Adobe Universal Support FAQ

[nagromme]

1) Performance boost for new machines is minimal or non-existant for PPC native apps.
2) Some software and drivers won't even run on new hardware.
3) OS X is gen 1 for native version. Bugs are bound to have crept into OS X for the first release on Intel.
4) Native software is gen. 1 on Intel version of software. Again bugs are more probable.
5) Hardware is gen 1. Possible issues there.
6) No legacy OS 9 support.
7) Pro software requires purchase / upgrade to native intel version which means immediate investment in software.

These issues will all be resolved in a year or less. They are not show stoppers but after going through the transition period I went through for OS 9 to OS X, I am more than happy to wait this transition out on the sidelines.

That's a good list for people to keep in mind. This is a big transition, and Apple may be good at pulling those off, but that can't make it totally painless. Waiting is smart for many people.

But I do think that a great many other people, coming from G4s like me, will STILL have very good reasons to buy an Intel Mac sooner rather than later.

Also, it's easy for us Photoshop people to think that "pro user" means "Photoshop user." But there are a lot more pro fields than just photo manipulation (or vector art and Flash for that matter). Not everyone is as tied to Adobe's schedule as we are.

 

[direzz]

MacBook "Pro"...well maybe not.

Seriously this is making a g4 powerbook seem more tempting now.

i was just thinking that

isight built in and apple remote with front row are hardly pro features.
i use photoshop. alot.
i should just buy a powerbook g4 and wait a few years when the mac book pro really is pro.

 

[gugy]

Let's put this way.
buy the latest Powermac quads now and wait for PM Intel Rev.B.
That seems to be the safest route for professionals.
Hopefully by then Adobe will have most of it's application Intel native. I discussed with many people in this forum back in October when the Quad PM was introduced. That seemed to be the best action for many folks who needed a fast machine. Now we are seeing all the problems we can expect from a transition.
I am pretty sure my PM quad will have a good value for the next 2 years until the transition settles.

 

[MG79]

not to mention the fact that quark sucks

I'm telling this everyday since 1995

 

[w_parietti22]

*bombs Adobe building right by my house*

 

[gugy]

Steve must be infuriate with Adobe tonight. This is extremely bad news for new Intel Mac sales.

 

[Bear]

Ya know something...

This is one of the reasons I had no problem with buying a Quad G5 with knowing about the Intel transition.

I'm also glad I never bothered getting the CS2 upgrade for photoshop. From what I'm told, since I have CS, I probably won't miss any of the added features.

And truthfully, if CS3 doesn't add anything I need, I might wait until CS4 to upgrade. Or until I need to get an Intel based Mac.

 

[Dave the Great]

After Effects 7 just came out a few weeks ago, and it isn't Universal. I guess that means it will be awhile .

That is craptastic. Having to wait possibly up to two years before a universal version is released is absolutely ridiculous. I can't imagine Adobe would wait that long. Is there a petition to be signed or is anybody calling Adobe to show their disapproval?

 

[dantec]

BOTTOM LINE:

Adobe should done there homework and rewritten their apps in COCOA a LONG TIME AGO !!

Instead they decided to trail on, with the pre-OS 9 apple approach, that if its not broke don't fix it... instead lets just keep piling code on this old architecture and hope for the best...

Now with the switch to intel, they have been screwed over, because it is my understanding that XCode only allows you to make universal apps of Cocoa apps which Adobe's suit is not.

moral of the story: ADOBE SHOULD HAVE DONE THEIR HOMEWORK LONG AGO!

 

[gugy]

I wonder if this is a huge battle of egos.
Adobe is pissed at Apple because Aperture and Steve joking about Photoshop at MWSF.
Apple is pissed at Adobe because AE 7 is not universal and Lightroom is here and so on.

The bottom line: most of the creative professionals use Apple and Adobe at the same time. This is a bad business decision to keep Apple consumers without their beloved Adobe apps for that long.
I am pretty sure Apple and Adobe will patch things up and Adobe will release universal apps sooner than later.
Neither Apple or Adobe can live without each other.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Newsflash: Most graphics people are so cheap, they are still running blue and white G3's under system 9 and photoshop 5. This is true, I see it all the time. Very few people stay on the cutting edge in graphics, they are just too cheap. Plus most people I know that are not way behind, are sticking with CS1 anyway because CS2 is so dog slow at everything. I suspect that CS1 via rosetta will be just as fast as CS3 native on an x86 ANYWAY. Now is a prime time for another company to swoop in with a 'photoshop killer' and really hurt adobe. I hope this happens but somehow, I doubt it will. Maybe I should make a donation to GIMP.

It's not being "cheap" it's being cost effective. Why drop down a few grand for a new machine and new software if they old machine and old software still meet your needs? Or why possibly introduce new bugs/hiccups into your workflow if your workflow still meets your needs?

I see a number of of MDD drive Macs at editing facilities running Avid software in OS 9 and up until a few years ago many of the editing facilities I went to had at least one ancient Power Macintosh 9600/XXX (circa 1997) still running day in and day out.

Slow and steady is a lot better than fast and buggy.


Lethal

 

[SiliconAddict]

Since Ars testing revealed that the intel imac is generally about half as fast as the imac g5 running photoshop cs in emulation:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/imac-coreduo.ars/6

this means that the macbook pros will run even slower so mobile pro users will be stuck with very slow photoshop performance on the road. Hopefully Apple will fine tune the OS to make better use of both cores and improve the Rosetta software so we can get performance up to 70-80% of PPC native.

And hopefully the Lightroom UB beta will fill a big camera raw processing void on the new macbook pros until Adobe releases CS3 next year. Also Aperture better run very fast on the macbook pro when it is converted to UB or pro photographers may be forced to switch to PC laptops.

I think you are going to be WAY off assuming the top of the line MacBook will be slower then the bottom of the line iMac.
-Both are using the same CPU.
-Both are running the same FSB.
-Both are running DDR2 RAM at 667Mhz.
-Both AFAIK are running the same chipset even.
-Both have SATA drives. No doubt though that desktop's 3.5" 7200 will be faster then the MacBook's 7200 but I'm betting its not going to be a huge difference.
-The biggest factor is the GPU. One is a mobile GPU the other is a desktop GPU but both are running the same amount of VRAM. But that should make virtually no difference when it comes to Rosetta.

My biggest question is this: Has anyone done any benchmarks with Rosetta and Photoshop with a iMac 1.83Ghz with maxed out RAM of 2GB? It has been speculated by numerous people that Rosetta is a hungry motha and that anything below 1GB is going to impact performance. The system ARS is using has 512MB of RAM which is bare minimum for OS X to begin with. I’m not doubting that software run under Rosetta is going to run slower then native G5 software. Anyone who thinks that is an idiot. I however AM thinking that the speed difference between software running in Rosetta and native G4 PowerBook software is going to be close.

 

[MG79]

Remeber the first IBM reaction to Apple transition annuncement? they didn't known anything!
I assume that Apple didn't told to the software developpers what they were planning!
So Adobe developped Aftereffects for G5
Developping software is a lot expensive even for big Softwarehouse, that plans developping time and cost with precision.

Intel users can't accuse Adobe.

 

[ChrisA]

I'd love for there to be some competition on the Mac platform for graphics editing. I've always hated Photoshop, I've never liked how it works ever and have always been a devout Paint Shop Pro fan on the PC. One big niggler in switching *everything* to Mac is the lack of Paint Shop Pro. If they could get a Universal Binary port out in the next few months they'd make a killing imo. Its just as powerful and way cheaper.

I'm guessing that won't happen so hopefully it'll run decently through Darwine in a few months anyway.

Is there a reason you don't use Gimp? (www.gimp.org) Some PS users don't like it because it not exactly like PS but if you are a paintshop fan you might prefergimp to photoshop. Gimp's free so the price is right

As for being "just as powerful, no there are some things Photoshop does the others don't. like pre-press color seporations and 16-bit color and Photoshops' RAW conversion is about as good as it gets.

The advantage is Gimp is that it's Open Sourse. If you don't like something about it you can change it, no waiting for ther next release. OK maybe the average user llacks the skills to change it but enough can an so development happens at "Internet speed".

 

[SiliconAddict]

signed or is anybody calling Adobe to show their disapproval?

Yah they will probably direct you to the janitorial service for all they give a crap.

 

[puuukeey]

not to mention your plugins. KPT is probably doomed. and good luck getting Digital Performer or Protools happening on a mactel within 2 years.

apples response? "who cares about our developers... just buy our software!"

Heres to iTunes addons from the rest of developers for the forseeable future.

 

[puuukeey]

ps. the good news is someone might be able to eat into the giant's monopoly

 

[lazyrighteye]

That Said...

MacPhoto Pro™.
$499

Tee hee.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Frankly, I've never read so much pointless and unrealistic whining in a thread.

This timescale is reasonable. Those who use the Adobe CS — day in, day out — for their jobs will not be put out by this at all.

The number of graphics pros who rely on laptops for their work are in a small minority.

And for those of you who wonder why Photoshop is the industry standard yet have it running on your machines, I suggest that you don't know what the hell you're doing with it.

 

[Bern]

ps. the good news is someone might be able to eat into the giant's monopoly

Now that I would like to see. I'm tired of Adobe's grip on the Mac community.

 

[suzerain]

But nor is a PowerBook G4 any speed demon compared to an iMac G5.



UNLESS your current machine runs slower than Rosetta. Which is true for VERY many people--including mobile professionals. Rosetta on Core Duo actually DOES look like it will be mostly a step up from a year-or-2-old PowerBook G4. So MANY people will see an immediate speed benefit from buying a MacBook Pro NOW to run Photoshop.

Sorry to be blunt, but I call ********. Some people, sure...but I doubt your claim of it being faster than a one year-old PowerBook.

Not sure where you're getting your information from (and I'm not saying mine is any better), but the benchmarks I read of Photoshop under Rosetta said that "it is roughly the same speed as a 1 Ghz G4". And this was on the iMac.

Presumably, the MacBook Pro will not perform as well as the iMac, despite the fact that it features the same chip.

1 Ghz G4 were de rigeur quite a while ago...certainly more than a year, and maybe more than two.

I have a one year-old 12" (1.5 Ghz), and for me losing 33% of my speed is a pretty damned big deal, despite the fact that the Intel native apps ought to be much faster. I think your picture is perhaps overly rosy (though I don't think the world is going to end or anything either).

Also, anecdotally, some friends I have who are developing Intel-native OS X software say that Rosetta performance is not as good on the iMac as it is on the recent PowerBooks.

So, I would like to know why you are assuming Rosetta on the MacBook is going to outperform the current G4s? Do you have a reason to believe this other than optimism?

I just wanted to edit my post to say that this is really frustrating for me in particular, because I would really, really like to have more speed, but desktops are useless to me. I hate being tethered to a location. It's kind of a catch-22 for us pro laptop people.

Oh well...c'est la vie.

 

[macnews]

Frankly, I've never read so much pointless and unrealistic whining in a thread.

This timescale is reasonable. Those who use the Adobe CS — day in, day out — for their jobs will not be put out by this at all.

The number of graphics pros who rely on laptops for their work are in a small minority.

And for those of you who wonder why Photoshop is the industry standard yet have it running on your machines, I suggest that you don't know what the hell you're doing with it.

THANK GOD! Some one with a real sense after 5 pages of pointless dribble! Adobe has been good about their 18/24 month upgrade cycle. CS2 intro'd in April 2005. Thus, an October 2006 - April 2007 is normal and not unreasonable given we might have Intel desktops by October most likely at the earliest. If you want to use CS2 on your laptop than you shouldn't complain as you really can not expect ANY laptop (windows or mac) to be a true graphic design machine.

 

[petej]

Why so much negativity to Adobe?
I have to add my voice to the minority who are welcoming this announcment from Adobe.
Firstly it is now very clear that Adobe have no intention of leaving the Mac market. This is clearly good news for a lot of people who have a lot of cash invested in Apple/Adobe environments.
Personally, I think that the timelines outlined by Adobe are perfectly reasonable for applications of the size they produce. The costs of porting/testing the Universal applications for Adobe will be huge. Especially considering the age of some of the products. Combine that with the fact that these are already cross platform applications, Adobe now are being forced to add a 3rd platform to the test plan (Windows, ApplePPC, AppleIntel).
Make no mistake, Apple have really dumped from a big height on software vendors. Assuming that Adobe and others were told a few weeks prior to WWDC then no one could expect them to turn around new Universal Versions in 6 months especially when they were told to expect about 12 months. Apple themselves clearly never expected Software vendors to keep up and hence the reason they invested so much cash in Rosetta.

So for now can we just let the public beta trial of the new intel Macs progress without whinging quite so much. Let those that want to participate in this trial do so at their own risk, the rest of us will wait until the platform/software is stable. The future looks really good.

 

[cwedl]

A Perfect opportunity for apple to release and perfect a creative suite killer, come on what are adobe thinking off! I assume that goes with dreamweaver etc (Studio 8).

 

[bugfaceuk]

Seriously, I am shocked that this surprises anyone. Why did everyone expect Adobe to be intel native prior to CS3?

This will be a poor sales year for Apple. Not last year. Last year was a good year for Apple because people wanted to upgrade once before the transition.

Now it makes no sense to buy. The new machines are gen. 1. Most software isn't available yet and the OS is gen. 1. But the old G4 and G5's have not dropped in price soooo... even they are not a good buy right now.

Hopefully by MacWorld SF 2007 all will be right with the world. Bugs will be worked out of gen 1 hardware and OS. Most all software will be native.

Have to agree, why the hell would adobe release before CS3? The biggest shock for me, is other people's shock!