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Adobe Adds GPU Acceleration To Creative Suite 4
arcticstoat writes "GPU computing has just taken a major step into the world of mainstream software development, as Adobe has now released a GPU-accelerated version of its Creative Suite, comprising Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro. Both Premiere Pro and After Effects only support GPU features on Nvidia's professional range of Quadro GPUs, but Photoshop CS4 allows GPU acceleration on any mainstream GPU that supports Shader Model 3.0 (such as Nvidia's GeForce 6200 series of GPUs). Built on OpenGL, Photoshop CS4's GPU features allow real-time rotation of images and accelerated zooming and panning. As well as this, Photoshop CS4 also uses the GPU for anti-aliasing on text and objects, and it can tap the GPU for brushstroke previews, HDR tone mapping and colour conversion."
It's too bad that you need a $2300 mac pro to make use of it as the mini has a very weak video card and the imac screens are not good for photo work.
I though the high end iMacs used better screens.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
You do realize that for less than half that sum you can get a PC with an up-to-date graphics card that will also easily run the Adobe Suite?
Amazing how much more you pay for an Apple logo and one less mouse button.
Similes are like metaphors
Yeah but then we can't be apple fanbois.
they use glossy screens and apple does not let you pick if you want one or not like they do with the mac pro.
Maybe Apple will bring back the CUBE. Heck just take the mini and put an PCI-E slot on it so you can a better video card on it.
Would help gamers and other that don't want (to pay for) a Pro.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The higher end iMacs, the Mac Pros, and the MacBook Pros all have real graphic cards.
In fact, at this point, the low end iMacs may have real graphics cards (not those Intel chips).
That said, it's being used for things like zooming around the image smoothly and color correction. Even the little Intel chips should be able to handle that with pretty big images without problems. The higher end things the GPUs can be used for (I hear some of the new 3D features) would probably need a better GPU.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
True. But if you want to buy the full version of Creative Suite that includes Premier and everything, you're paying $2500. If you pay that much for software, you're probably not going to be running it on a $1100 PC, you're going to spend more (still could be a PC).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
PeeCees (and workstations before them) have been using graphics accelerators since the days of Windows 3.1 (and before).
So someone put some hooks in their code to use some maths functions on a new graphics card? Big deal.
Stick Men
I think this is a cool innovation (and quite frankly overdue for graphics manipulation packages) but people don't seem to be too happy with the way Adobe has been handling bug fixes to CS3, which was already expensive enough. Now comes another $$$ upgrade.
There's an interesting list of popular gripes here, which mostly seem to center around "you didn't fix CS3 to begin with" and "it's too expensive".
I don't mind companies charge for software at all, and if you need Photoshop or any of the other apps then there's really no question about paying for them (need here == paying the bills). But CS4 seems to be just a bit too expensive for most people. I don't use Adobe apps, but I know many people in the publishing industry who do and tend to have a weird love-hate relationship with them.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
The sort of glossy high-saturation screens used for iMacs looks great to a lot of users, but isn't good for professional-level color matching. Some people refuse to use LCDs at all because the black point isn't true enough.
Basic idea here is that the sort of screen you want when choosing colors for print ads isn't the same as the screen you want for general consumer use. It's kind of like how the sort of speakers you want in a professional studio aren't the same as what you want for your home stereo. (whether that analogy makes things clearer or more obscure, I don't know)
Funny, I run this stuff on a $999 PC and it runs great. As a matter of fact, the video editing runs faster than my neighbor's $2500 mac. The rendering engines are faster, the video is faster, and Photoshop is faster too. In fact, with 4g of memory (on my $999 PC) it is a lot faster!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Then you need a efix to run mac os on it or use the os x86 hacks.
1100 US buys a hell of a PC these days.
One less mouse button?
Macs have shipped with the Mighty Mouse, a four-button mouse, for three years now.
That's one more than my current Microsoft mouse has.
How long before someone releases hacked drivers to use the accelerations on desktop-class cards? A simple BIOS flash ought to do the trick as well.
In fairness, the problem isn't really that the Mac Pros are overly-expensive for the hardware. I mean, we could quibble about whether they're well-priced for what you get, but at least they're in the right neighborhood.
The problem here is that Apple doesn't offer a normal mid-range machine. There's the Mac mini, which isn't very powerful and isn't expandable, and then you have the Mac Pro, which is a serious professional level workstation. The only thing in between is their all-in-one machine, which isn't suitable for everyone (including serious professional designers).
I'm not sure why Apple has gone so long without selling a middle-of-the-road headless tower in the $1k-$2k range. I think it would help them get more enterprise penetration.
Why is shader model 3.0 required? You can do 2d image maps (zoom, pan) with openGL 2.0.
I'm glad to see they did this for Mac as well as PC. Now if they could just support 64-bit processing on OSX, it would once again be fully up to par with Photoshop for Windows. Yes, I read the article I linked to, I know it's not all Adobe's fault. But it's going to be bad for Adobe, because they'll sell less CS4 upgrades for Mac because of this, and it'll be bad for Apple, because some platform-fence-sitting Photoshop pros who are considering a new computer to run CS4 are going to go PC over Mac.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The higher end iMacs, the Mac Pros, and the MacBook Pros all have real graphic cards.
But do they have real SCREENS?
I mean a proper 8-bit color space, instead of 6-bit dithering? I mean the ability choose matt vs glossy.
Obviously the Mac Pro lets you attach whatever you want to it, but the imacs and macbook pros stick you with the choice of exactly the one LCD screen apple chooses. (although the mbp used to let you choose between matte and glossy; i don't know if it still does; but that's just the finish not the technology.)
As far as i know, all Apple laptops use 6-bit TN screens. And there is a fair bit of information out there that iMacs have switched to 6-bit TN screens too, at least for 20" models. The 24" model is apparently an 8-bit S-IPS... but its not like apple makes this info readily available and the specs are subject to change, so you've got to pay constant attention.
the iMacs (excluding the 24") use screen dithering.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
But if you want to buy the full version of Creative Suite that includes Premier and everything, you're paying $2500.
Since when does anyone *buy* Adobe Creative Suite?
I'm joking, of course. Sort of.
Adding proper hardware acceleration to Flash. Seriously, performance of Flash apps is horrible, especially video applications. Try playing a H.264 video in full screen on anything less than a Core 2 Duo... And then play the same video in VLC.
Sadly enough, 4gb of RAM probably costs $999 for a Mac Pro.
(Yes, I know I'm exaggerating, but seriously, it's expensive)
We had some Apple reps at our company last month, pitching their security stuff (File Vault). When they asked for questions, just about everyone said they wanted a mini-tower in the $1200-$1800 range with minimum 3 pci-e slots and graphic card options. We have a lot of engineers who don't need an 8 core machine with 16GB RAM (and a $3000+ price tag). If they do come out with such a beast, we'll be picking up a metric butt load of 'em.
I drank what? -- Socrates
although the mbp used to let you choose between matte and glossy; i don't know if it still does; but that's just the finish not the technology.)
You still get the choice.
Well it is possible to plug in a 2nd display to an imac (or a macbook pro for that matter) if you really want to.
If you can afford to buy CS4, you should be able to justify upgrading/replacing your computer.
Can I run it on my Ubuntu Dell yet?
No?
Thank you for giving good ideas to the GIMP developers. I look forward very much to 2.6
It's only expensive if you buy it from Apple.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Isn't Quadro just a different identifier in the GPU bios and people have been turning their consumer level cards into Quadros with a bios update? The only "magic" about Quadro cards (aside from their insanely high prices) is that the Quadro driver won't run when it detects a consumer card id. To limit this to "Quadro" cards is Adobe, and most especially Nvidia, ripping off the average consumer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Could someone explain to me, and everyone else who doesn't know much about graphics acceleration, why it's taken Adobe so long to make use of GPUs in their flagship products when games have been using these features for over ten years?
...installation and all...then the year of the Linux desktop would be here, for sure.
I can't believe why that isn't the almost singular purpose of that project. It would make a huge difference since PS has no real alternative on Linux. At least one almost similar the to what users are used to. All other business applications, like word and others, has corresponding.
Yeah, sure, maybe there aren't many CAD applications either, but engineers aren't the ones that need the super-easy transitions. And CAD-users are somewhat fever, at least afaik...
I know I am not first one to say this, I just feel that it needs to be said again.
Baboons are cute.
hrmm... i've never heard of this. aside from contrast ratio and luminance what other monitor specs would have an impact on professional design work? shouldn't saturation be adjustable via software? a high-saturation monitor can always be set to display with a lower saturation level, but a lower saturation monitor can't be set to display higher saturation than it's capable of producing.
it seems to me that for color-matching the only thing you should be concerned about is choosing the right color profile in your graphics application. for print ads you'd obviously want to use a CMYK profile, but regardless of the profiles or monitor you use you won't be able to reproduce the CMYK colorspace on a computer screen because of the disparate gamuts of each system.
Actually this is a common misconception that large display sizes require large images. Get up close to a billboard (which is designed to be viewed from a minimum of 30 to 50 feet away, and usually much further) and you'll find that instead of pixels per inch, that it is measured in inches per pixel, and some pixels are the size of your fist. You don't need 64-bit addressing to make very attractive billboards, or may other large outdoor signs.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just about everyone who uses it professionally. In the great scheme of things, $2500 is not a large business expense. If you can't afford that, software costs are hardly your biggest business worry.
How well (if at all) will this work in VMWare?
Actually the 64-bit Photoshop CS4 currently only runs on PC's. The Mac version remains at 32-bit for now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...and getting rid of the DRM that thinks it has the right to mess with my boot sector. That alone has made buying CS3 a show-stopper for me, even though I run on Windows and I would very much like to have several of the applications. For anyone who dual-boots Windows and Linux, it's pretty much fatal to even installing CS3 on the Windows persona even if you don't have moral objections to supporting DRM-laden software. Does anyone know whether Adobe have seen the light and removed this for CS4?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I agree with you that this is overdue for Photoshop. Pushing some of the workload over to the GPU is a great idea.
I also agree that the upgrades are too expensive and that irritating bugs have not been fixed.
But I also wonder where Indesign fits into this. I can imagine several ways Indesign would function better using the GPU -- no more grainy photo previews, smooth zooming in and out (a la Google Earth?) but I don't want eye candy at the expense of functionality. And I want them to fix things that are mind-blowingly irritating, like importing text files. It chokes on UTF-8 files and anything with even a hint of Unicode punctuation. It's incredibly frustrating and there's no way to add filters for importing that I can find.
I think Indesign's text importing is actually worse now (CS3) than it was when it first came out. Don't neglect stuff like this in favour of the "shiny" factor, Adobe.
CS4 is 64-bit for WINDOWS VISTA ONLY
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/04/photoshop_lr_64.html
As far as i know, all Apple laptops use 6-bit TN screens.
The fun thing is Apple fanboys, when challenge, ignore/contest the quality reduction of using a 6-bit panel.
I'm not a Mac fan, and yet I'm kind of irritated by the cheap LCDs. The whole thing with Apple is they market their computers as high-end pretty multimedia workstations, to justify the high prices. If they're going to throw cheap-ass 6-bit panels in there, how can anyone take them seriously ?
There's not much in the way of "perceived value" when dealing with computers. You either have good hardware, or you don't. In an age where the difference between a cheap LCD and a very good one means a 20-25% premium, Apple's being absolutely moronic to go with the cheap stuff. At the OEM level it's maybe $50 more per unit, which is NEGLIGIBLE considering Apple's reputation is built on graphics.
Idiots, amazingly smug idiots.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Thats why I measure my images in pixels per fist, or fists per pixel when i'm feeling distant.
Thing reads like an ad for nvidia GPUs, which doesn't come across as a huge surprise when all the quotes are from an nvidia PR rep.
FWIW, as far as I can tell there's no reason why the Photoshop enhancements won't work on an SM3-capable AMD GPU like the X1000-series and up. Might even work on SM3 capable intel graphics, if such a beast exists.
$100 for 4GB. Seems to compare favorably with other types of RAM.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
It's not coincidence that Apple don't sell a machine which is directly comparable to mainstream Windows PCs. Every one of their desktop machines is "different" to the mainstream. The extremely-high-end Pro; the tiny Mini; the sleek, integrated iMac. Not being directly comparable makes it easier to sell at a higher price than machines with similar headline specs. If you're trying to sell a premium product in a commodity market you have stand out.
I don't think we'll see a standard mid-range tower, they just can't make that obviously different enough to justify a premium price. I'm hoping for something just a bit bigger than a Mini. Still small and quiet and pretty enough to be different, but at least with a couple of 3.5" drive bays and expansion slots.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
From the article:
"even though it's standard OpenGL, we didn't care - we still wanted to do it because we felt like it would bring a better experience to the end user... we believe that you should get a better experience and we're going to devote engineering resources to make that happen, even if it helps the competition."
If this isn't just BS, then kudos to nVidia. Not that I actually use PS. I use the GIMP, and am eagerly awaiting 2.6 with GEGL. I'm told 2.5 builds now have multithreaded support which will be great for those heavy filters. I'd like to see an OpenGL frontend like this one for the GIMP some day.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Definition: "enterprise penetration" - having sexual relations with a co-worker on top of your desk.
How little do you pay your engineers that the price difference between a $3000 machine and an $1800 machine is even noticeable compared to their salaries and benefits? How little do you pay them that the difference between a $2300 4-core Mac Pro and a $1800 mini-tower is noticeable?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Hey! I have a pair of 4408A studio monitor speakers attached to my living room stereo, you insensitive clod! ;)
It's not the engineer's pay but their project funding. A lot of them would rather save $10k or $20k on new Macs for their department and spend it on other equipment or for time on some of our super computers. Part of their funding comes from gov't programs and customers and other part comes from selling their work to businesses, state gov'ts and NGO's. Sure, some orgs are flush and buy top line gear. Others are told they have a $2K cap on personal computing gear.
As for me paying them, heh, I'm just a contract tech monkey who gets to unpack and set up kit.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The next version of Flash (10) is supposed to have hardware accelerated 3D as well.
At this rate I wouldn't be surprised if the Adobe Reader was leveraging the GPU in its next release.
not really, if you have to buy a monitor. I bought entry level PC for my friends with decent 22" LCD (that is no way good for photo editing) at it costed them $880 after taxes.
A decent, non-TN LCD of decent size is easily $600 dollars.
Not to mention that CS4 is only supporting 64bit instructions on Windows. There have been reports that there won't be a 64bit version of the Creative Suite for the Mac line till CS5.
And yet, my e-penis is much larger than yours. ;)
I have 7 buttons, a scroll ball and 2000 DPI at 1000 Hz on my mouse.
And I actually know how to put it to use.
The Mighty Mouse might look good... like 80s white-plastic-sci-fi.
But in every other aspect it is as bad of a joke as 6-bit-LCDs.
Ergonomics, precision, functionality... you name it...
Apple is not selling a product. It's selling a dream.
I'm sorry, but my fantasy exceeds that dream by far, and I'm not susceptible to professional lying like in religion, hypnosis, politics, marketing, etc.
Luckily for Apple, I'm a rather rare kind of person on this planet.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Maybe some people just have a problem wasting money?
Photos.
And that's basically what's wrong with Apple!
I've wanted a Mac for a long time. However, my needs aren't met by the mini, and the mac pro is serious overkill. The only option left, is that all-in-one :(
A "normal" core 2 duo mid-tower (like a E8400, with 4GB or RAM, a decent radeon card, and a 750GB HD) would sell like crazy. My theory is, Apple doesn't want our money.
Apple can whine about hackintosh'es, but they're the very ones creating the need for them.
The extremely-high-end Pro
Dell XPS
the tiny Mini
Dell Studio Hybrid
Asus EeeBox
the sleek, integrated iMac.
Dell XPS One
HP Touchsmart
The 20" iMac has the cheaper LCD, the 24" is a higher quality panel. You still can't choose a matte screen though.
This is entirely the fault of Apple. Apple was touting Carbon as a viable solution until last year. Moving a huge app like PPro or Photoshop to Cocoa will take a lot of time. If Apple hadn't told everybody that Carbon was a viable platform for 64 bits Adobe would have started switching a long time ago.
Obviously Apple encouraged everybody to go Cocoa, but for Adobe and most other large apps that would have been an absurd choice. If Carbon was viable, why would they port to Cocoa at the expense of fixing application bugs and adding real features? Moving from Carbon to Cocoa would not give Adobe any new features but the cost would be significant. Staying with Carbon was the only sane solution no matter what the zealots claim.
Apple screwed everybody on that one. Not an unusual move for Apple really...
Now, many Apple fan-boys and dummies will state that Adobe should have moved a long time ago. It was the way of the future (despite Apple stating Carbon was too). Every sensible company should move to Cocoa according to these zealots. Problem is, not even Apple has done that. Final Cut Pro is a Carbon app and will need a significant re-write if it wants to go 64 bit. Perhaps the FCP team also believed Steve when he BS'ed about Carbon also being the future.
I drive a BMW and maybe you're happy with a Yugo, to each their own. I like Apple's products but I do agree there are better products. Then again, non of the mice or keyboards included with PCs I've bought from Dell or seen from HP in the past 6 months have been nearly as good as what Apple provides.
Yep, thats why people like me install OS X on the PCs and laptops instead of the elite labeled shit Apple sells.
Personally I find the XPS one to be ugly. That's a personal preference though.
I think the Studio Hybrid is probably one of the first little computers to really compete with the mini in size and looks. It looks ok, has better specs than the now ancient mac mini. A year ago it wasn't a terrible deal, today it is.
I also think you should compare the Mac Pro to the Precision line, but you're point still stands.
Everybody bitches and moans about the fact that Office costs $400 but somehow nobody minds getting completely raped by the Adobe monopoly.
I'm not sure why Apple has gone so long without selling a middle-of-the-road headless tower in the $1k-$2k range.
Because people keep giving them $3000 for $800 worth of parts.
If you could use commodity hardware, you could buy that midrange machine for $700.
That "you" was the plural you, meaning your organization. I didn't mean to imply that you paid them personally.
A friend tells a classic story of consulting. He shows up for a job, getting paid $BIGNUM/hour writing software. They sit him down in front of the crappiest computer you could imagine and tell him to go to work.
The thing takes so long to build the project that he finds himself spending more time by the coffee machine than in front of the computer. Meanwhile the manager has a shiny new multi-kilobuck machine collecting dust as his personal computer.
At the end of day 1 he points out that he's wasting a ton of time because his computer is so slow, and that the cost of a shiny new machine like the manager's would, at his hourly rate, pay for itself in something like two business days out of his multi-week contract.
The request is of course denied.
So yeah, there are dysfunctional organizations out there that are penny wise and pound foolish, paying top-notch people a lot of money and then not paying relatively trivial amounts for the equipment they need to be most productive. But I think we need to realize that the major fault there lies with the organizations, not in equipment suppliers who don't offer a slightly cut-rate version of their stuff.
And I don't think it has anything to do with being "flush". At the rate a decent engineer makes, counting benefits and other overhead, buying him a shiny new Mac Pro every two years would come out to be something like one half of one percent of the total cost of that engineer. It's also likely to make him more than one half of one percent more productive compared to some cut-rate machine, so the cost pays for itself. This is true no matter how much money the organization has.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
I just watched the videos showing panning with and without the GPU, and the difference is irrelevant. Who cares if Photoshop can only pan and zoom at a few FPS? That's not important.
They make no mention of GPU accelerated filters, which seems to me like where the real benefit would be. Why would I need GPU accelerated zooming in Photoshop? I'd much rather have a GPU-accelerated Gaussian blur, since that can often take minutes to hours.
When you see performance comparisons between machines, like when Jobs was showing-off the power of the PowerPC, they didn't measure how good a pan and zoom looked. They did a filter, and watched one system take 5 minutes and another take 15 minutes. It looks to me like Adobe is just trying to get "GPU accelerated" onto their box, even if it is some minute and irrelevant detail.
(Vista now supports GPU-accelerated BSOD!)
Wait for a dual-core VIA Nano? The single-core version is likely similar to an Athlon 64 just at lower speeds...
Already the CN896 has PCIEx16 support. nVidia wants to get PCIEx16 as a popular option for VIA boards, hoping to have at least one last niche in case it needs money. (right now nvidia is getting abused by everyone, it's very likely they'd launch extremely-low-power cards and market them with miniITX to dig into a different market)
iMac screens are not good for photo work? Someone should have told me! BS.
I wouldn't gripe about the mini (you get what you pay for), but I agree that the glossy-screen-or-else option is really annoying. It seems like everybody has forgotten the original reason why glossy screens were bad for computer work (eye strain, and useless when you're trying to judge an image and confusing details with glare). :P
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
That's because Adobe's software works really well. Seriously. Yes, it's being raped, but it's the difference between raped by a professional dominatrix (Adobe) and a prison-yard gangbanger (Microsoft).
Well, there you have it. I've reduced the professional software market to a comparison between bondage and prison rape.
Advice: on VPS providers
Something tells me you don't do anything involving graphics and these details don't concern you, as you can't spell matte correctly.
moox. for a new generation.
Since when does anyone *buy* Adobe Creative Suite?
I'm joking, of course. Sort of.
No, no, NO! You must say "According to a friend of a friend". Legally that will get you out of any legal trouble... well, according to a friend of a friend.
Zomg apostrophe only on contractions and possessives. Never, ever plurals.
moox. for a new generation.
No. In most cases you would be correct (Macbook, iMac, Macbook Pro), but the Mac Pro uses memory that is expensive no matter where you get it from. It's pretty much the one case where it's better to just buy the ram upgrades along with the machine.
The fun thing is Apple fanboys, when challenge, ignore/contest the quality reduction of using a 6-bit panel.
While I don't consider myself a fanboy, I do love my MacBook. That said, I agree with you completely, and absolutely hate the cool-temp TN in this thing. It really takes away from what is otherwise a great machine. I understand Apple's obsession with product differentiation, but come on -- is there really such a need for them to use such cheap-ass parts? Is it all their name that sells the computers still?
As I said, I love this MacBook but I would be over-the-top about it if it had a quality screen and even a mediocre graphics chipset.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
you couldn't find the mini-dvi output on the imac. You can sit on a pillow on the iMac and have a seat warmer, workstation combo....
Of course it's too expensive - it's what people will pay for it, and it's what people will pay for it because it's the defacto standard and they have no proper choice.
Yes, yes, I know.. you can use The Gimp! Or Paint Shop Pro! And while many home users most certainly could - no, they do not give a rats' ass about CMYK separation - they also hear that it is -the- choice among professionals.. and will thus go for it anyway. And professionals don't really need Photoshop most of the time either. What CG shop uses CMYK? What web developer uses the Panorama stitching function? Come on, give me a few anecdotal cases, and I'll show you thousands that make drop-shadows for buttons.
Until something or somebody can break through that defacto standard stuff, Photoshop (as buggy, archaic, and overpriced as it is) will remain the #1 choice... and will remain as expensive as it is.
In fact, things got more expensive... Compared to April 2008 for the same CS3 products ('same' in name, not in featureset, I suppose).
CS4 Design Standard: $1399 vs $1199
CS4 Web Premium: $1699 vs $1599
Contribute CS4: $199 vs $169
Photoshop CS4: $699 vs $649
But if you think that's bad, be glad you - at least, if you're in North America/United States - don't have to pay the "You love us so much, we'll let you to pay extra!"-charge. This is for the NL store as of September 22, exchange rate USD / EUR: 0.677620 (xe.net, indicative only), all prices excluding VAT (BTW) sourced from Adobe online store, all prices calculated back to dollars.
PRODUCT / USD US / USD NL
CS4 Design Standard / $1399 / $1873
CS4 Design Premium / $1799 / $2950
CS4 Web Standard / $999 / $1474
CS4 Web Premium / $1699 / $2507
CS4 Production Premium / $1699 / $2802
CS4 Master Collection / $2499 / $4131
After Effects CS4 / $999 / $1622
Contribute CS4 / $199 / $294
DreamWeaver CS4 / $399 / $663
Fireworks CS4 / $299 / $441
Flash CS4 / $699 / $1032
Illustrator CS4 / $599 / $958
InCopy CS4 / $249 / $367
InDesign CS4 / $699 / $1105
Photoshop CS4 / $699 / $1017
Photoshop CS4 Extended / $999 / $1578
Premiere Pro CS4 / $799 / $1253
Soundbooth CS4 / $199 / $294
On average, that's a price increase that seems to have no good reason* of 53.76% on average, with DreamWeaver CS4 taking the crown at 66% and CS4 Design Standard as the least increase at 34%.
* I should qualify the 'no good reason' bit, as otherwise there will be a slew of responses on why there's a price increase.. localization, local support, bla-dee-bla. Thankfully, I don't have to qualify it myself - another person made an excellent set of pages on this matter, and I suggest those who feel like posting such reasons first read them:
http://www.amanwithapencil.com/adobe.html - Adobe is ripping off European (and other non-US) customers
It deals with the most common 'reasons' and debunks them. I'll add one - most of the products do not have native Dutch versions and those that do are hardly sold. It's slightly dated (being for the CS3 launch), but the same things still apply. It also gives one very true answer that the author dug up from an interview, and serves as the basis for my earlier "You love us so much" statement:
I don't have anything against Adobe, or their products**, but I most certainly do take issue with their pricing in the various markets. Oh, and I also take
That's a hell of a lot of work to do for twelve people. I'm sure they are very grateful. Of course the marketing department is happy to have something to gush about also.
Everybody ready to pony up a few hundred for HDR tone mapping? Financial crisis? What crisis? I really need this stuff!!
I still don't understand why Apple is so secretive about APIs and why they don't give fair warning when they are about to drop one. Its not like its an iMac, nobody is going to wait till the new API comes out to start using your products(for the most part). And when they do drop one, they give almost no notice. For instance, we use quicktime for Java at work, and they deprecated it, but only told people at the 2008 WWDC(which is technically under NDA). Even before that you could see the writing on the wall(no 64 bit, no QT7 features). The info is pretty easy if you search for it, but Apple's website still promotes the thing as viable on their website. Come on, you are only going to piss people off by doing stuff like this.
Monstar L
The iMac has a DVI port, so this doesn't have to be a dealbreaker.
Are you trying to prove his point? Those would almost never be found in a studio.
(Btw, I meant this more as teasing - I'm waiting until I get a place with better reduction of outside sound to buy monitors myself.)
There's a -lot- of nice 64bit-only instructions that you can use for a lot of common calculation tasks, many of which apply to graphics processing.
Somebody tag this !gpgpu.
The Adobe suite are all graphics applications. The whole point of GPGPU is to use graphics hardware for something other than graphics, otherwise you're not really breaking that barrier. Nothing but plain old "hardware acceleration" to see here, and yes, that makes it "about time" for users of these apps.
yeah, my main 'hifi' is based on a studio monitor setup as well. i would never go back :)
Apple never said Carbon was the future. Carbon was always a compatibility fudge so that it was easier for OS9 apps to run on OSX, and to make porting apps to the new OS easier. Cocoa was always the way forward, it's just that Adobe never bothered to switch.
I'm not a Mac fanboy, I just use one at work.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That is why my customers that make their living with graphic artwork and photo editing refuse to let go of their CRT monitors. While they have LCD screens on their "goof off" machines,according to them you just can't beat a CRT for color reproduction. Me I just think FEAR looks nicer on my 19in CRT than it does on the LCD. Of course the only bad part is when your CRT dies you pretty much have to buy local as the shipping on one of those monsters will kill you,that is why I always keep a spare.:-) But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That kind of defeats the purpose of an iMac. Just get a MacMini then.
I started developing in Cocoa very early on - 10.1, if not before. I took a break after a couple of years and have recently come back to it.
It really struck me how different things are now compared to then in terms of projected attitude towards Cocoa. If you went on to the official mailings lists for specific APIs (rather than general help or such), Obj-C and Cocoa were definitely second class citizens. If it was a less-covered subject, any samples written by Apple were for Carbon with possible Cocoa support added later. Hell, all the GUI support for AudioUnits was Carbon-only for quite a while there. It felt like Cocoa was more of an advertising buzzword meant to attract newbie developers into making cute little simple programs, whereas Carbon got all the effort put into it and it seemed like all the Apple employees preferred to work in it.
Now they're all about Cocoa in public and in general, although there's still some marks of the old guard. Some APIs are still only in the Carbon world, and their docs on using Carbon APIs from Cocoa are not as obvious as they should be. (It's one of those things that once you know it, it's simple for most cases, but they don't bother to note it in useful places such as in APIs that look like they are Carbon-only.)
Hopefully it's a long, long time before Apple does a major platform change like that, because it definitely was not handled well.
(Btw, one reason I stopped for years was because after an OS update - probably a later 10.2.x release - I was buried in errors that I couldn't get out of with several days of effort. When I brought the project back to life under 10.5, the number of errors I got were minimal and all solved in a few hours. I guess I hit a bad release way back when.)
Nobody pays retail! You go down to your local community college and register for a class which will cost you like $90 and then you save almost 50% off the retail price of Creative Suite.
-1 Fanboy
Personally I find the XPS one to be ugly
Hey! You're on Slashdot, not Engadget! We don't care if a computer is fugly or not if it can perform well. :)
I agree. Sadly the Apple fanboys got to your post and moded you down. I'll never pay the Apple premium. It just doesn't get you as much as it should. You get a PC and you can put Linux on it or XP or that godforsaken Vista but the choice is yours. Not Apple's.
slap on some e-SATA ports and I'd call it ready for primetime.
Yes you are right, but your parent poster if talking about GPU acceleration, not 64 bit support. Macs also support OpenGL you know.
You can get a better screen and a better graphics card. It's called MacBook Pro. You get what you pay for.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
If they bring it back they need to make it Black.
Cars? Eeewww. Don't tell me you still live in the 20th century where you actually need cars. Pervert!
We ride on flying hot women with internet access and fuckstick-2.0-port. (I bet you're still on 1.0.)
You can't even *imagine* the number of... ehrm... "buttons" they have. O:-)
Don't try to win against me in fantasizing. You don't stand a chance! :D
On a serious note: Included? PCs in a whole? I haven't seen someone buying a PC as a whole for a looong time. Especially not including a keyboard and a mouse. On the other hand... We have a very nice community of people here that actually know how to build a PC out of the devices and help others with it. They usually get something nice in return. :D
To me "PC" always was a word for a set of devices for generic computing use. The CPU is a device. The DVD drive is a device. But a PC - here - is not a device.
P.S.: *Never* try to take me too serious. :D
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
What's wrong with Quartz extreme? At least on the Mac they could save themselves a lot of work if they
a) got their shit together, bite the bullet and after 8 years finally move PS over to Cocoa and make this application fit for competition on OS X again
b) used all the nice technology that is in OS X and Quartz for a change.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
You forgot to add in the price of the house to keep it in, the price of the car to pick it up and the cost of the education required to use it.
Apparently in Fanboyworld it's an acceptable part of the Apple Tax to buy RAM to replace in a system you've just bought (because they do make sure that they use as many slots as they can).
Definitely agree on the Precision. Much nicer, no tacky lights, etc. Though my wife loves being able to change the light color by software control panel. Me, I'm waiting for my Precision M4400 to arrive.
Yeah, if you were going to max out all eight RAM slots on your new Mac Pro that might actually be a problem here. Given the $1800 you'd have to spend to do that, having to remove the $50 worth that comes with the machine doesn't strike me as all that significant.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Damn and I just blew through 15 mod points the other day.
Though they haven't really improved Photoshop in like a decade. OK maybe slight exaggeration. And let me make no bones about it, I'm still really pissed Macromedia sold out to them. Life was much better with both Adobe & Macromedia in it.
Vote Quimby.
I won't be upgrading. Time to look for alternatives.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There's not much in the way of "perceived value" when dealing with computers. You either have good hardware, or you don't. ....
While you are presumably right about Apple's LCDs being inferior, this comment of yours is way wrong. I'm no benchmark expert so I can't really tell whether my Mac Pro is fast or my Diamond screen has nice colours. But I think they're good, so they work for me.
Perceived value is far more important than actual value. Here are some reasons why perceived value is important:
So, the criteria for my purchases are: (1) will it do the job? (2) will it irritate me? (3) can I afford it? Unpacking that a bit: (1) sufficiency is the first criterion, and optimal doesn't even appear; (2) perceived value and subjective measures of quality allow me to distinguish between the sufficient options.
It turns out that people using Macs are able to produce good work /despite/ the quality of the screens or the speed of the OS. That's because they are happy using them---otherwise, most of us would be off bitching over lattes.
Objectively, I'm perfectly aware that I could do the most important parts of my stuff on a stable 486. But (objectively) the subjective factors make that impractical.
Idiots, amazingly smug idiots.
From one smug idiot to another, don't sneeringly ignore subjective factors like perceived value. They're more important than you realise and they're why Steve Jobs is a billionaire and you are not. Of course, you shouldn't buy Macs because they would irritate you.
The XPS does not compare to the Mac Pro.
That is the problem. I have twice doen price comparisons, and the standard Mac Pro (the first was with Power Mac G5) is consistantly less that an equivelent from Dell (low-mid range Precision)
The device below, a quick and sloppy comperable to the Mac Pro for 2800, comes to 3,300.
Now if I remove the second CPU from both, they are very similar for $2300 (Apple) and $2400 (Dell).
The Apples are real nice to work on too.
My System Details
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5430 (2.66GHz,2X6M L2,1333)
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5430 (2.66GHz,2X6M L2,1333)
Genuine Windows Vista Business Bonus-Windows XP Professional downgrade
3 Year Limited Hardware Warranty with Next Business Day On-Site Service
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia NVS 290, Dual Monitor DVI Capable
2GB, DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (2 DIMMS)
16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVDâ and Roxio Creatorâ Dell Ed
C1 All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration
80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s,7200 RPM Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst Cacheâ
No Monitor
Resource DVD - Contains Diagnostics and Drivers
My Accessories
USB Entry Quietkey, No Hot Keys
Dell USB 2-Button Mechanical Mouse with Scroll
No Floppy Drive
Internal Chassis Speaker,Dell
My Software
My Services & Warranties
No Onsite System Setup
Also Included
Vista Premium Sticker
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
You can still plug an external display into a macbook, macbook pro, or imac. With all of photoshop's windows and tool panels you kinda need one anyway.
Jayne: "These are stone killers, little man. They ain't cuddly like me."
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smok
The really sad thing is that the typical /. misinformation is, in fact, misinformation.
The only Apple laptops which ship with the TN screen are the MacBooks... the consumer laptop.
All the Pro laptops are 8bit (I tested this last week in an Apple store.)
Idiots, amazingly self-righteous idiots.
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
What I still don't - and never will - understand is how this even comes close to being either acceptable, let alone defensible by the Apple crowd. Apple is charging you FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS for SIXTY FOUR DOLLARS worth of memory, and yet you're still all over the internet talking about how price point comparable Apple is to regular PC parts.
Something tells me you don't do anything involving graphics and these details don't concern you, as you can't spell matte correctly.
"matt" is the UK spelling.
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=49278&dict=CALD
The iMac has a DVI port, so this doesn't have to be a dealbreaker
Why would I buy a 20" iMac to put a 20"+ screen in front of it? Or do you mean I could use both? Dear god, no, the two screens could NEVER be properly color matched, and it would completely suck to have the color visibly shift as I dragged an image around the expanded desktop. No thank you.
Sorry, but I call bullshit.
I used to print and sell billboard banners in a previous life, and we printed at either 60 DPI or 110 DPI. Outrageous clients would require 300 DPI, and we'd happy laugh and charge them 4x the cost for being dumb. And they couldn't tell the difference.
That's nice, except we're talking about the cost of third-party Mac Pro memory, not first-party MacBook Pro memory.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
This is especially true when you use things like Illustrator which are vector based. They really only need enough memory to display it nicely on your display. Rending it to even a massive bitmap for some sort of 'high resolution' billboard would still only be done a few times, once perhaps for a large scale pre-production prototype, and the final output, assuming the billboard company can't deal with vector graphics based formats anyway. I don't really know how that particular industry works.
When you get into video editting or very large photos, or even some smaller ones with a large under buffer, memory starts to become a lot more important. Too bad thats one of those things where a lot of the people who do it prefer Macs.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No no, you need to provide a car analogy. It's like going to pick up the groceries in an F1.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
even the pro models have crappy TN panels.
This is ubiquitous though, and the bits per pixel are scarcely if at all documented.
This means it's pretty improbable that anyone will come eat their lunch any time soon, leaving them "safe" to do it, not that I don't despise them for it.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Technically you are completely correct. Aesthetically, however, PC's is better read by a plurality than PCs. One must try to speak to one's audience.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
they use glossy screens and apple does not let you pick if you want one or not like they do with the mac pro.
Screen finish has nothing to do with the screen panel.
Do they actually document that spec somewhere (you know, a quality screen would be a selling point), or does it depend on the manufacturing batch?
At least in the last build i tried, and this is what keeps me away from the gimp.
all transform and move options do not provide feedback until they are completed.
This makes stitching and reconstruction of images/scans very difficult and frustrating.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I suspect you're being sarcastic but in case you're not; I run a 24" iMac with a 32" 720p TV connected to it, the colors are obviously different since the TV isn't quite as good as the iMac at color reproduction but this is actually a good thing when doing anything that's supposed to end up on a TV since you can see a lot more accurately what it will look like.
Even back in college we'd use special workstations with high-end TVs hooked up to them whenever we were editing video, of course this was back in the days of oversaturated CRT TVs but there is still a difference between the image quality on a 32" LCD TV and a 24" LCD monitor (although in some cases there shouldn't be).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
The higher end iMacs, the Mac Pros, and the MacBook Pros all have real graphic cards.
But do they have real SCREENS?
I mean a proper 8-bit color space, instead of 6-bit dithering? I mean the ability choose matt vs glossy.
Obviously the Mac Pro lets you attach whatever you want to it, but the imacs and macbook pros stick you with the choice of exactly the one LCD screen apple chooses. (although the mbp used to let you choose between matte and glossy; i don't know if it still does; but that's just the finish not the technology.)
As far as i know, all Apple laptops use 6-bit TN screens. And there is a fair bit of information out there that iMacs have switched to 6-bit TN screens too, at least for 20" models. The 24" model is apparently an 8-bit S-IPS... but its not like apple makes this info readily available and the specs are subject to change, so you've got to pay constant attention.
Wow! You state the current scene for the entire PC market space and act as if Apple is an anomally.
Take a look at the 22/24 inch screens from all vendors and you'll be hard-pressed to find an S-IPS display under $600.
HP just finally released their:
HP LP2275w Black 22" 6ms(GTG) Widescreen LCD Monitor with DisplayPort input 300 cd/m2 1000:1 - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824176098
$379.99
for a S-PVA panel.
Personally, it's a great monitor and one I'd add as a secondary display on an iMac for a secondary display. Most video editing setups deal with dual displays.
Unless you wanted a competent GPU which is what this whole article and thread is about. The GMA in Mac mini and the "regular" MacBooks is about on par performance-wise with a cardboard replica.
Have you read the website for the product?
http://developer.apple.com/carbon/
Where is the notice (like you'd see in some msdn api's and methods) that this is a deprecated feature/api?
Also you're forgetting at the previous wwdc apple said that carbon was coming with them in the move to 64 bit - it was long after that when they announced that it wasn't.
You can't blame Adobe for that - moving to cocoa it a pretty huge endeavor for a really big project like photoshop or after effects.
Oh and for the Mac zealots - I'm typing this on a G4 powerbook.
And you got modded Insightful.
That's the funniest part.
Because it's so true.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
You mean the oldest and most famous graphic application didn't make use of a graphics processor before ? That can't be serious. Even before the time of 3D GPUs, there was a time of simple 2D acceleration. Why would you even want to write a graphic app if you are not using those features ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
screen panel has noting to do with the week gpu
Last build what you tried was 1.2.x?
Since 2.0.x the GIMP has shown you the preview of layer/area/image what you are transforming.
Bad side is, it is not in best quality, but enough to tell how it goes.
If you tried 2.3-2.4.x series, then you just need to look the tool option and "Preview:" part where you can choose "Outline", "Grid", "Image" and "Image + Grid"
It might be so that GIMP does not show the image preview by default, but just grid or outline. Then check out the "Normal" and "Corrective" options too if needed. And use zoom (Ctrl+wheel) to get closer if needed and you get better quality for the transforming. If you cant do it with GIMP, then you have not actually tried... so then go back and use Photoshop.
Apple always said Carbon was a viable future, and Apple also believed it since they never started porting FCP to Cocoa. Apple encouraged people to move to Cocoa, but for an application like PPro, FCP or similar that would have been insane given that Carbon was 100% viable. That is, until Apple, in a rather typical manner, screwed everybody, including the FCP team actually.
it's just that Adobe never bothered to switch
Adobe never switched because they are not insane. There was never any reason to switch to Cocoa. Why would they? Switching to Cocoa would have meant thousands of man-hours spent on porting an application and gaining nothing whatsoever. Adobe should focus on making their apps better, and porting it to Cocoa would have gained them or their customers nothing at all.
As long as Apple said that Carbon was going to be there any product manager advocating moving an application the size of PPro to a new API for no reason whatsoever should be fired instantly for gross incompetence. Adobe did exactly what they should and needed to do for a sane company, and Apple rammed a big stick up their ass just for laughs.
interesting. I will give it another try.
it's a shame i have yet to see a good color calibration tool for linux.. or maybe i'm also not looking hard enough there? I spent a week and a half searching for that though : /
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You are correct.
On these days when 64bit is coming, it sounds funny when people still speaks that 300DPI all the places. No matter what you do it is 72DPI, 300DPI and sometimes usually 150DPI. And then they try to get such "quality" from photo what is taken from 8Mpix camera and they want it to be size of 1x2 meters.
So the question is for them... how did professionals manage to do such prints 10 years ago with Macs (2-4Gb RAM) and photoshops when 64bit was "just a dream"?
Mayby the 64bit commercial effect is actually biting people because so many is believing that when then get 64bit CPU and software what supports it, they can get twice as fast computer... even they would play CS and type office documents and download torrents..
This is why I can make a nice living for my entire family just by importing software from the USA.
Shipping costs are very low, and margins are quite high for a computer related product.
I resell most software 10-30% below localized prices, keeping the remaining difference of 10-40% for myself.
So, you can either complain, or profit. I chose the latter after the former didn't change anything.
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
I would like to propose an addition to the meta-moderation system so that the parents 5, insightful mod can be meta-modded funny.
I may agree or disagree on your points but your comparison is a modern work of art.
You have obviously never heard of an external monitor port.
weak gpu has nothing to do with screen finish...
Why would I want to run OSX on my PC? And why would I have to to run any Adobe software?
Woohoo!
WTF?
Except for those outside the US who will probably pay in the region of $5000 for the same thing!
What almost always crashes Safari for me is the flash plugin and not actually Safari itself.
Isn't this simply 'tapping into the GPU' like any other openGL application?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Can you use soft you obtained under academic license for commercial (paid) work? If not and you are still going to do why not just dl it of the torrentz?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
The real irony comes in when you learn that all Apple monitors are just rebadged Samsung monitors.
Not that I dislike Samsung monitors (best consumer grade LCD panels out there in my opinion) its just that I've had arguments with Mac fanboys that their "Apple" monitor is better than my Samsung (2243BW) when its the same brand and an older model. It's also hilarious that a Mac fanboy pays about 20-40% (depending on store, in AU) more for an "Apple" Samsung than an actual Samsung (often using the exact same panel).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Well, I'd like to ram a big stick up Adobe's ass too, because of their older Windows apps that I have to support requiring administrator rights to even work (yeah, I know, I could set custom permissions on the part of hkey_local_machine they use, but I don't know /where/), and also because of Dmitri Sklyarov.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
$3000 workstations and touch-screen, all-in-one machines are mainstream? Uh, yeah, perhaps on your planet. I didn't say nobody else sold similar machines, but those you listed aren't mainstream, they're all niche, which is exactly my point. Mainstream PCs are mid-range towers which cost $500-$2000, which is exactly why Apple don't sell a mid-range tower.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Oh, before you wilfully misinterpret what I've written again, the HP is the touchscreen machine I was referring to.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
It's too bad that you need a $2300 mac pro to make use of it as the mini has a very weak video card and the imac screens are not good for photo work.
Why should it be "too bad" that you need a professional computer to make good use of professional software? I mean, that $2300 Mac Pro is still cheaper than the Adobe software suite to which you're referring.
Keep telling yourself you are not susceptible to professional lying. That's what the professional liars want you to believe.
Apparently you missed the part where I said I understand their differentiation goals. Yes, I am well aware that I can drop $3,000 on a laptop and get (1) a still-shitty TN screen and (2) one of those lovely GeForce 8600 chips that fail in batches. Whoopee.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!
The problem here is that Apple doesn't offer a normal mid-range machine. There's the Mac mini, which isn't very powerful and isn't expandable, and then you have the Mac Pro, which is a serious professional level workstation. The only thing in between is their all-in-one machine, which isn't suitable for everyone (including serious professional designers).
This is why after a dozen or more years as a dedicated Mac user, I decided to set up a Hacknitosh tower. I now have a Quad Core 2 Duo with 6GB of RAM, 512MB GPU and over a terabyte of (combined) storage. Total price paid was less than $700. That's a $100 more than Apple's base model Mini which features a Core2Duo, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive and integrated graphics (so no dual monitors for me).
I didn't want to make the jump but it seems I'm just no longer in Apple's target demographic. As many other Mac users have been quick to point out, if I can't drop $2500 on a computer then I'm not actually a professional and Apple doesn't want my business. Fair enough. But I've been self employed as a web designer for over a decade and it's not that I can't afford a new $2500 Mac (though lately it has been hard), it's that I can't justify the purchase of one. I need dual (upgradable) monitors, plenty of RAM slots and some hard drive bays. If I could get that for under a grand in PC Land should I really pay 2X as much just for the Apple logo?
Simply put, I'd go back to Apple in a heartbeat if they brought back the mid range tower. But until they do that I'm stuck with the Hackintosh. And, I hate to say this, but so far it's more stable than my wife's iMac so I'm in no hurry.
From what I've seen they can be beaten with OLED panels, but those aren't yet available in the necessary size.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I suspect you're being sarcastic but in case you're not; I run a 24" iMac with a 32" 720p TV connected to it, the colors are obviously different since the TV isn't quite as good as the iMac at color reproduction but this is actually a good thing when doing anything that's supposed to end up on a TV since you can see a lot more accurately what it will look like.
I'd say that's something of a special case, given that you are actually targeting TV.
Wow! You state the current scene for the entire PC market space and act as if Apple is an anomally.
Apple is an anomally.
The ENTIRE PC market space lets you buy an inexpensive core 2 duo tower and attach whatever monitor you want to it. Sure there are all-in-ones in PC land, but not one vendor forces you to choose to buy a xeon based system just to get into a tower.
There are also a number of options out there in PC land if you don't want a TN based laptop.
How is is possible for anyone to take you seriously when fully 2/3 of your paragraphs end with smileys? :-O
You have obviously never heard of an external monitor port.
Of course I have. So I can attach a 2nd monitor to an imac? big deal. Why would I want a good screen and a bad screen? With a PC I could (and do) have two good screens, that match.
raped by a professional dominatrix (Adobe)
How did I miss that option? I guess Adobe doesn't offer that with Photoshop Elements. :(
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
And neither of you twits can spell "anomaly"
costed is not a word. You were looking for "cost", where the past-tense is the same as the present tense.
I just upgraded from 2gb to 4gb on my MacPro. Didn't get 4gb when I got the PC cuz it was 800$+ for 2gb more, a year later bought it from 3rd party for $200.
I think Mac is a kind of griffe computing. Ok, I know, PPC is RISC, and as far as I know, RISC is much better than CISC or "CRISC". But all Mac products are expensive and sometimes as I see, they are "Hypening the common (my newly invented term :D)" such I-Phone and IPod. I don't see any great step toward the innovation. And more, is an elitized brand (you know dude, just follow the news such apple store :D). But I don't have anything against apple, but for me, who lives in an emerging country (Brazil), buying a mac is close to pay $2500 for a "Prada" sunglasses which a $100 "generic-but-good-brand" sunglasses does the same.
their older Windows apps that I have to support requiring administrator rights to even work
This is an annoyance, and a significant part of the blame belongs with Microsoft for the way they handled the move from the Win 9x world to the Win NT/2000/XP World. A lot of what was common practice, even in Microsoft documentation for quite some time, meant that you had to run as an Administrator on NT-based operating systems. The fact that this has been fixed by most software vendors today shows that it was a minor issue. It pales compared to Apple screwing over all of the third-party developers for Mac OS X.
and also because of Dmitri Sklyarov
Why would you be pissed about this? Because Adobe advocated his release from just a few days after his arrest? Under US law Adobe had a valid reason for complaint against Elcomsoft, but it wasn't Adobe who arrested Dimitri.
Obviously Apple encouraged everybody to go Cocoa, [ ... ]>
[ ... ] but all those damn fanbois stuck to their lattes.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Mac iCube.
Core2Duo, One PCI-e X16 slot filled with an ATI 4670 and an e-SATA slot.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That'll get you a student license. You want to do anything professionally with it and you have to rebuy it.
Though they haven't really improved Photoshop in like a decade. OK maybe slight exaggeration.
I still haven't upgraded from Photoshop 5.0. That was released in, what, 97? 98?
There are a few problems with it that really show. The lack of layer grouping makes working with other people's files problematic (although not impossible -- the file format change was backwards compatible). It completely refuses to work with OpenType fonts (have to convert 'em all to truetype for it to even realise they're there). Kerning gets screwed up with small fonts at low resolutions.
It does, however, work nicely on systems with not very much memory, only uses up 40MB of disk space, and works fine without installation (i.e., I can keep a copy on my USB memory stick).
I'm thinking of an upgrade. I hear version 7 was a particular leap forward. :)
AHAHAHAHAHAHA
Uh. Maybe you are.
IMO, subjective value flew out the window the moment real competition moved into the neighborhood.
I realize people want something that gets the job done, but these days just about any new PC is more than capable of doing most any job a normal user can throw at it. If the $1500 Macbook is made of the same cheap Flextronics-made junk as the $500 Dell, suddenly the Macbook doesn't look like such a great machine anymore. The Mac OS is certainly a contributing factor to Apple's success, but few people work with the operating system, they work with the 3rd party apps like Photoshop and Cubase and Office, apps which run just fine on the cheap Dell.
Perceived value only works when there is no obvious value indicator to trump it.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
They get even more pissed off when you tell them your cheap Dell LCD uses the same guts as their Apple LCD that costs twice as much, and never goes on special.
The problem is that Apple LCDs used to be the hotness. They cost an arm and a leg, but they looked better than the competition, in part due to better backlighting yielding more vivid colors. Eight years ago, when someone bought an Apple Cinema Display, it came with bragging rights. That is no longer true in 2008.
If you don't mind having iPhones thrown at your face, feel free to tell your favorite Mac freak that Mac motherboards are made by Foxconn, which also makes Dell motherboards, and it generally regarded as one of the cheapest, junkiest brands in the industry.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Maybe they are like me, and can't stand the ambiguity of emotionless text.
I know that slashdot is dominated by logic-dominated humans. But there is much more out there, and many logic-dominated humans have a deficiency in emotional communication, which is rather sadm because they see it as something good. (We are no Vulcans, and pure logic is the opposite of ideal for humans.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You mean like you? :D
Well, I do not take *anything* by the above groups, fanatic or extreme people seriously, and normally I do not even listen to it. ;)
And if they insist, I throw them trough some hard-core logic reasoning shit, where they usually lose pretty quickly.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Says who?
Midrange machines hardly count as "the crappiest computer you could imagine"...
That comment might make sense if i ever did count it as such, but I did not.
The story was a stronger version of the situation. A guy making a whole lot of money with a really terrible computer, such that the ROI for something better would come in literally days. In the case of the midrange computer versus a high-end one, the ROI may be weeks or months, but the net result is the same: an overall savings in money.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
And I guess your $999 PC you're comparing to the "expensive" Apple also has eight cores, a very cleanly designed and case optimized for low noise and all the other stuff you get for those $2K, right? Right?
Unless you're talking video editing or retouching large images (in the multi-GB range), 2 GB of RAM are quite okay. OSX 10.5 needs a mere 180 MB or so of RAM when booted, not the GB or so Vista needs (or so I heard), so there's more space for applications on OSX. I agree that more RAM is always better, but the 2 GB in the minimal configuration are OK. If you're doing bad-ass stuff, you're reconfiguring the machine anyway.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
For one contract job I have, I have company laptop that's really locked down. It had PS 7, and when CS came out, they installed that version. Due to the anti-piracy/activation stuff, they were never able to get CS to work - activation just wouldn't stick. I finally said, the hell with it, I'll just use 7 when I need it and truthfully, I barely notice. I use my own machine with CS3 for 90% of the stuff I do, but when I just need to do something quick while working on the other machine, version 7 does the job just fine.
Vote Quimby.