My MacBook Pro has arrived. In general, I’m impressed by the smoothness of the transition Apple has made to the new processor architecture. The Rosetta emulator does a good job of running software written for the PowerPC processor, and the new native applications are indeed noticeably faster. The only big snag I’ve hit so far is that Adobe PhotoShop CS won’t run — it launches and then quits. This is a pain, since PhotoShop is a key application for me. A spot of Googling failed to unearth any obvious solution. But then I remembered that I also had an old copy of PhotoShop 7 in my Applications folder, so I launched that and it runs perfectly. And although I’m sure CS is a more sophisticated program than its predecessor, a naive user like me can’t honestly tell the difference.

Update: Lots of helpful suggestions from readers — for which many thanks. One suggested that there was a known issue which could be solved by updating to QuickTime 7.1.1. But I was already running that. Quentin suggested creating a test account and logging in on it to see if CS ran properly in those conditions — in which case the problem would be something connected with my CS plug-ins or preferences. I did this and CS ran perfectly. So then logged in as myself and — guess what? CS runs perfectly! I give up. (But I’m not complaining, either!)