It’s nearly a year since Apple released their first Intel machines for consumers and over a year since developers were able to get their hairy mitts on Apple-branded hardware with Intel processors.
We’ve been aware of the structure of Universal Binary applications for ages and we’ve accepted that for ease of use, it’s a good move. It was pioneered at NeXT and Apple did it as well for their hybrid 68k/PowerPC binaries back in the Classic days.
This post at nodepoint whines about the increase in disk space use that both universal binaries and localisations cause. A case made is that Firefox went from 12 MB to 18MB when it went Universal. He makes the case that having two binaries available, one for Intel and one for PowerPC would be more suitable.
Bollocks.
In fact, Utter Bollocks.
Another example: Final Cut Pro 5.1
“It’s a Universal binary, which takes up 73.7MB when installed. Removing the excess Intel-based code takes out 16.89MB; and deleting all the non-English language files takes out another 18.01MB, leaving us with a final size of 38.8MB, almost half the size of what we started with.”
The thing is….this is really relevant if you’re stuck using a 10 GB hard disk, then the operating system and components take up a lot of room. But with modern disks, this is a TINY percentage of space. Also…his example of Final Cut Pro is TOTALLY BOGUS because FCP 5.1 requires GIGABYTES of space to install the Libraries required.
Is saving 30 MB worthwhile? Possibly. But if you migrate from a PowerPC machine to an Intel using Migration Assistant then you end up with non-functioning applications.
I’ve talked about universal binaries before and about my excitement that with Leopard we will finally have ONE DISK to install computers whether they are PowerPC or Intel. I’m a fan of Universal Binaries because I deal with Real People. And there’s nothing more annoying than someone who’s used a third party tool to strip out components and help files in order to save a few percentage points of disk space. Just like I rather lose patience with people who use InputManagers, Haxies, APE and all that other crap. I’m not knocking the quality of the code, just the problems they cause.
Nodepoint, an anonymous link blog with a bit of editorial cries out for donations and to be my honest my inclination is to send them absolutely nothing.
[addendum
Final Cut Studio requires 4 GB of space for applications and a further 42 GB for templates, loops, content, and tutorials. Saving 30 MB of space seems a little pointless.]