Adobe and the Intel Mac

[jhogan]

Hey-This wasn't supposed to happen! Ouch.

[Frank Petronio]

Adobe is also happy to get a little revenge against Apple for releasing Final Cut and Aperture... and more than happy to see some power users switch to Windoze which gives them a new market. They already have the Mac market sewn up and we'll all buy the CS3 upgrade regardless -- it's money in the bank to them -- so no rush.

[CXC]

I'm thinking about buying a current, pre-Intel Powerbook while they are still available, to circumvent issues like this. Yeah, it's old technology, but hey, I'm old too...

[Marko]

Gotta love the spin - everybody's got at least one in this business. And given the fact that Steve and Bruce have had an ongoing love-hate affair for close to 30 years now simply gives the spinmeisters a fresh opportuinity every once in a while.

Now seriously, there were two major changes happening at once: Apple's switch to Intel and Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia. It would only be natural to expect even one of these changes to take time to implement. Looking from purely logistical side, the acquisition has put Adobe in an excellent strategic position, but also in a very tight tactical situation, both time-wise and money-wise.

Here's Bruce Chizen's interview with Forbes.

Even without the Intel angle, it would be logical to expect that the acquisition would slow down the release of CS3. Intel switch only adds another complicaton layer to it, but not too thick one. The way I am reading this interview is: Why throw (already strained) time and money on converting the old (CS2) code to new platform? Wouldn't it be better to use both to develop the brand new version (CS3) right off the bat?

Yes, it would delay the Intel-native code for a few months, but the real powerbase for CS3 - Power Desktop - has not yet been switched, and the CS2 is running under Rosetta anyway. So, it makes much more sense to make the new version apear as soon after the release of the desktop as possible. CS3 release is currently projected for April 07, but I would not be too surprised if it happens a little earlier, since it would be in the best interest of both companies.

Frank: They already have the Mac market sewn up and we'll all buy the CS3 upgrade regardless -- it's money in the bank to them -- so no rush.

Frank, it may be a good wager, but money's not in the bank until the check clears. So, no rush indeed, but the sooner it clears, the better, for any serious company I know, especially the one that is currently cash-short and option-rich.

Regards,

[paulr]

adobe's story ... which i tend to believe ... is that it's just a whole lot of work to port their aps over. aparently apple's developer tools, which are supposed to make the transition easy, don't work as well as adobe would like with gigantic programs. in addition, they say photoshop needs a lot of fine tuning for performance, which all has to be done by hand.

[Michael Chmilar]

Apple has been telling developers for the last five years (since OS X first arrived) that the best way to keep their applications compatible with future hardware and OS changes is to use XCode (Apple's developer tools) and Cocoa (Apple's application framework). Apple has devoted a great deal of effort to these projects to ensure that applications will be very portable.

Adobe has chosen to stick with the Metrowerks tools and Carbon API's. (Carbon is a "legacy" toolkit, designed to ease the transition from OS 9 to OS X. It requires a lot more work to port code to a new processor with Carbon, because it supports a more old-fashioned approach to writing code.) Metrowerks ceased development of their Mac tools some time ago, so there is no version supporting Intel code on OS X.

Adobe has released a number of major updates to Photoshop since OS X debuted, so it is surprising that they did not make much effort to port the project to Cocoa/XCode in that time. Now, they have to scramble to do it all in one shot, rather than gradually.

[neil poulsen]

This whole thing is hilarious! Doesn't sound like Aperture's interface with Photoshop will be all that seamless. :-)

Just a rumor, but I heard someone's already hacked the new Intel Apples to run XP! Has anyone else heard similar stories?

[John Brownlow]

What has this got to do with Aperture's interface with PS? It works fine.

Everything you need to know about XP on Mac:

onmac.net/

[Dan Ingram]

So after all the sturm und drang, the article says Intel OS X users will have to wait until April 2007 to have a version of Photoshop that's fully integrated in the new environment. That's a whole year! Oh, the horror. I guess I'll just chuck my beautiful new MacBook Pro in the trash.

[CXC]

In a similar discussion over at photo.net, the consensus was that the MacBook is so fast that current photoshop will run faster on it, under Rosetta emulation, than natively on a PowerBook. Supposedly the chip is 4 times faster, and the emulation is only 20% slower. Though it is very hard for me to believe that the cost of emulation is so low...

Yes, this is just hearsay.