Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
I'm not so sure. Professionals choose the platform based on software, not the other way round. Switching to PC does give a lower total cost of ownership if Adobe keeps their prices the same, but if the other tools that people want are available only for Mac, then they will choose mac.
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.
"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."
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
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.
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.
--
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.