MacBook Pro II

[Von Cameron]

Thanks for the replies guys. One other thing the "Genius" said was that
office would have to be "optimized" for the the MacBook Pro to get the
improved performance with the core duo processors. Otherwise it would not
run any faster/perform better than the the PowerBook. Thoughts?

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Apple and Microsoft collaborated to make sure that Microsoft Office 2004
runs well using Rosetta. So in that regard Office has been optimized for
Rosetta.

Office 2004 was running on MacPro laptops at MacWorld. I tried one
briefly to see whether or not Excel's Analysis Tool Pack add-ins would
load and run. They loaded fine and ran well in my not at all thorough test.

In the few moments I had with the machine MS Office response was
instantaneous. I didn't try PowerPoint with lots of animations and
movies. That would be a good test.

If you are at the Apple store why not bring some MS Office documents in
to test? I think they usually have Microsoft Office loaded on their
demo machines.

-Jim

 

[CyberTaz]

The reference probably meant that the current version of Office (2004)
has to run in the Rosetta emulator, but there is no way to 'optimize'
that version. the next release of Office will employ Universal Binary
and will run native on the IntelMacs rather than through Rosetta.
Whether that makes any noticeable difference in performance (speed)
depends on tthe tasks involved. Most current configurations permit the
cpus to 'wait' for more characters to be typed, but more intense
demands should be handled faster n software that doesn't have to run in
an emulation mode.

Regards |:>)