Is Adobe Software Inferior on the Mac Now?

bitfidelity said:

Well, this is certainly odd. I had always held the belief that the Mac version of Adobe software was superior, based on how practically all designers and other creative professionals would do their work on Apple hardware.

Now I'm reading that Adobe and Apple actually have a rather poor relationship and that most recent versions of their software are simply Windows ports.

Is this true? On machines with similar specs, does the Windows version perform faster and more efficiently?

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Just because companies have bad relations doesn't mean the software is any different.(They have investors to please after all).

In my experience all of creative suite is more stable on a Mac (WITH the exception of CS3 and CS4, those were crappy).

Thats not a slam against Windows, its just that Windows doesn't often handle large data sets well*. If you do a lot of stuff in After Effects for example chances are you'll see a large difference in stability between Mac and Windows versions. For Photoshop, Illustrator, etc I see no major difference but I still prefer Mac since the OS supports my workflow better.

*Windows strength is compatibility, to get this there is some sacrifice in stability. Macs are less compatible with hardware but are more stable, you have to pick what works best for you.

chrono1081 said:

*Windows strength is compatibility, to get this there is some sacrifice in stability. Macs are less compatible with hardware but are more stable, you have to pick what works best for you.

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I haven't seen some of these stability issues under Windows 7. I think we're all just pushing tired cliches. Windows 7 64 bit does fine with large data sets assuming the hardware is appropriate for what you're doing. As an example you'll find a lot of complaints on AMD cards with Autodesk products under Windows with a couple Firepro exceptions. There are many things that Apple just doesn't support. Anyway much of the time it's just an issue of compatibility that has held a lot of people on Macs (myself included). In either case, Adobe products eat whatever ram you throw at them. I will say that while Windows has some irritating behavior too, I've encountered many wacom driver crashes with OSX. Those are always annoying.

Some of the family feud stuff between Apple and Adobe seems fabricated. As an example there wasn't much of a choice for Adobe with CS4. They even explained it in great detail mentioning they were waiting for Xcode to mature as it was still a difficult program for dealing with large software deployment. Adobe reversed their development plans once Apple decided to cancel 64 bit Carbon. This means 32 bit Carbon --> 32 bit Cocoa--->64 bit Cocoa rather than Carbon--> Carbon--->Cocoa. Adobe has different issues, but it's important to recognize that sometimes the reason we don't have a feature or something is lack of support from Apple rather than Adobe. This included a few cursor display issues in CS4 where they couldn't use the old thing.

Also note that it's not just Adobe. Pretty much every developer has stayed with an older OpenGL version. Supposedly the way Apple implemented it meant a resource prohibitive level of code updates. It's not just Adobe here. I can't think of one developer that moved on to the latest thing with Lion.