Why I Won't be Buying an Intel Mac Soon

Well, I had a dickens of a time making either KisMac or MacStumbler work on an Intel Powerbook 17" using the integrated WLAN adapter, which, by the way, I'm not sure whether it is an Airport or an Airport Extreme. However, IStumbler worked great for basic WiFi discovery; I didn't try the Bluetooth discovery.

That's not the only reason, however. Most of the cool apps that I know and love (NMap among them) are either a big pain to get running, or run slowly. The ones that run slowly, however, seem to run stably, and the slowness more tolerable once you convince yourself that its only temporary and that the developers of your app will make a free upgrade for Intel users. However, rumor has it that some developers are planning Intel support as a paid upgrade - that's right, some apps (like MS's Office suite) are going to charge for the upgraded version of their app, and the rumor didn't make it sound like it was going to have any new features or interface changes, it'll just be faster.

I'm willing to bet that the development of many current freeware and open sourc Mac apps will end as some developers may turn their attention elsewhere.

RosettaTest
RosettaTest is a nifty app that resembles the "Force Quit Applications" applet in OS X, but it has a little red "R" on the corner af applications that are running under Rosetta, thus diagnosing the likely cause of the sluggishness of your application.

AbiWord
AbiWord is a nifty word processing app not too dissimilar from OpenOffice.org, but not requiring of X11 and only being a word processor, nothing more, nothing less. Abiword ran very well under Rosetta.

OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice
OpenOffice.org 2.0.x is nearing completion for Intel processors, and can be downloaded using the Intel and PPC based non-qa'ed Community Builds link. Remember, it requires X11, which can be installed using your OS X Tiger CD.

NeoOffice reportedly won't run on the Intel Mac, so I haven't even tried it. That being said, I've used it on a PPC, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.