Thank you sir! May I please have another?!?

If you’re the crafty sort, you can look at this page on the Apple site, and it might just give you hives. Big fat hives right on your face, with hairs growing out of them.

If you’re not the crafty sort, you’ll wonder “why?” The key cause for worry is in this paragraph:

In addition to the POSIX and math libraries supported in Tiger, Leopard enables developers to build complete 64-bit applications using the Cocoa, Quartz, OpenGL, and X11 GUI frameworks.

Guess what’s not mentioned there? Carbon. That’s the library that virtually all developers of audio software on the Apple platform use. You may not be intimately familiar with it, but suffice to say that Live, Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools, and even their own Logic are all written against the Carbon library. No 64-bit Carbon means no 64-bit audio apps, until all those developers port their various products to Apple’s ridiculous Cocoa library and everyone learns Objective C.

Now, it’s not as bad as all that. 32-bit Carbon will certainly be present in Leopard. (If it wasn’t, roughly 95% of the apps written for OSX wouldn’t work with Leopard.) But I wouldn’t hold my breath for the next iteration of OS X having any 32-bit capabilities at all. It’s not something you need to really worry about right this minute, as a user, but I’ll state right here and now that if Carbon ceases to exist at all, it will effectively wipe out indie development for audio on the Macintosh.

So, if you’re thinking of Switching, you might want to think again, and if your PPC Mac is on its last legs, you may seriously want to consider going to PC. The audio industry is starting to get really bored with Apple’s hijinks.