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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?
it just shows graphs that say the PC is faster than the mac doing stuff in after effects..and at the end it says, "While the computers used in this study are no longer the fastest in their respective classes, the information is still valid"
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
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?
The images appear to be incorrect.
If you look at the first image, it has two times, 54 seconds and 1 minute 25 seconds. The second time is shown at well over double the length of the first, even though it only took ~50% longer. If you look closely, you will see that 1:25 got placed at 1.25, and 0:54 got placed at 0.54, hence the error.
Any of the images where the minutes are different are going to be skewed a fair amount. The error will decrease as the minute difference increases.
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 |
How is it a bad move? They know which platform they sell more copies of their software for. Hint, hint.. it's not the Mac! So it makes perfect business sense for them to say what they prefer their users to use their products on.
"Upset Mac people.." Come on! As if they aren't used to it by now.
I'd be upset knowing I spend 2-3 times as much for my computer to do the same work a PC will do.
That's just dumb.
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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
Well, it seems what Adobe has actually done is a bit less inflammatory than what the headline suggests. On the hyperlinked page, they simply display the results from a performance benchmark that indicate a 3.06Ghz P4 outperforms a dual 1.25Ghz G4 by a wide margin on some tests, which is a little confusing as the article said the P4 was a 2.53Ghz. Whatever.
This changes very little and seems hardly worth the effort sensationalizing.
They could always go AMD ;)
"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."
The article linked says nothing like that at all. It just states that in a test performed in July 2002 a Pentium 4-based workstation outperformed a G4 workstation. It does not say that Adobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
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.
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
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
Photoshop and Illustrator are the most annoying programs to use under Windows. They both use the MDI (Multiple document interface) model for drawing their windows which makes it very difficult to utilize the avalible screen space.
MacOS and even the UNIX versions of Photoshop/Illustrator do not suffer from the same design flaws.
The clockspeeds of the computers mentioned in the introductory paragraph on that page don't match up with the clockspeeds of the computers in the charts. I'm wondering what other errors are present as well.
Also, this doesn't look like an Adobe recommendation so much as Adobe showing one group's results of a comparative test. There is more to a computer than render speed, just as there is more to a computer than compile speed.
mbbac
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.
The link doesn't say anything about Adobe preferring one platform over another, in the slightest. It's just some graphs indicating that PCs as a class perform better than macintoshes, which is something that i don't think anyone is denying at this point.
While that kind of does seem like an endorsement of the PC on adobe's part, it also is just good business sense to explain to your customers what hardware your software runs best on.
Speed at raw data-crunching is just one of the factors in which computing platform you are going to use, though if you're using AfterEffects or Photoshop or something it's going to be a much, much larger factor.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
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.
Adobe is just using the superior metric system, which has 100 seconds / minute.
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
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.
The choice of red for the PC is interesting in that it draws your eye to it. I downloaded one of the graph and switched the colors of the bars. Then on first glance the eye is drawn to the Mac and your first thought is that it won whatever the test was about.
Um.. but the mac didn't win what the test was about. It lost.
If they really wanted to show info rather than a predetermined conclusion they would have done both bars in the same color.
You know, i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that maybe they made the graphs after they ran the tests, at which point, their "predetermined conclusion" would have been kind of been moot.
Which would lead me to suspect that maybe they chose to color the Windows bar red because windows won the test. Um.. i mean, it sounds reasonable to pick the color that draws your eye for the successful data, right? It's like a "lookit! this one is the important one!" flag, since you wouldn't otherwise have any indication on first glance whether short or long bars are better.
And what jpeg artifacts do you refer to?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Or they could go for the 64-bit IBM PowerPC 970 with 32-bit backward compatibility and AltiVec that has "APPLE, USE ME, I'M YOUR NEXT PROCESSOR" written all over it.
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). saying winblows ... i mean windows is the perfered platforms just makes it easier on them and buys them more time for the eventual and i guess probable porting.
I write code.
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.
Ahh, but the question is; is it hardware architecture, or superior underlying OS code? Could it be calls to Win32 or DirectX that makes the difference?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
"We were using Motorola processors, and all. And then, like, they stopped improving them and stuff. We were like, Huh??
We had to tell our customers that, you know, 3X the clock speed was only a myth. But they weren't trying to hear that.
That sucked.
Then we, like, lost our market share, and stuff... It was good market share.
Bummer.
My name is Steve Jobs, and I switched to X86."
I am in full agreement that a high-end wintel box will out-render any mac, and I run a mac-oriented media production unit. But...
I read said article in a copy of some trade mag. I was annoyed and immediately recycled it, because:
1. Focus on hardware alone misses the point and causes people like me extra unnecessary work.
2. The 'article' in question is being used as a large advertorial insert partnered by adobe and intel, IN DISGUISE.
3. The 'article' and all the surrounding 'information' leaves out crucial issues like uptime, human interface, Return On Investment, training time, technical support, h/w-s/w integration, and other minor economic factors that add up significantly over a year's production. These factors more than make up for the difference in render time. [Ask any of my friends who've tried and tried to make Premiere do what it promises how much time they've saved...]
I keep telling my interns [and anyone else who will listen]: it doesn't matter how fast your hardware is if your wetware is lagging. Speed requires optimization all the way down the signal path, starting with ideas.
Damn those pesky terrorists
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."
Adobe Carbon code running on Mac OS X has nothing more in common with Unix than it did when it was running on Mac OS 9. Carbon is a subset of the old Toolbox APIs and really is about as far away from porting something to Unix as you can get. Sorry.
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...
This would:
In short, this could be a good thing for Free Software.
Or not.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I doubt Adobe is the actual source of the stupid axis-labeling error -- Adobe attributes the images to Digital Media Net, the parent of the site that published the article this is based on -- so I'd imagine it more likely that the error's on DMN's side.
It's interesting to look at Digital Video Editing, the site that published the original article entitled "Macs vs. PCs III: Macs Slaughtered Again".
I'm not enough of an editing guru to comment on the validity of the tests, but the writing is strikingly unprofessional: "Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP". He's obviously got an axe to grind. Writers who compare Macs and PCs and *start out* with a chip on their shoulder kind of piss me off.
It seems quite possible that Adobe asked the author for a couple of images, and he came up with these worthless, mis-scaled pieces of junk to force his own point. But maybe it was an accident, and I'm just a pessimist.
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.
So, someone ran some benchmarks and then Adobe posted a bogus graph showing that a PC was faster than a Mac doing something. Perhaps a little oversimplified, but I think anyone who picks a PC over a Mac based on that one page is missing a few things.
What about a consistent, well-design user interface that isn't always one step behind?
What about superior color management and a truly WYSIWYG pdf-based display architecture?
What if design pros don't want to have to deal with linear mouse acceleration that makes fine adjustments akin to slow torture?
What about the fact that most design pros don't want to have to spend a day every month or so troubleshooting some nonsensical Windows problem?
What about Microsoft's increasingly oppressive product activation and upgrade policies? What about their draconian approach to DRM?
What if people don't want to use an OS that is still built upon the blasphemy that is the Windows Registry?
What about the 50,000+ virii that affect Windows only, and the handful that affect OS X?
What if creative pros don't want to deal with a welter of Windows-only spyware?
What about Microsoft's seive-like security?
I could go on. I know all those things add up to more lost time for me than the time saved on a few select operations.
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
Yes. However, Adobe never released a more recent version, and won't even sell you a license for the old IRIX Photoshop, despite the fact that SGI still has a page up for it.
Why, if one may ask, would Adobe miff a huge established user base by "choosing" one platform over the other, especially when they keep the Mac and PC versions more-or-less concurrent anyway? What possible motive would they have for declaring one platform "preferred"?
On the other hand, I can think of a trolling motive for someone to see if they could get this thing posted. This "news" appears to date to 11 november of last year, to boot.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
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.
Actually, this is far more likely to cause Apple to start working on The Gimp and adding the features that Photoshop has that The Gimp lacks.
And GM will switch to hovercraft designs because Goodyear said nice things about Ford.
The GIMP is no competitor to Photoshop. Sure, it's an impressive piece of free software, but graphics professionals are not going to switch from Photoshop. On average, each user has years of experience, probably has taken courses in using Photoshop's advanced features, and may have a considerable investment in plug-ins on which they rely to do their job. They would sooner switch personal computers before they would switch image processing software.
Allow them to add features that Adobe does not see fit to add
Apple's software developers don't work for free. The GIMP is under the GPL which means that Apple would have to give away all of the code that they develop for it. They would not be able to sell it (they could try -- and become the next Mandrake). Thus, they would be paying software developers to add features to a Free Software program so that Apple could have a substandard Photoshop replacement that would still run faster on PCs. That's hardly going to result in massive sales of Macs.
In short, this could be a good thing for Free Software.
This has nothing to do with Free Software. There are only three possible outcomes for this and neither of them involve Free Software:
1. Graphics designers switch to PCs.
2. Apple switches to x86 architecture CPUs.
Slashdot strikes again. What Adobe did: link to that pc/mac comparison that one guy did that showed a Dell 3Ghz outperforming a Mac dual G4 1.24 Ghz, under the title "Prefer a PC for DV?" The link is in the "digital video products" page -- Premiere and After Effects. (Fair enough too -- if you were doing heavy video editing, it's a useful reminder of performance.) It is *not* under any of the other product pages that I can see.
So how does this justify the slashdot interpretation: "Abobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform for running Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator"? I don't see it.
A.
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
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.
I officially *HATE* Motorola. Motorola always made better chips than Intel, and that dates back to the 68000. The 68000, the 68020, the 030, and the 040. All better than their x86 (and x88)equivalents. But then a few years ago, Motorola started slacking. Look what they did to Palm. They (Motorola) thought they could just make minor modifications to the 68000, now a 24 year old processor, and they thought Palm would continue buying from them forever. All the while Intel kept on increasing the clock speed on their ARM processors for the big joke that was the WinCE market. 200 mhz Intel chips versus 16/33/ and now 66mhz Motorola Dragonball chips (ie Motorola 68000). Why didn't Motorola help Palm adapt the PowerPC chips for the Palm platform (or even a Dragonball based on a 68040 or 68060)? Obviously, there would be less emulation problems with going from a 68000 based chip to a PowerPC then to switch the platform to Intel and Texas Instruments ARM based chips. Even IBM just announced a PowerPC based reference design platform for Linux based PDAs. How did Motorola (and IBM) drop the ball on this? The PowerPC was also the most suitable choice because they offer low power consumption to begin with. PowerPC chips run in the Nintendo Gamecube and the Series1 TiVo. It would've been perfect. But instead of being a chip powerhouse, Motorola prefers to focus on building inferior cell phones. Such a dramatic decline from a company that used to make great television sets.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
The entire theory that Adobe is now "preferring" the PC platform is based on the fact that there's a page called pcpreferred.html on Adobe's site.
:)
Oh, you mean it's
PCpreferred.html
and not
PCPreferred.html
There goes my theory that it was a page set up for referrals to Adobe software by your Primary Care Physician.
Has anyone noticed how screwed-up those graphs are, especially the first one? It says the PC took 54 seconds and that the Mac took 1 minute and 25 seconds. If you measure them both in seconds, then that is 54 seconds versus 85 seconds, but the Mac bar on the graph is more than twice as long as the PC bar.
.54 according to the lower index. Is this index supposed to represent seconds or minutes? If it's seconds, as suggested by the fact that the PC bar lines up with .54, then why is there a marker at 0.9? And more importantly, why does the Mac bar line up with 1.25, and not .85?
The PC bar lines up with
Tricky! (But not as tricky as the incredibly misleading title on this SlashDot posting.)
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
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
computers have a lifesan of 1-7 years with most new computers being bought in the span of 2-4 years. Computer sales have been flat since 1999. Mac sales have been flat for 10 years.
. shtml
:(...
Take a look at this chart
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0007/18.share
It details the sales per platform of every major platform in the last 20 or so year (yes even stuff like amiga and commodore 64).
Mac sales have been flat for at least 10 years. The mac market should be facing a steady state and they could maintain their sales if they only sold to their user base (since these guys must have bought another computer in the last 10 year). It implies that for every persone switching to the mac there is one switching away. Perliminairy number indicate that mac sales are again flat for this year. The split betweem people who have bought a mac before and people who are new to the platform (as far as iMacs anyway) was ~65 old 45% new... That's quite a chunk of people to be loosing... Sales of the towers have been suffering (I would expect that this is because the towers are sold to pre-press places which should be part of the installed base)..
In any case, this is all secondairy compared to Apple's sharply dropping numbers in its established markets like education and pre-press. This is the real killer 'cause if you don't have a established market niche you are 10% of nothing.. Actually Apple's marketshare is at 5% these days
NOTE: I'm not trying to be a doom and gloom guy. I am really worried about the survival of the platform. Not only because it is actually very nice (I have a mac Towers these days as well as the PC), but because Microsoft with a monopoly does not do anything. Look at microsoft exploder. They've done bascially nothing with it since version 5. Mozilla has blown past it. (Well, in my opinion anyway)..
I'm making an exception this time because I can save a lot of people time before they delve into the over 500 posts of reaction to this story (at least for those who read /. in threaded mode).
Adobe is not expressing a preference for Windows PC's
The linked page is called "pcprefered.html" because it is the page which is brought up on the Adobe Digital Video Products page when you click on a link that says: "Prefer a PC for DV? See what an industry expert has to say about PC vs. Mac for video editing."
In other words, those who followed the link from The Adobe DV Products Page are indicating a preference for PC's. Since it's a page for those who prefer PC's, it's called "pcprefered.html".
There is nothing in the body of the page to indicate that Adobe has any preference for PC's, reccomends PC's over Macs, or even likes PC's. The page is a mirror of some Dell vs. Mac speed tests that some guy did. That is all.
By deep-linking to this page out of context, the person who submitted this was obviously trolling... perhaps hoping that the article would not go up until a little closer to April 1.
You may now safely ignore all of the responses below and move on with your life. No need to mod up this post, I'm already posting it at 2. Save your mod points for a real article.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The survey doesnt reflect that Photoshop is only using *ONE* of the mac CPUs at any time during their tests, so it's quite understandable why it lags behind. However, If Adobe/3rdparties got their finger out and actually wrote their filters to take advantage of multi-cpu systems then you might be suprised at how well a dual-g4 does against an x86 system.
I haven't been following the Mac world for a while. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since Adobe was *always* the app vendor out in front when it came to multiproc support on the Mac, even when Mac multiprocessing architecture sucked balls (as on the Daystars).
However, you are ignoring a number of points. First, it is *not trivial* to write code for multiple processors, especially when retrofitting existing code or dealing with algorithms that simply don't parallelize well. So it doesn't really matter whether Photoshop *could* run faster -- it doesn't. And that's what most people are constrained by (that or games, which generally also don't parallelize well). It's quite possible that if all x86 authors went out and changed their calling conventions, hand-coded everything in assembly perfectly, and used their 3d card as a general-purpose matrix co-processor, their software would run much faster. But it doesn't, so it doesn't matter. The software matters too, not just the software.
Second, arguments that the Mac is performance comparable with x86 boxes are long, long dead. Even comparable with x86 boxes that cost half as much. Apple had a good thing going with the PowerPC, they trusted Motorola, and Motorola blew it. It's done, it happened, and now the PowerPC just doesn't compare. Sorry, but that's the way it is.
Frankly, I don't give a damn so much about the Mac's CPU horsepower as I do about the disgusting, inefficient memory usage in OS X. OS X is without a doubt the most bloated piece of software I've ever run across. Apple might possibly make it worse by porting it to Java, but other than that, I can't imagine what else they might have done wrong. When you're blowing 128MB and swapping to display a desktop, somewhere there's a coder that needs to be shot.
May we never see th
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
Nope. It runs in both Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. It's a Carbon app through and through. Doing it in Cocoa would have required a complete rewrite.
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
I'd mod myself up to get this read, but oh well....
This computer cretin was simply out of place while making this review, so bear it no weight. In the following blocks, I provide sufficient information to prove that the "tester's," Mr. Charles White's, review neglects important information, is not thoughtfully written, and is irresponsible.
First, notice the title in the article. It is definitely biased based on his word choice. He is obviously a pro-pc "I hate mac" person considering all the time he spends describing the PC. Ars Technica does a much better job at keeping tests objective and posting all tests completed. The tester probably left out a few tests for the sake of his article, adding to his irresponsibility.
Major errors in this article, including, but not limited to....
1. On page four, he indicates that the graphics card was a newer ATI Fire card (a back of the pack pro graphics card, NOT a consumer one as he claims. The same NVIDIA card in the apple can be put into the pc, but was not. Dell gives buyers several options, and he could have picked the same card for both.), and the mac had a consumer grade NVIDIA whatever Ti with 128 VRAM.
2. The Apple hard drive the tester used has only 2MB of onboard cache, while (rather cutely) the hard drive tester substituted for the PC has 8MB onboard cache.
3. Tester talks about hyper-threading. He obviously has not read the documentation Intel provides, as I have, because he mentions:
Without boring you to tears, I?ll tell you that hyperthreading is a new technology from Intel that makes one processor act like two. It doesn?t double the speed of a processor, but makes it able to do most operations faster, and is particularly effective if you?re doing more than one thing at a time with your computer (multitasking).
No, he is incorrect. Hyperthreading on average makes the processor 30% more efficient on a Xeon processor. That percentage drops a lot when one adds as many pipeline stages as the P4. I would estimate that he got less than 10% in performance gains with his hyperthreading in a P4.
Intel does not provide lots of Hyper-threading on a P4, not because of patent issues, as the reviewer claims, but because it is simply inefficient. His own two tests with other computers and with the Dell 350, hyperthreading off, make that clearly evident. Intel itself would rather have someone buy Xeon processors, for they are much more efficient.
4. He claims a bunch of other nonsense about how certain hardware (RAM, Logic board throughput at the processor bridge) makes the PC faster, which is not the case. In fact, much of what he talks about is totally unrelated to the specifics of his tests.
5. Several of his tests rely more on the graphics card and less on the processor. That skews results massively since tester uses a Fire-class card. He should have gone with a 3DLabs wildcat 4 if he really wanted to differentiate the scores.
6. Again, vector operations being performed in all these tests are not the same as floating point operations. Few of his tests used the floating-point abilities of AltiVec. The tester is a "hardware kiddie" if such a thing does exist, and there is a difference between a processor and a graphics card.
7. Many of the tests he posted were tailored for the PC. The tester probably did other ones, but the Mac must have done a decent job on those. How about opening (oops, 8MB hard drive cache), a 150MB Photoshop file in 2400dpi resolution. That file must contain anti-aliased text and a few high-resolution photos.
Finally, I would say from my experience at building workstation hardware and writing reviews for other hardware, that Mr. Charlie White has extremely limited knowledge, provides much "bs" to fill the article, and that he is unqualified for making his review. The site he posted on was digitalvideoediting.com. It is out of the scope of his review to even touch on Photoshop, other 2D, or non-digital video sources. Mr. White has neither the knowledge, expertise- check his credentials on the primary source article -nor the objectivity to make this review. His article is simply irresponsible journalism.