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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."
If anything can get Apple to ditch its current arcitecture, this it it. Who knows if they will go Intel or IBM, but blood is in the water now, and they have to make some switch.
With Apple increasingly separating itself from Microsoft, creating their own browser based on Konqueror's KHTML technology, perhaps this move by Adobe will prompt Apple to create imaging software to compete with Adobe based on open source like GIMP?
Well, I guess I would have to say that one is more productive within their platform environment of preference in general. Yes, my dual Ghz G4 with Cinema display is not as fast as the P4 system it replaced, but it is generally a much more productive environment in that I can run on one workstation, code originally written for SGI, Office for Mac, Adobe products galore, remote sensing code, the website for our lab etc...etc...etc... and I could not do all of this nearly as well or as easy with the three systems my OS X workstation replaced including an SGI Octane, a Wintel system and an older Mac.
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Slap me if I'm being silly, but how much do we know about the internals of these products, and how they're implemented between platforms?
That is, could it be that the Windows Adobe team simply writes better software than the Mac Adobe team? How much of this can be put down to the underlying operating systems on both machines?
Just thoughts
Score:-1, Funny
man, that is just completely untrue. We run a shop of 20 macs and 10 PC's. Top end G4's and reasonably fast piii's. The differences in rendering complex filters is virtually nonexistent.
The differences in interface: negligible.
The differences in speed: imperceptible.
The differences in cost: the pc's are cheaper.
Which do you think we are buying more of next year?
Our ENTIRE business rides on our ability to turn high end photoretouching (PS) and layout and design (AI). And there is no longer a big enough difference between macs and PC's to warrant the cost diff on our budget.
All of our PC users were forced onto their PC's having been hardcore mac users. They complained, they spent a week getting into "natural" mode with XP, and then no problems at all. Two of them are looking at upgrading their apples and they are looking at the new line of Vaio's.
The pc is 54 seconds, around 0.5 on the scale. Mac is 1min 25 seconds, which they wrongly put around 1.2 on the scale. Makes it seem like the mac is more then twice as slow when you look at it, when in fact the difference is not as much.
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.
Personally, I find myself more and more using The GIMP on Linux because it's faster than Photoshop on *any* platform (and it's open source
My journal has hot
I'll tell you why Adobe is making a big deal about this: M-A-R-K-E-T-I-N-G.
Adobe realizes that a commodity PC box costs less. This is important to people that, at the end of the day, have to make the numbers work. Adobe also realizes that a faster platform that costs less leaves more room in the budget for their software. A company saving money on the hardware is much more likely to spend on pricey software.
-ted
Photoshop and Gimp are wide and far apart Performance and Featurewise. I'm a Linux User all the way through - with strong ties to multimedia. Allthough I hate Windows (for good reasons too) and love Linux it's utterly impossible for Linux to reach design power parity with Windows. Even with a full license of Corel Photopaint and CorelDraw for Linux. This is - along with broad range gaming - still a major drawback with Linux.
Since you're talking about 'not fact heavy' I'd like to point out that especially Photoshop is a programm that plays in it's own league with no other competitor even close to reaching the same power in grafical editing. Especially Gimp which, while being an astonishing OSS project with unmatched ease of installation and considerable powers, is far away from stuff like the PS rendering filters and scaling/interpolation algorythyms. One of the strengths of all Adobe 'pixel' programms.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I remember when applying a filter to a 24MB image took overnight, now they happen in a minute or so. Have we reached the point where it doesn't really matter how fast your computer is at PhotoShop/Illustrator because everything is fast enough? Or has the image size/filter complexity gone way up since the mid-1990s?
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
This would:
In short, this could be a good thing for Free Software.
Or not.
www.eFax.com are spammers
One thing I wonder about based soley on my personal observations (that's my disclaimer, btw) is say Adobe DOES pick the pc as their primary platform...I wonder if (and by how much) piracy will rise?
Of all the mac users I've ever met, loyality to their platform was extremely important to them. That meant going out an *buying* all their software for their computer (what a concept, eh?). OTOH, of all the pc users I know and have met, piracy is rampant. "Why should I buy Photoshop 7.0 for $650 when I can download it on KaZaa in 20 minutes?" has been echoed more than once. If these people are forced to wintel boxen to use the newest version of Illustrator, they're most likely gonna be pissed off enough to give pirating expensive apps a definite consideration.
Of course, mac warez is by default a harder scene to get into, and hence pirated versions of software like this won't be as commonplace as pc versions. It's still out there though, as any other Hotline users will tell you. ;)
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
It also ignores the fact that the newest PowerPC's are imbued with a practical SIMD execution engine, the instruction set of which is not only heavily leveraged in MacOS X itself, but numerous 3rd party applications. The SSE2/3DNow! engines just don't stack up to AltiVec for widespread usage, and once Apple machines supply a 1.8-2.5Ghz, 200+ simultaneous instruction Integer/fpu core alongside Altivec, the argument for x86 Macintoshes will entirely evaporate.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Ok, you cited two things you like about Photoshop. Cool. Get on it. I expect plugins by the end of the month.
Seriously, is it so hard to read the *rest* of what I wrote? I was suggesting that a company take The Gimp, modify it as needed (contributing back the OSS parts, and keeping proprietary plugins for patented stuff that they will have to chage money for to pay royalties and fund their staff).
The Gimp is a pain in the ass to use, but most of what PS gives you above and beyond The Gimp in terms of real features center around the ready-for-print market (patents prevent much of this technology from entering The Gimp) and some of PS' advances layering features (again, likely patented). Their scaling and interpolation is nice (also probably patented, which again leads to my point), but rarely worthy of chosing them over a competitor. In fact 90% of the ready-for-print market cares about only 10 or so of PS' core features asside from simple image editing. Of those 10 or so features a good chunk are covered by patents, and that's really what's keeping PS afloat right now.
Create a company that can ship patented plug-ins for The Gimp, and you remove the barrier that has kept it a second-class citizen for so long. Of course, getting the starting capital would be tricky in today's market, but this is a huge area with lots of profit to be had. The early worm will most certainly get the worm.
Remember that the power of open source is that the larger and more complex the software that you're imitating/improving, the more of an edge you have because of the large community of contributors who have source code.
Two things.
Adobe wants folks off of Macs. There are two reasons.
The first is that Final Cut Pro is killing them on the Mac. Their Mac market is drying up for video and for good reason. FCP is much faster on a G4 than Adobe, and cheaper. These tasks comparing FCP Mac with Adobe PC would show the Mac winning in many instances. That's a fair comparison in terms of productivity since you will never be able to get FCP for the PC.
The second is that switching brings in revenue. Upgrading isn't working as well anymore, so switching is the next great hope. Microsoft makes more money when most folks switch to Mac than they do if they buy another PC (not that they recognize that as being in their best interest - but maybe they do). Adobe makes more money if someone switches to PC than if they buy a new Mac.
Maybe in another year or so they'll be encouraging switching back.
The most hated company in all of Macdom is not the beast from Redmond, who makes the tasty, lickable Office, but Quark. User-hostile doesn't even begin to cover its marketing and support... user belligerent is more like it. They flat-out refused to port to OSX (they still haven't), and they openly despise the Macintosh platform and insult its adherents at trade shows.
They are this way because they believed they had an unbeatable product, a single killer app the world could not do without: Xpress. The Mac dweebs would buy and keep buying, because there was no credible choice.
Until Adobe came up with InDesign, which is easier, faster, every inch as powerful, compatible with Xpress "Xtensions" and runs on OS X. Adobe shows their users lots of lovin', with trade shows, rational support, and deep Mac roots. Now InDesign is poised to topple Xpress into irrelevancy.
Adobe does not have the only pro-caliber image editing app out there. If they're upset that iPhoto killed ImageReady, and incensed that FinalCut destroyed Premier, wait until Apple decides to buy the TIFF-any codebase, or Avisa Image, or just roll their own Photoshop killer based on the GIMP.
Adobe is playing a very dangerous game. If Quark can be dethroned, you better damn well believe Photoshop can be, too. Apple's got pockets deep enough to do it, and marketing savvy that put FinalCut Pro on a Powerbook in the news vans of every TV station in the civilized world.
You don't take on Apple and win.
SoupIsGood Food
The same guy who did this benchmarking wrote this, not exactly unbiased. Trackback at MTG.
I haven't seen anybody mention it yet (probably missed it) but this is pretty clearly a shot against Final Cut Pro's bow. FCP runs only on Macs and it has been eating Premiere for lunch. Many in the industry consider FCP to be way ahead of Premiere in features, usability and interface. FCP's weakness is Adobe's main selling point: PC flat-out render faster than Macs. Period. They just have more raw power. The G4 chip has been orphaned by Motorola for the last 3 years. If Macs had the equivalent processing power of PC's, FCP would be a no-brainer for those deciding between the two packages.
yes, i believe as well that this is ironic and probably the case. since adobe has ported it's code to a unix (mac os x), in time it will be expected to port their code to other unixes (such as linux, and BSDs, as well as maybe IRIX).
You've got it backwards. Photoshop 3 (or maybe it was 2, my memory is hazy! Like the moors of Scotland!!) existed as far back as IRIX 5 on SGIs. It was round about the time that SGI were pushing the Indy as a desktop PC, with the idea that you would use a Mac for low-end 2D and the Indy for high-end 2D and entry level 3D. Of course it never played out because IRIX 5 was a piece of crap, far too slow, too buggy and the fancy desktop environment required too much RAM. By the time SGI got their act together with IRIX 6 (a damn good OS, IMHO, and I've used 'em all), the Mac had come to dominate 2D, not that it was ever particularly great but it was there and it worked better than Windows at the time and it was cheaper than SGI, who had pretty much abandoned their 2D ambitions by then and only sold machines with expensive 3D included in the price.
Honestly people who are serious about graphic design, movie editing, and or modeling use BOTH macs and PC's PERIOD.
When it comes to my client wanting me to either A) work on a specific platform so when I give them my files they know it will run on there machines fine or B) Needing an APP that only runs on one particular platform - Argueing over which is faster doesn't matter, it comes down to the FACT that as a graphic designer I NEED to have both my Apple Dual 500 AND my P4 1.6ghz Windows XP machines.
Having one or the other ONLY in these fields WILL limit you.
Ave Molech Setting
OK, first read this... taken straight from the page:
In the July 2002 issue of Digital Producer Magazine, Charlie White reported on a head-to-head duel between a single-processor Dell 2.53GHz Pentium® 4 -- the Dell Precision Workstation 340 -- and the fastest Macintosh then available -- a 1GHz dual-processor G4. The contest compared renderings of files created in Adobe® After Effects®, Illustrator®, and Photoshop® software that are typical to the video post-production workflow. The graphs below show some of the results, which were consistent. While the computers used in this study are no longer the fastest in their respective classes, the information is still valid. The PC outperformed the similar Macintosh machine, at an impressive rate.
And this above all the pretty graphs:
Graphics courtesy of DMN - DigitalMediaNet.com
Listen up, dumbasses... this was an article written entirely external of Adobe and most likely was on Adobe's website simply because it was an Adobe product in the press. This has nothing to do with Adobe's own preferences.
Furthermore, you can't take a single set of benchmarks as indesputable proof of anything. Different benchmark tests can get widely different results.
Finally, if you look at the page one directory up, you'll see one of the links that says the following:
Prefer a PC for DV? - See what an industry expert says about PC vs. Mac for digital video editing."
It really has little to do with Adobe's preference for platform and more likely was put there because the sales of the PC versions are trailing behind the Mac versions. Adobe is at it's best when both platforms sell products evenly.
8==8 Bones 8==8
ok, we've hashed over the raw speed differences to death on this board. I would just like to say that after looking at the page for 3 seconds, I realized that the graphs were drawn by an idiot.c omposite .gif .54
http://www.adobe.com/motion/images/video_
Take a look, and see if you can tell what's wrong? As drawn:
Dell P4 3.06 GHz: 54 seconds =
Dual G4 1.25 GHz: 1 minute 25 seconds = 1.25
In case you didn't catch it, go look at the labels on the graph & the axis, because here's what the real values equal:
54 seconds = 0.9 minutes
1' 25" = 1.4 minutes
So, instead of a difference of 57% it should only be 35%.
This does not mitigate the fact that the Pentium was faster, but rather than someone is making pains to make things look even worse then they are . . . . or (if I was feeling generous) that they are simply mathematically illiterate.
If you look at the first graph, as you point out, it compares 0:54 seconds vs. 1:25, but they just blindly did this:
0.54 vs. 1.25
This gave the Dell an advantage on the graph.
But, in the second graph, it gets funnier. 2:05 vs. 3:47 becomes:
(real) 125 sec vs. 227 seconds = Dell is 45% faster
(Adobe) 2.5 vs. 3.47 = Dell is 28% "faster"
So in their second graph, the Dell looks a lot slower than it actually is. I guess that evens out then. Whoever did that charge clearly forgot that 1.00 in "time" is sixty seconds, not 100 seconds.
after skimming it a bit more, the opening paragraph says that it was comparing "a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 and a 1GHz dual-processor G4", but the graphs are labeled with a "Dell P4 3.06GHz" and "Mac G4 dual 1.25GHz". So which is it?
Proving you can run a productive office without any Microsoft products. BSSH
reading through the comments, it's amazing what's getting blurred from already mucky story. Here are some things I'd like to point out:
A few months ago, we reviewed a Dell system that packed the fastest PC processor available at the time, the Pentium 4 2.53GHz. Since then, the chipsters at Intel have topped themselves twice, and this time, the newest chip runs at an unprecedented 3.06 GHz.[www.digitalvideoediting.com]
The Dell machine used in these tests was, in fact, a 3.06 GHz machine. The 2.53GHz machine mentioned is in reference to a machine they recieved a few months ago. I have no idea why this was referenced in the article.
Mac OS X 10.2.1 was the OS used on the Mac in these tests [www.digitalvideoediting.com, p.2], and Windows XP Pro was running on the Dell. (also p.2)
Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. [www.digitalvideoediting.com]
Can someone tell me exactly what Ethernet has to do with image rendering? Are they testing this over a network???
And you people complain about the EDITORS not reading the aritcle!
Man, I wish I had the statistics handy! But several years ago, Mac versions of photoshop accounted for 70% of all registered versions of Photoshop.
This coming from 3% of the computing market! Ha!
I'll bet anything that there are still Quadra 840's out there running Photoshop 3 as scanning stations!
Pooty tweet