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Some 2013 MacBook Air Models Exhibit Severe Flickering With Photoshop
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I get flickering with VMware and Windows 7; but there's a workaround. Goto Virtual Machine -> Settings -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Click "General" on the top -> Choose "Always detect mouse for gaming"
Mouse moves a bit slow, but the flickering has stopped. Hopefully VMware sends a patch soon.
Credit: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/448885?start=0&tstart=0
Mouse moves a bit slow, but the flickering has stopped. Hopefully VMware sends a patch soon.
Credit: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/448885?start=0&tstart=0
A few notes:
I was a Art Director for many years (Now I'm a iOS Engineer) We used to run Photoshop all day long on 2ghz Dual Mac Pro G5s with a benchmark of 2k vs the 6.8k of the new Macbook Air. Regardless of what Adobe wants you to believe photoshop has not advanced much from CS2 - CS6. Heck I go one step further.. we used to run Photoshop on a 266mhz Clamshell Tangerine iBook.
I.E. Macbook Airs are more then enough for PS.
Only 500-600 users are you high? There are millions of people using Photoshop and the Apple/Photoshop User ratio is even higher. I would not be surprised if this affected 20 - 30k people.
I have an appointment at the Burlingame Apple Store today - I have Wifi Issues, This screen flicker and my battery only lasts 7 hours.
I was a Art Director for many years (Now I'm a iOS Engineer) We used to run Photoshop all day long on 2ghz Dual Mac Pro G5s with a benchmark of 2k vs the 6.8k of the new Macbook Air. Regardless of what Adobe wants you to believe photoshop has not advanced much from CS2 - CS6. Heck I go one step further.. we used to run Photoshop on a 266mhz Clamshell Tangerine iBook.
I.E. Macbook Airs are more then enough for PS.
Only 500-600 users are you high? There are millions of people using Photoshop and the Apple/Photoshop User ratio is even higher. I would not be surprised if this affected 20 - 30k people.
I have an appointment at the Burlingame Apple Store today - I have Wifi Issues, This screen flicker and my battery only lasts 7 hours.
I've never paid attention to this sort of stuff and have never been jumpy about buying an Apple product. Never, in my over 30 years of using Apple products have I EVER experienced any of the glitches reported by that ethereal "some users" crowd. The instantaneous nature of the Internet these days makes stuff like this look common when it is not.
The nvidia GPU defect in the older MacBook Pro line was considerably common. If not for the Internet and affection given to it, lots of consumers would never know why their machines failed. Like myself. Sadly, mine died a year or two after replacement parts were still available.
Information freedom helps consumers overall. There needs to be higher expectation of reliability in computer tech in general. It's not acceptable the way things are... though the industry has most people thinking things are just fine as is because of indoctrination ("computers are too complex to make them big free"... nonsense).
This might be a OSX 10.8.4 issue.... I noticed this happening on my MacBook pro (hooked up to a cinema display) a few times lately.
There comes a point when its cheaper to replace a number of faulty units than it is to over-engineer and over-design to eliminate all potential problems. Whether Apple are at that point is unknown since neither you nor I have the figures to state whether the current situation is acceptable.
To me that suggests it's a software issue - either driver or the application. From other people's posts, it's looking more and more like an Adobe issue.
I'm not aware of any non-Adobe apps causing this problem?
I don't have an Air but I'm sure the two respective companies will figure this out soon enough. I just wanted to reply to toneLA here.
That's pretty paranoid. What would his motivation be? Hatred for a platform that helps provide his paycheck and is critical for the success of the application and company that he works for?
I think it's simply that the Air's that they have in their offices don't exhibit this behavior. If it's as widespread as you report, then they should be able to reproduce the problem as they expand their testing.
You're uninformed here. It appears Chris isn't just a customer service rep. Instead, he's a senior engineer with a long standing history on the Photoshop team. So much so that he was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame a few years ago by NAPP
http://photoshophalloffame.com/inductees/chris-cox/
Dude has almost 15,000 posts on the Adobe forums and clearly goes out of his way trying to help customers. Cut him some slack! Show me a single apple developer with that much commitment to their community forums! Heck, do Apple employees even post at all on their forums?
That's pretty paranoid. What would his motivation be? Hatred for a platform that helps provide his paycheck and is critical for the success of the application and company that he works for?
I think it's simply that the Air's that they have in their offices don't exhibit this behavior. If it's as widespread as you report, then they should be able to reproduce the problem as they expand their testing.
You're uninformed here. It appears Chris isn't just a customer service rep. Instead, he's a senior engineer with a long standing history on the Photoshop team. So much so that he was inducted into the Photoshop Hall of Fame a few years ago by NAPP
http://photoshophalloffame.com/inductees/chris-cox/
Dude has almost 15,000 posts on the Adobe forums and clearly goes out of his way trying to help customers. Cut him some slack! Show me a single apple developer with that much commitment to their community forums! Heck, do Apple employees even post at all on their forums?
I just fired up Photoshop CS6... same issue... but, even while it's flickering, if you do anything system wide, the flickering stops completely. For example, I was going to quit out of the application and when I held in the command key, it stopped. As soon as I let go of the key it started again. I hit command Q to quit and the save/don't save dialog came up and the flickering stopped. As soon as I hit cancel out of that, the flickering started again.
It's gotta be an Adobe issue here. Either that or the Air has some special driver.
I'd like to see the same thing done on another HD5000 GPU machine. Possible it could just be that?
I have tried different avenues to report the problem:
- Called Apple support, the first guy referred me to Adobe
- Called Adobe support, they referred me to Apple
- Called Apple support again, the 2nd guy went through a few procedures with me and concluded I needed to talk to Apple
- THEN I started using the forums here and at other places
Do you even realise that most of us don't have an Apple store just around the corner?
These discussion forums have helped me and others understanding and communicating the issues. I am not in a capacity to say anything about the root cause of the problem but the dialogue here is interesting with some very interesting points on either side.
Since I am privileged to have a store only 20min from home I went down that path as well (apparently Apple is aware of the problem and working on a fix). I also posted this in forums in the hope it would help others.
So, before you have a go at me consider that I might have tried a few things before coming here. And I will stay here, post and learn for as long as I like. Welcome to the internet.
And one more observation for the record, If I use a screen video capture program such as "Jing" the flickering stops completely.
What annoyed me the most about the whole nVidia fiasco was the fact that consumers were given a replacement motherboard with a GPU that had the same design flaw resulting in a failure in a few months thus necessitating another replacement. What should have happened was Apple demand that nVidia absorb the whole cost of a replacement GPU without the design flaw at nVidia's expense. Btw, want to know this happened? it happened when they moved to a lead free solder - yes, the minuscule amount of lead used in the GPU has resulted in millions of devices (it affected non-Apple laptops too) that prematurely died resulting even more e-waste. Thanks a lot environmentalists for making a minuscule problem into a giant one.
I assume that is sarcasm because almost every first run has issues; the Lenovo Carbon X1 had a dodgy touchpad and firmware updates were fast and frequently released. That doesn't include the default installation of Windows that is so butchered which results in Windows Updates failing to install due to modifications made by Lenovo to 'boost teh speed'.
The fact that it is only occurring with Photoshop leads me to the conclusion that the discussion will be something like this: Adobe mentions that it uses some ancient API that is older than time itself and Apple suggests that they should move their code to this new API that doesn't suffer from the same problems. Adobe refuses because it would require them to spend money on their code base rather than on marketing meaning that poor old Shantanu Narayen won't be able to purchase the final ivory backscratcher to finish his collection.
So true! Early adopters are always the ones getting burnt by issues like these. Fortunately Apple seem to be pretty good about sorting out issues with components or their production line. I always give it a couple of months for them to sort stuff out before buying any new Apple model.
It's pretty funny that anyone is even using an Air for Photo$hop though!
Bloody flickering is back on Photoshop CC despite the update. Now CS5 seems to be working OK. Strange erratic behaviour...
Your ignorance is even funnier.
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You should be amazed by yourself on a frequent basis then.
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Your ignorance is even funnier.
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You should be amazed by yourself on a frequent basis then.
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It's my MacBook Air and youtube video featured in the news post. Hello!
I received my replacement from Apple today (took a while because it was a BTO) and I can't replicate the issue anymore, indicating that it's an issue with only some machines.
Also, for what it's worth (and I really don't want to reignite this debate), the defective model had an LG screen and the new one has a Samsung. It might well be nothing to do with that however!
I received my replacement from Apple today (took a while because it was a BTO) and I can't replicate the issue anymore, indicating that it's an issue with only some machines.
Also, for what it's worth (and I really don't want to reignite this debate), the defective model had an LG screen and the new one has a Samsung. It might well be nothing to do with that however!
You could take that as a compliment to the Air. It's your comment that infers that people expect it to perform like a netbook, and at $300.
People are not sad just cause hardware is improving at a faster rate. There was a time when people bought a new desktop which would struggle to run photoshop. Having experienced that, it's quite amazing where we are now days.
Hi,
I should receive my MBA 2013 on friday
Did someone tried to go into Photoshop Preferences > Performance then tried to change "Advanced Graphics Processor Settings" to see if it helps ?
There used to be an issue with Windows 8 and AMD GPUs (see here) and a workaround involving these preferences.
So it IS possible that Photoshop has problems due to bad GPU drivers and Chris Cox seems not to admit this
I should receive my MBA 2013 on friday
Did someone tried to go into Photoshop Preferences > Performance then tried to change "Advanced Graphics Processor Settings" to see if it helps ?
There used to be an issue with Windows 8 and AMD GPUs (see here) and a workaround involving these preferences.
So it IS possible that Photoshop has problems due to bad GPU drivers and Chris Cox seems not to admit this
Yeah, I think you and 8 other people are the only ones. Photoshop has been out in one form or another for over a decade and CPUs and graphics chips have made MASSIVE leaps over that time. I'm more amazed at how bloated Photoshop (and other long running apps) has become despite improvements that are hardly noticeable to more casual users.
Personally, I think Apple should be concentrating a LOT harder on quality controls. They demand a HUGE price premium over equivalent Windows hardware and they should have some kind of perceptible benefit over Windows machines for that price (other than just running OSX). Top quality goes a long way to justify heftier prices while frequent defects just makes it look like overpriced garbage.
This flickering happened to me
This flickering is is most likely a driver issue with the Intel/apple display driver.
If you change a setting in Photoshop to use basic drawing mode that should help with this. Though this does not happen I my Mac, mine has Nvidia graphics.
This same issue was happening to three of our Windows 8 machines. All with Intel graphics. I changed the drawing mode on them and the problem went away. I then updated each machine with the latest Intel Driver and put the setting back and the issue is gone completely.
This flickering is is most likely a driver issue with the Intel/apple display driver.
If you change a setting in Photoshop to use basic drawing mode that should help with this. Though this does not happen I my Mac, mine has Nvidia graphics.
This same issue was happening to three of our Windows 8 machines. All with Intel graphics. I changed the drawing mode on them and the problem went away. I then updated each machine with the latest Intel Driver and put the setting back and the issue is gone completely.
Yes, that IS a problem, and yes... That's why they sell Macbook Pros. It's like buying a Chromebook and scream that it doesn't run Office!! (I know the Macbook Air is nothing like a Chromebook, but it's not build for high end tasks either. They sell it as a Student laptop so Graphics and Video Editing is not included in the expectations of that Macbook.)
Good that Apple will work on an update, but please don't try to run Lucas Films on a Mac Mini!!!
Good that Apple will work on an update, but please don't try to run Lucas Films on a Mac Mini!!!