the feature, I credit the improved graphics during that keynote as an example of how Keynote empowers your creativity.

Even better, it runs quite fast on both the new iMac and a PowerPC Mac.

So has iWork become a genuine alternative to Microsoft Office for Mac users? In theory, the two applications do their jobs well, and are probably more than adequate for most of you. But it’s not quite the AppleWorks replacement, at least not yet. Illustration features are still lacking and there is that spreadsheet application.

But how far will Apple go to enhance iWork? Now that it has a new five-year agreement from Microsoft to continue developing Office for the Mac, will iWork be promoted more aggressively? Will the spreadsheet and other features that were part of AppleWorks be incorporated in iWork ‘07, and will it continue to gain traction against Office?

To be sure, I’m really tempted to revisit iWork now, and I hope to present a real review in the near future.

Related Articles:

• Was the Steve Jobs Health Admission Too Little Too Late?
• Newsletter #475 Preview: How Apple Might Avoid a 2009 Screwup
• Of Fixing Cars and Fixing Macs
• The Apple CEO Succession Scheme
• Is the Pressure Growing on Apple to Produce Cheap Gear?