What is a "Universal Application" on a Mac?

While ordinarily I don't think that the chip inside a computer matters to any but the geekiest of computer owners, the announcement by Apple Computer at Macworld San Francisco 2006 is pretty darn profound for everyone in the computer world, even non-Mac fans. For the first time in many years, Apple's Mac OS X operating system is now running native on the same computer chip that can also run Microsoft's Windows operating system.

By switching from its historical Motorola CPU to an Intel base, Apple can leverage a better architecture and create faster and (hopefully) less expensive computers for all of us. But more importantly, we can all benefit by having computers that will be able to run either Windows XP (and, eventually, Windows Vista) and all the wealth of PC applications on the market, or Mac OS X and all the many elegant applications available in the Mac world.

Apple, of course, is stating that it is focused on building Intel-based computers for running the Mac operating system, but there's no question in my mind that being able to pick which OS you want to run when starting up or, even better, being able to run both Mac OS X and Windows XP simultaneously, is going to be a killer combination and we'll have a solution on the market within a few months, if not sooner.

But there's a challenge inherent in switching from one computer architecture to another: most computer programs on the Mac platform are still written specifically for the Motorola architecture, which means that they won't necessarily work on the Intel-based Macs. That's where the Universal comes into play: Universal applications are made to run on both Intel and Motorola (PowerPC) based Mac systems.

The basic idea? It's as if the applications will be written in both English and Spanish, and the system automatically, and silently, choses the most appropriate language so that you never even realize it's happening behind the scenes. In this case we're not talking about human language as much as computer language, of course, but Universal Applications, utilizing a system that Apple calls Rosetta, will run the Motorola PowerPC version of the program on that hardware, and will run the Intel version of the program on the newer computers. Automatically.

You can learn more about this on the Apple site, if you'd like:

  • Apple's Universal Program
  • Apple's Rosetta Technology