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Adobe Says PCs Are Preferred
Father Of Free Choice writes "Abobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform for running Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator. I don't know how many Mac people this will upset, but given the large hold Apple has on design pros and film, this seems like a bad move on Adobe's part."
It's not like Adobe hadn't hinted at that. How long did it take them to get a decent OS X version of their software out?
Adobe wants to embrace commodity (PC) hardware-- think about it-- which makes more sense? a user base of 500 mac users or 5000 PC users?
Letting customers spend less money on hardware means there is more money leftover for buying pricey Adobe software. Moreover, Adobe may soon abandon one of its development team to shave costs-- guess which one won't survive: the one not making that much money.
davejenkins.com |
At the end of the day it's the users who are going to decide what the 'preferred platform' is, and I know that a large proportion of graphic/web designers who could not be separated from their G4s without a crowbar and tub of Vaseline. Whatever Adobe say.
However, does this mean Adobe are going to start favouring Windows in terms of releases and support? I suppose that could make more of a dent . . .
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
They could always go AMD ;)
Despite what the HTML file is named, the page itself is not a claim from Adobe that users should be running PCs instead of Macs. The page merely highlights a benchmarking test that was found on another website, digitalvideoediting.com. This test compared rendering performance between P4s and dual-G4s on apps from Adobe commonly used by those of us who do digital video editing and post-production work.
I love "metric time" as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't trust any review that equates 47 seconds with 0.47 minutes [from the review].
Mark
Please stop pissing us off. You've created products to compete with us in photo management. You've added nonlicensed PDF capabilities to your new OS (which we had to update for OS X!) and you've utterly stolen the video editing market from us - which was quite profitable, despite the absolutely abysmal Premiere.
We will continue to promote PCs as the better machine on our website, despite the fact that we ship for both platforms, because you've stepped on our toes. We recommend you go back to making machines and stop with the polished, useful, FREE software.
Thanks,
Adobe
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It's possible to slant the results either way you want with a careful selection of filters. His credibility is pretty much shot by the long tirade about how great the Dell is, and this quote: "Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support."
This has nothing to to with the tests he's running! It's also very possible that what he was doing wasn't taking advantage of both processors in the Mac. Given the sketchy information on the actual testing, we don't know.
Granted, both camps do this kind of stuff - it proves nothing.
This is a sad day for Mac users, but this is nothing more than business reality.
Adobe gets most of their money from the PC market, and the truth is that regardless of all the hype Steve Jobs has made recently regarding the Mac G4's, almost all benchmarks comparing a top of the line G4 to a top of the line PC simply give the PC a winning mark by a landslide in graphics and video tests.
Now let's not get into a flame war over this, I love Macs too, but hey, if I have to render a large project, and it takes half the time to do so on a PC, then I will use a PC even if its user interface is not as nice as the Mac.
This is why for some time now I've been advocating that Mac OS/X be ported to the x86 architecture. It's the only way Mac OS/X will be able to run on equal footing to Windows. Let's face it, Apple being the only major consumer of Power PC chips for consumer (I know, IBM uses them on large servers too) is not a good incentive to innovate, while on the PC market AMD, Intel, and Transmeta are always killing each other to come up with the fastest and "bestest" processor, and at the cheapest possible price.
Macs either move to the x86 architecture or they are dead. And *please*, I know many fanatics will argue that "what makes Macs great is the amazing integration between hardware and software, something which cannot be acchieved or guaranteed in a commodity-based PC market", however not only is this not true (Apple for example could publish open APIs to have hardware vendors support in order to support all needed integration, and it could also build Mac PCs itself if it chooses to), but simply getting stuck with the past. Yes, it'd be great to control the hardware and the software, but right now business reality is telling Apple that this is not the time to do so.
So, let's get on with it: I know this is a blow to Apple, and I know many Mac users will cry foul to Adobe, but I also think this is a necessary blow to Apple (and mostly, Steve Jobs) to let them know that things are simply moving really fast in the PC world in comparisson to Apple.
Heck, you can already buy WiFi "g" for PCs much cheaper than on the Mac already, plus all PCs nowdays come with USB 2.0, and FireWire is almost standard or really cheap to add (20 to 40 bucks or so). About the *only* things Apple has going for itself right now is (1) FireWire 800 (and I bet you'll eventually find it cheaper on PCs), (2) the iApps, which are very easy to use, but I bet Microsoft or someone else will copy them soon enough, (3) the iPod (competitors are getting close also on copying it and improving it as well), and (4) Mac OS/X, which is a nice piece of work.
So Steve: Port Mac OS/X to x86 *soon* before you let Apple die in obsolescence. It's just you versus *thousands* of companies making products for the PC commodity market, a market which due to competition is making products better and cheaper all the time. The choice is clear, evolve or die.
Look at the graph showing the comparison between 56 seconds and 1 minute 25 seconds. It is showing seconds like there are 100 in a minute. If this was built by someone at my company and was getting this much pub, I'd berate their ass.
.1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1.0 1.1 1.2
.1 .2 .3 .4 .5 1.0 1.1 1.2
Their scale:
123456789123457 Mac
12345678912345678912345678912345678912 PC
How it should be:
123456789123456 Mac
12345678912345678912345678 PC
Morons.
BTW I hate these slashdot filters isn't that what the moderators are for?
Ok, so the Slashdot take is a bit sensational, and not fact-heavy, but Adobe does have a rather strong hold on the Mac-using image and publishing market. It seems to me that there's only a few things that have to happen for The Gimp to all but replace Photoshop for this purpose. All it really needs is some company to come along and give it a) plugins for dealing with patented color-management for ready-for-print applications (no problem as plugins with licensing, as long as you pay Adobe and the few other companies a royalty) and b) a Mac-native UI that fixes some of the basic brokenness of The Gimp's poor UI choices (e.g. the nearly un-navigatable menus).
Both of these tasks are many orders of magnitude smaller than rolling your own Photoshop replacement, and The Gimp has a far more flexible plugin architecture and tons of people who are happy to write plugins in C, scheme, Perl, Python and other languages!
Anyone have the money to kick something like this off? Consider this you Make Money Fast wakeup call!
And, if you need more of a push... there's CinePaint (ne "Film Gimp"), which you could integrate into your product and add a whole other market.
perhaps this move by Adobe will prompt Apple to create imaging software to compete with Adobe based on open source like GIMP?
Nothing against GIMP, but it would be a bad move on Apple's part if they did. Apple should be doing their damnedest to get application vendors to provide ported software to the Apple platform, not trying to reinvent every piece of software as an Apple product.
When Adobe has the same application that will run on both PC and Mac with 100% file compatibility, it creates an environment where you can choose the best platform for a given user, without having to sacrifice application interoperability with other users. If Apple were to say, "screw Adobe, here's iSomething" it will force graphics shops to have to choose between PC+Adobe and Mac+iSomething. All this will do is take marketshare away from Apple.
I think that Safari and Keynote (and the iOffice/iWork/iWhatever suite that is likely to follow) are simply a response to the dead-end relationship that Apple is in with one vendor - Microsoft. I don't see the practice of duplicating every major application as a trend for Apple in the long term. At least I hope it's not.
I've been using Photoshop for . . .um . . . about eight years now. Initially, all I used it on was a Mac, because quite frankly, Photoshop for Windows in 1995 was a gross, nasty piece of software.
.things I'm not even sure I can call to mind - the way menus lay out, the lack of some standardized interface items (like a save button) . . .have always left me feeling like the PC version of Photoshop and other Adobe apps are kind of afterthoughts - that Adobe must view the Mac version as the REAL version, and the Windows version as the weaker sister.
For reasons mostly related to my profession (Landscape Architect, at the time), I switched to a PC, and began the task of using Photoshop in a Windows environment. At the time, version 3.0 or so was getting better, but still pretty nasty. Now we're up to 7.0, and it is a remarkably better piece of software. I love it. I now do 3D work and image editing, and Photoshop work probably comprises 25% of my time. I'm extremely happy with it, as I am with the copies of Premiere, Pagemaker, and Illustrator that I use in the course of my work, as well.
That being said, I have never been able to escape the notion that it has seemed that Adobe has never quite gotten the knack of porting the software over to the PC. Granted, it runs like a champ, but just little things . .
I fight this battle with my cluster of close friends, most of whom are designer types, about once every three months. I think I've finally got them convinced that you CAN run Photoshop and Illustrator on a PC. For years, they assumed that you couldn't. But that opens up a whole different can of worms that I'm not even going go get into. Use what you want.
So, I'd say this is a surprising development, given my experience with Adobe software over the years.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
ummmm that is taken out of context. If you read the page that links from it asks the question: Do you Prefer the PC for DV. It is not saying they prefer it.
they move now when UNIX (include MacOS X) is gaining ground
It seems stupid to me for them to make such a proclamation which will only serve to inflame loyal Mac based customers of many years.
It's the same sort of backward move as when they decided to indefinitely discontinue the Linux FrameMaker beta program. [They still support it for the Mac - for now.]
At MyCorp the UNIX desktop has moved from Sun to Linux, largely because of the cheaper x86 hardware. Needless to say, FrameMaker users emigrating from Sun are quickly getting an extra reason to be weaned off of Adobe's product because the way they can run it on their Linux box is over the network (mmm, latency) via X from a Sun.
The net outcome will be that more people will use the ubiquitous MS Word, and maybe StarOffice/OpenOffice on Linux, but we'll clearly be buying less Adobe products in the future.
It's got to be strange being an Adobe executive, watching MS eating chunks of your bread and butter business, but having to be nice to them so that you don't get on their shit list when it comes time to get a reasonable head start developing your product for the next version of Windows.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
As a professional graphic artist who uses Adobe products on both platforms, I'm not quite sure I agree with the findings of the author. I always find benchmark results from either side to be suspect. I judge by user experience. I find that my results are better, and much easier to achieve, on either of my Macs. I have grown to accept Windows as a sometimes necessary evil, and am quite functional with it. However, and maybe some of you out there have noticed this, tools in Photoshop seem to work much more reliably on the Mac. For instance... color correction, minor adjustments to position, hotkeys, and anything done freehand seem to work less consistently in the Windows version. Strange stuttering, having to hit hotkeys twice, taking forever to place items exactly where you want them... these add up in a business where you are constantly playing beat the clock. Now, before you all start flaming me about being a newbie, or checking my manuals, getting a new keyboard... I have been using Photoshop since the beta for version 2, and Premeire since the very first betas. I've been making a living with CGI for over 12 years. Again, this is my experience with these products, YMMV. I suggest that Adobe is promoting stories like this to teach Apple a lesson. Apple has really put the hurt on Adobe with Final Cut Pro, and with their purchase of several other effects software companies, will soon start to hurt sales of After Effects. This is not to say that Adobe's products are inferior... I think they got lazy with their stranglehold on the market, and don't appreciate Apple filling the gap. What they should be doing is making better products for Mac users. We are largely responsible for supporting them up to this point, and would continue to do so if they kept up the good work. Taking so long to get Photoshop for OSX out did not make them any friends, and suggesting that they were going to stop releasing Premeire for the Mac didn't help either. Ask any of the "Mac Faithful"... Adobe runs a close second as a company that we would break a bottle on the edge of the bar and cut you for badmouthing. Bottom line: their Mac products are slipping, but in general still (IMHO) get the job done better. Let the flames begin...
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
That said Quark's inability to move Xpress to OS X in a timely manner has given Adobe a market in the DTP arena with In Design.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
I guess those Adobe folks are on crack... have you seen PS run on a Mac vs Windows??? It is SO much faster doing nearly all filters. The 3rd party ones even show considerable differences. - RR
In fact, I have. In addition to systems administration, I've also worked as a professional graphic designer (and sometimes still do for side cash). And pound-for-pound, the newest versions of Photoshop run better and faster on Windows than on Macintosh.
The reason PhotoShop was much faster on Classic (Mac OS 9.x and earlier) for many fucntions was due to the way mutlitasking and memory management were handled.
Multitasking was "competitive" multitasking, meaning that the process in focus could, in theory, steal as many CPU quantums as it wanted and ignore interrupts from other programs. To demonstrate this, start a large network download or upload in an application (Netscape, Finder, and Fetch all work). Now load a large image in PhotoShop, and resize the editting window so horizontal and/or vertical scroll bars appear. Now scroll and hold the mouse button down for about 90 seconds. Go back to the application that was responsible for the download. Notice that it has timed out because it stopped receiving data. The application and its IO interrupts were ignored while you held the mouse button down to scroll. Obviously this is more advantageous when running one process "that matters", such as a filter benchmark.
The memory management on Classic is also pretty simple. First, there is no protected memory in Classic. An application has a preset "Preferred" and "Minumum" amount of memory setting attached to its binary. At runtime, Classic attempts to find as close to the preferred memory setting as possible, down to the minimum amount. It allocates all of that memory at run time, or fails to launch if the minumum memory setting is unavailable at that time. Throughout runtime, memory management really only consists of using that memory and possibly swapping some of it out. This vastly reduces memory management overhead.
With OS X, these advantages are erased. The processing capabilities of the system (especially AltiVec) still help vastly with some filters. However, handling other processes, context switching, memory allocation and of course the more complicated Quartz graphics engine offset the advantages. You can run filters faster in the background, the application and OS is vastly more stable, but you cannot run them them as fast as when they are in the foreground in Classic.
People who use Macs don't use them because they're faster.
Adobe has for a long time now achieved feature and interface parity between their Windows and Mac products. That's no mean task, and they should be applauded for it. But it seems a little short sighted of them to name Windows the "preferred" platform just because it's faster. Photoshop may be the same on Windows and OS X, but Windows and OS X are very different. And no matter how graphically productive you are, you are still going to end up spending a large amount of time outside of Photoshop's isolated interface.
If speed were really the end-all and be-all of graphic design (or computing in general) Apple would have died a long time ago and PC users would still be using DOS.
--
This "pcpreferred" page is part of the "DV" or "motion" section of the Adobe web site and I think that context is important. In the video space Adobe is having a real tough time competing against Apple's Final Cut Pro. Most Mac based video editing is now done on FCPro and Adobe's Premiere is losing market share. However, in the x86 arena Adobe doesn't have that competition. So it is in their commercial interest to try and move video professionals over to x86 because that is their only guarantee that Premiere get sold. I personally believe that x86 currently has the raw performance edge over PPC but that is not the only basis on which professionals make their choice. Final Cut Pro is not only a superior product than Premiere ii is also far better optimised to make use the dual-processors of the Mac platform. I think Adobe is just miffed and want to lure video professionals away from FCPro and the only way they think they can do that is by diverting the attention away from their relatively weak Premiere by emphasising the speed of x86 and some other Adobe products. Basically they are admitting that Premiere isn't cutting it against Final Cut Pro!
First off, the slashdot article is misleading. The link is for a page on adobe's site about a study done by somebody else on which is faster PC or mac and what somebody else recommends, it's not about which adobe recommends. I mean if Adobe had a note next to Photoshop's minimum requirements saying that PCs are recommended this might be interesting but simply putting up a summary about an article which talks about which is faster is really a much more ambiguous move. We cannot draw from it, for instance, the conclusion that Adobe is gearing up to drop the mac. Nor can we gather that Adobe is no longer investing as many resources in the Mac version. If anything, the only thing we can draw from it is that Adobe is aware that the latest G4 macs are not as fast as their PC counterparts, which I would assume they would know about anyway.
:-)...
Here's the parent link on adobe's site.
Quote::
Is it only me, or isn't ironic that they move now when UNIX (include MacOS X) is gaining ground at all fronts including the desktop users.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
While the Mac is attracting a record number of new users to the platform it is also loosing its established niches and customers. Apple's share in education, for instance, has gone from 50-60% to about 20% under jobs. Apple is also loosing quite a few customers in pre-press although I don't have any numbers on that. I think it is also telling that while Steve has shown in previous macworld keynotes that that the number of new users to the platform has gone from ~10% to 25-30%, Apple's market share is stagnant or decreasing and PC sales are flat which implies that for every new user to the platform Apple is loosing an established user.
What I believe is happening is that Apple is loosing market niches in which it has gained a sizable number of Early Majority users (as defined in Geoffrey A Moore's "Crossing the Chasm") and trading them for early adopter type users in other market segments. This does not bode well as it implies Steve has absolutely no idea how to market to an established user base. Since going from the initial inroads to niche market domination is the hard part, Apple's decline implies that it's quite possible that Apple will never, under Steve, gain enough market presence under in any niche to control it properly. If you have 10% of every market you're not important in any of them and you will be marginalized in all of them.
This definitely matches my experience. I was once a rabid Mac fan, however both the iMac and MacOS X did not present any obvious upgrade path to me since the iMac and ilk broke compatibility will all my peripherals and MacOS X did not leverage any of the knowledge I had acquired in using and debugging the MacOS. Oddly enough, it was easier for me to switch to the PC since my peripherals we're all PC Mac compatible and Windows was at least as Mac like as MacOS X.. and of course everything was cheaper. So I went with a new PC and have been quite pleased with it. This situation is typical when an established market is not presented with an obvious upgrade strategy.
Oddly enough Steve is quite good at setting up situations where he *could* dominate a niche. Like at the moment he looks to be going after the consumer market and the Unix market (quite a spread!). The thing is, as soon as he gets anywhere, I think he'll get bored and abandon the niches and move on to some other interesting niche technology. I seem to remember it was this type of mentality that got him fired from Apple in the first place
As both a computer and graphic arts professional. One's choice of imaging platform boils down to workflow and the Wintel platform is just not there yet. I use Photoshop 7 on both the Mac and WinXP platforms and yes Photoshop renders more quickly on the WinXP it is useless for finished work because of the virtual nonexistance of Color management for the PC platform. On the MAC calibration is easy so the Pantone (tm) color you see on the monitor is what comes off your proof printer and eventually comes off the phototypesetter. There are far more people with digital cameras and scanners on the PC platform BUT for professional use the Mac is the preferred platform due to the tight integration of color management into it's OS's whereas Wintel thinks color management is a add-on product and the results reflect this view
I'm working right now on both a dual-GHz PowerMac G4 with 512MB RAM running 10.2.4, as well as a 1.8GHz P4 laptop with 512MB RAM running XP. (I have a KVM switcher for the middle shared screen of 3.)
I have used MacOS since late versions of System 6. I have only recently, in the last couple years, been using Windows full-time.
I feel like a traitor, but I have to say that, personally, I too prefer Windows when using Adobe apps. I don't know if it's the OS itself or shoddy programming for OS X, but Photoshop and Illustrator both seem slow to interact with uder OS X, whereas they seem snappy on XP.
I prefer OS X over XP in almost all other areas, but I feel that someone (probably a combination of Apple and Adobe) has seriously dropped the ball for Photoshop and Illustrator under OS X. It's just not as usable, IMO.
Scratch disks, hard drive kind, size make huge differences for some reason on Macs, also lots of RAM, same kind fastest machine can take RAM matters too.
Further, lots of geeks will disagree but to an artist it makes a huge difference - INTERFACE = PRODUCTIVITY - even XP is pixelated and ugly, there is little that is not pleasing to the eye on a Mac.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny