Adobe put a page up (named ‘pcpreferred.html’) stating that the PC is preffered to run Adobe products. Adobe, along with Quark and Macromedia, are the long standing allies to Apple, offering the most important products that literally drive Mac sales in the Pro market. For historical reasons mostly, it is now of surprise to see Adobe openly verifying and backing up Digital Producer Magazine’s benchmarks and recommending PCs instead of Macs to their customers (even if PCs have indeed overtake Macs speed-wise the last 1-2 years). This is a blow for Apple, sales and marketing-wise and we will wait for a reaction from Apple towards Adobe.
Adobe ‘Prefers’ Customers to Use PCs Instead of Macs
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Adobe would maken linux or bsd versions of their software….
It is bizarre for Adobe to put forward benchmarks IT KNOWS are bogus. I see Redmond’s hand in this. But, beyond that– why use a PC and have to deal with an ugly, illogical UI and have it lock up every few hours when you can use a Mac and run it all day? Makes no sense.
Adobe seems to use QT, so I thnk that version os their software will appear for linux/unix soon. Otherwise why use Qt.
I am porting to QT now, totally cool it is.
-Jason
why would Adobe bite the platform that made them who they are today?
>It is bizarre for Adobe to put forward benchmarks IT KNOWS are bogus.
The benchmarks were NOT bogus. Get your facts right. Adobe seemed to have verify them, and in fact it makes sense a P4 at 3 GHz to run faster than a dual 1,25 GHz, don’t you think so? Leave zealotry aside and think a bit. GCC is not even as good as ICC and when it comes to PPC, GCC produces even worse code, so it is of NO wonder why any PPC app won’t run as fast as the same app would run on that fast P4. The guys at Digital Producer Magazine did a good job with their benchmarks back then.
>Adobe seems to use QT
Only for *one* product, not for Photoshop.
>why would Adobe bite the platform that made them who they are today?
Competition… Business as usual…
poor richard says It is bizarre for Adobe to put forward benchmarks IT KNOWS are bogus, then adds why use a PC and have to deal with an ugly, illogical UI and have it lock up every few hours when you can use a Mac and run it all day.
That itself summarizes his logic, call the truth a bogus, and then make up another bogus claim yourself and call it the truth.
Adobe tells the truth, obviously it cares about its customers.
>>Adobe seems to use QT
>Only for *one* product, not for Photoshop.
Do you think that perhaps they would be doing some behind the scenes R&D with QT and their other products?
I mean why use QT for that one product (Photoshop Album) without using it for the others (eventually..)
-Jason
Eventually, maybe they will go for it, who’s to say? But for now, they only announced QT only for a single product…
I would hardly say that that page at adobe.com constitutes the company “recommends” that users use PCs or even that the PC is “preferred.” It clearly displays that the current high-end Macs are not as fast as the current high-end PCs. That’s not really up for debate anymore anyway. There are a lot of reasons to use a particular platform besides speed, though. (I’ll admit that some graphics and video people are the few who really need to be at the top of the speed scale, though). This is a statement of fact, and I think it’s to Adobe’s benefit to avoid looking like blind Mac zealots just because of the long history of development on the Mac platform. But show me where on that page it says that Adobe is telling people to use PCs.
Actually, I am hoping this means that Apple’s about to put Adobe out business just like they are sticking to Avid with Final Cut Pro. If Apple did Photoshop one better with image editting, I think it would be GREAT.
I think it is crystal clear when they name the html file as “pcpreffered” and when they say: “The PC outperformed the similar Macintosh machine, at an impressive rate.”
And this page is under the Video section of Adobe, and we all know that Video encoding needs speed and this is what customers need when they do pro video work. To me, all these clues together, translate as “Adobe Recommends PCs” and I believe the message is crystal clear.
why use a PC and have to deal with an ugly, illogical UI and have it lock up every few hours when you can use a Mac and run it all day? Makes no sense.
I assume this guy is trolling ?
The only thing that seems to imply that Adobe is recommending PCs over Macs is the filename. Nothing in the text of the page says anything to that effect. They simply state that PCs are currently the performance leaders.
A page like this really isn’t going to convince anyone except a newcomer which platform to take, and I think for those people a PC is probably the better way to go. Obviously the pros have other criteria to keep in mind beyond simply which platform sports the fastest processor.
We’ll see how long this remains up though. With the forthcoming release of PPC970, I think the stage is set for the situation to change somewhat.
If Apple is going to start using the 970 later this year, then it is odd that Adobe would put this page up. I don’t know, but I do know Adobe wasn’t happy with Apple for using Display Postscript in OS X. This is interesting though – Steve probably went through the roof 🙂
Adobe would maken linux or bsd versions of their software….
Adobe isn’t going to be porting things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Acrobat (that is to say, Acrobat, not Acrobat Reader) to Linux/BSD for a long, long time…
They don’t have much incentive to. These are all professional products, and the professional userbase isn’t using Linux systems for graphic design/layout at this point in time. The majority of them are using Macs, with a certain amount of acceptance of PCs in certain areas…
If you prefer less interruptions in your computer work don’t use a windows pc.
“I assume this guy is trolling ?”
Just stating what anybody who has used both platforms extensively already knows. YOU are the one who is trolling.
Besides, even if you BELIEVE their patently bogus benchmarks, they simply respresent a small slice in time. For most years, PPC has been so far ahead of Intel there has been no debate. It’s just in the past 6 months or so, with the “MHZ” gap that people have even been able to FUDGE benchmarks that make the Intels look good. Hopefully, MOT or IBM will get off their butts and set things straight soon.
I do know Adobe wasn’t happy with Apple for using Display Postscript in OS X.
OS X’s drawing libraries (Quartz 2D) use a PDF based rendering model. Display PostScript was used by OpenStep. By using PDF, Apple did avoid paying license fees to use Adobe code in their display server, however I don’t know if Adobe was really too angered by that. Apple has done a great deal for Adobe recently, such as bundling InDesign in the wake of Quark’s failure to release QuartkXPress 6.
While loyalties between Apple and Adobe (and also Apple and Quark) are somewhat more tenuous than they have been previously, it’s clear that Adobe is doing its best to support the Mac platform, and Apple does what it can to help Adobe (albeit when it furthers Apple’s own ends)
Besides, even if you BELIEVE their patently bogus benchmarks,
I’m a Mac owner, and I love Apple as a company. However, I must say, there’s nothing bogus about these benchmarks. Clearly x86 is the performance leader at this point in time.
they simply respresent a small slice in time. For most years, PPC has been so far ahead of Intel there has been no debate.
This is very true. Apple has been the performance leader for quite some time, and it’s only in the past two years that we’ve seen them slip. Unfortunately, Apple is still a “price leader” and this is a major point of contention.
It’s just in the past 6 months or so, with the “MHZ” gap that people have even been able to FUDGE benchmarks that make the Intels look good.
I don’t think there’s any way around it… these benchmarks are perfectly ligitimate. Macs are simply slower computers at this point in time.
Hopefully, MOT or IBM will get off their butts and set things straight soon.
Motorola is entirely the problem. They care only for the embedded market now, and don’t see Apple’s need for faster processors as worth the necessary R&D.
IBM, on the other hand, has already done the R&D. Furthermore, they’re the leader in manufacturing processes, ahead of both Intel and AMD. I expect the Power4-derived PPC970 to level the playing field, and the Power5-derived PPC970 successor to once again allow Apple to reclaim the throne as the performance leader.
For now though, there is no debate, the fastest Apple systems are significantly slower than the fastest PCs.
i dont know how well adoubes products use smp. if they do it at all. it would be nice to se some tests on runnig to bechmarks at the same time on the appel. tex runing filters on 2 diffrent pictures on the same time.
I thought just about everyone knew that the latest PCs were faster than high end Macs? Certainly most professionals must be aware of that fact when they buy computers. Most of the Mac people I know, (including the place I work) stick with Macs because of an investment in software and training, or simply because they like them.
IME even with Mac OS X, Macs don’t have a speed or stability advantage over Windows 2000/XP. The arguable advantage of the Mac OS X GUI is obviously very much a matter of personal preference. Hopefully Apple will soon get a CPU that can keep up with Intel for a while, otherwise I think they’re going to start losing market share in the high end.
The news is Adobe’s stance on the issue, not the fact that PCs are faster than Macs.
http://www.adobe.com/motion/main.html
under the title “perfer pc for dv?” it links to this page with the following synopsis:
“See what an industry expert has to say about PC vs. Mac for digital video editing”
Now, if they just wrote after effects to actually take advantage of smp . . . [/end excuses]
Sorry Poor Richard, but I’m going to have to ask you to back up your claim that these benchmarks are bogus. Sure, Jobs makes wild claims about their performance, but you have to consider the source. I haven’t seen anyone but Apple (and Apple fanboys without any evidence) claim that Apples are faster. Adobe sure seems like an unbiased party to me. OSX is more elegant and the machines are pretty, but Apple is really suffering now from Motorolla’s inability to compete with Intel. Hopefully, they will fare better with IBM.
I don’t think Adobe intended for it to be there.
If you go to the page http://www.adobe.com/motion/main.html you will see the link for the article, but the link says this:
http://www.adobe.com/motion/www.adobe.com/motion/gear/pcpreffered.h…
which will not be found. If you delete the first http://www.adobe.com/motion it still doesn’t work.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this can’t even be found by tomorrow.
>I don’t think Adobe intended for it to be there.
It was intended to go there. The fact that now has a mangled URL doesn’t excuse them of this page BEING there and being *created* in the first place.
that intel release a new processor (Centrino) with an efficient processor design at a clock speed of 1.6 Ghz and is comparable to a 2.4Ghz in performance.
A few things can be gleamed from this.
Intel were pushing brute force over efficiency.
Intel now have to market these as being “better or faster”, thus nullifying their own mhz propaganda. Somehow they will convince Joe Public that the 3Ghz desktop processor in their new laptop is inferior or on par with a 1.6Ghz Centrino laptop while being a few hundred notes more…you couldn’t pay for that type of entertainment.
Considering the price of these new systems…Apple is NO LONGER the price leader in laptops that offer long battery life with 5,6, over 7 hours worth juice coupled with low weight with an efficient processor design.
Again Apple was their first.
I bought an Apple machine because a Centrino was too expensive, forget the fact i hate MS and XP, this was a hardware purchase, Apple have a CHEAPER product on the market because Intel have finally changed tact and decided the current range of processors for their laptops were naff, those being the P4 and the P4M, they have rubbish battery life.
You are paying the premuim now for the Intel machines.
Just thought i would point this out and i will admit still that the processors from intel are better but THEIR prices are to much when it comes to these particular type of laptops.
Seem like a great way for Adobe to look wicked fast and crucial on both platforms. Why not put yourself in the center of the Mac/PC who’s faster war? Adobe comes out looking good either way and “embeds” itself as the benchmark of both platforms. Watch as this specific article is brought up once Apple gets their Mhz sh*t together. Or maybe I’m completely wrong and I should have just gone back to /.
The prepress industry might not be using Linux, but a lot of 3D shops, notably Industrial Light and Magic, of Star Wars fame, are switching over. Most of the major 3D packages (XSI, Maya, Houdini) run on Linux for that reason. In the articles I’ve read, they still keep some Mac and Windows machines running Photoshop, and it would at least simplify their IT infrastructure if Photoshop ran on Linux too.
The first graph on the page is good – it manages to turn 54 seconds into 0.54 minutes making the PC look more than twice as fast – instead of roughly 35 percent – granted 35 percent is enough.
In the articles I’ve read, they still keep some Mac and Windows machines running Photoshop, and it would at least simplify their IT infrastructure if Photoshop ran on Linux too.
You’re quoting the needs of one shop. Considering the logistics involved in a Photoshop port to Linux, do you think it makes sense for Adobe to port Photoshop to Linux so that a single shop can “simplify their IT infrastructure”?
I’m not saying there isn’t a need, I’m saying the need is far to small for Apple to justify the expendature required by the port. The ROI would certainly be negative, and most likely by a considerable amount.
The first graph on the page is good – it manages to turn 54 seconds into 0.54 minutes making the PC look more than twice as fast – instead of roughly 35 percent – granted 35 percent is enough.
Get your eyes checked, it’s “:54”, not “0.54 minutes”, and the Mac is at “1:25” I’d say that’s perfectly clear.
Come on kids…the “motion” section is dedicated to Premiere, an app essentially killed by FCP on the Mac side. So if they are pimping their video software, what platform do you think they’ll recommend?
As far as performance, Avid now has all their stuff ported to OSX (including Symphony), so I don’t think that’s the issue…
I don’t even want to get into this, but comments like “in fact it makes sense a P4 at 3 GHz to run faster than a dual 1,25 GHz, don’t you think so?” do require some re-education. Check your facts, classmates.
A P4 at 3 GHz may run faster than dual G4 chips at 1.25 GHz, but not because of the GHz rate per se. You’re comparing apples and oranges — yes, both are fruit, but of very different types. And for a long time, Apple Macs running chips at ostensibly much slower clock rates were faster than their counterpart PCs — true story, L-platers.
One analogy I’ve seen is of engines. Call the P4 a V6, and the G4 a V8. The V8 will go as fast (OK, maybe not quite, but this is an analogy, remember) as the V6 at much slower revs (or GHz, if you’re still struggling to keep up). So while we’re exhorting people to get their facts straight, lets get our facts straight.
The benchmarks were NOT bogus. Get your facts right. Adobe seemed to have verify them, and in fact it makes sense a P4 at 3 GHz to run faster than a dual 1,25 GHz, don’t you think so? Leave zealotry aside and think a bit. GCC is not even as good as ICC and when it comes to PPC, GCC produces even worse code, so it is of NO wonder why any PPC app won’t run as fast as the same app would run on that fast P4. The guys at Digital Producer Magazine did a good job with their benchmarks back then.
I’m willing to be that the software engineers at Adobe would disagree with your statements. One thing that should be noted about Adobe optimization on certain products is that Intel engineers do the optimization for the PC platform and the engineers at Adobe do the optimization for the Macs. And on the general side, the MAC is generally faster for most operations on apps, let’s say PHOTOSHOP. GCC, ICC – it doesn’t really matter which one you use if you’re breaking it down to the pure assembly. Adobe houses some of the brightest minds in the world, do you not think they would swoop down to the assembly level to optimize the most critical parts of their applications? It is only a fools assumption to believe that Adobe loads up an application into their IDE and hits “Build” to perform the compilation for any platform. Certain Adobe products have several million lines of code and have been known to break the Visual C++ IDE. It’s been said that certain apps have to be compiled in parts on the PC because of the poor engineering of the IDE/Compilers on the PC side. The guy at Digital Magazine did exactly what he knew how to do – run stats and write. It doesn’t take Jesus Christ to perform miracles such as making a 3ghz P4 run faster then a Dual Mac 1.25ghz. It’s only logical to assume that it would marginally faster due purely to the sheer speed difference. But to say that it runs fasther alone on this element is a mistake left only to be committed by an ammature user. The reason why many people prefer apps like Photoshop on the MAC is that the handling of large images are more elegant. Try it for yourself. Load up so really really big images and try to manipulate them on both platforms. Make sure they’re in the approximage range as far as RAM goes. Keep in mind this is all said without SSE, MMX, and other “multimedia” instructions in mind or various support systems on both for color sequencing and manipulation.
It can probably go without saying some of the lighter weight applications do run faster on the PC due to the speed differential on that two platforms. But for anything mission critical – I would be willing to say that the MAC could either keep up with a much faster PC, if not marginally defeat it.
> Get your eyes checked, it’s “:54”, not “0.54 minutes”, and the Mac is at “1:25” I’d say that’s perfectly clear.
Uhh, you’re wrong. What the hell would 0:9 be? They’re very clearly dots, not colons. 54 seconds should be right on 0.9 and 1.25 should be near to 1.5 if the scale is minutes. Otherwise they should be at 54 and 85 if you want to go with seconds.
Crackedbutter, you’re absolutely right about this. I can’t say much about the recent benchmarks–I’m sure they’re right or close, as everyone is aware of Motorola’s problems with development on a new PPC chip–but Mhz aren’t the end-all-be-all. And price, especially in the notebook field, is far less an issue now.
Come on guys, stop with the bickering. Did you really look at Adobe’s web page? Look at the bottom, what do you see? – a link to a digital video gear page. It’s nothing more than a cross promotion page for PC products. It really shows how pissed off Adobe is over FCP. (Or maybe they are afraid?)
The Photoshop plugin SDK is so based on Macintosh programming ideas that it’s not even funny. On the PC you have to jump through some many holes just for message passing and endian issues that it’s a total PITA to deal with.
If PCs reflect the major installed base and desired machine for Adobe products, they could at least restructure their SDKs to be PC oriented. Screw backward compatibility with older plugins, they’ll just need to be re-written, as their were between Photoshop 4 and 5.
Leave zealotry aside and think a bit.
Eugenia, you ask too much of us.
Competition… Business as usual…
Does that mean no consumer should ever have product loyalty? Is money the only thing that matters? Both rhetorical.
If you go to the main page: http://www.adobe.com/motion/ and click the PC DV link that “should” take you to this page, you get a page not found. Hummm…
I’d say Adobe is simply echoing the basic truth that particularly for video rendering, PCs can be considerably faster. Eugenia’s the one who noted this was linked in the Digital Video section of the Adobe site. To me, though, linking it there suggests that they’re not throwing quite the gauntlet down to Apple she concluded that they were.
I also noticed that the link to the article on Adobe’s site is currently broken, but it looks more like a ‘somebody wasn’t paying attention when they uploaded the website’ sort of thing.
Maybe Adobe knows what Apple will be updating and showing at NAB, who needs Premiere and After Effects when you’ve got FCP and SHAKE.
@Jay: Developers, especially important ones like Adobe and Microsoft, get the prototypes first right? So probably there is no Mac 970. Or maybe the Mac is only a little faster than what they have now. Or maybe Adobe got wind of news that would piss them off – maybe Apple was planning to compete with some of Adobe products (it isn’t the first time).
The more pro video Mac customers switch to the PC the larger the market for Premiere, assuming Apple never releases a Windows version of Final Cut. Smart business move for Adobe in reaction to a direct attack from Apple.
This page is evidence Adobe continues to distance itself from a (shrinking) Mac market. Apple has resorted to using price cuts on it’s obscenely profitable display lineup to goose workstation sales. It’s getting so small there is no room for competing apps at the high end. Mac users like myself will have to learn how to justify 1.25% market share as well as we defend 2.5% today. Adobe needs something better for their shareholders.
You know, Adobe better keep in line or they will find themselves with a cheaper, better Apple-made version of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. By keep in line, I mean, not sabotaging/neglecting the mac versions of things (like Adobe After Effects prominently featured in this shootout).
Apple ain’t taking anyone’s crap anymore. Remember IE, slow piece of crud that MS had no incentive to improve. Remember all that bad press about how browsing was “slow” on the mac. Hello Safari. This is the new plan — taking control of your own destiny rather than a slow and inevitable slide led by others with contrary interests.
http://www.creativemac.com/2002/05_may/features/g4benchmarks020514….
This testing was done by a co-editor of the Charles White’s, who obviously is aware of this issue with Adobe’s software but continues to grind his axe with Apple anyway. If Adobe did half as good a job optimizing AE for dual-processors and altivec as Apple did with Final Cut Pro, I suspect it would tell a much diferent story. Be that as it may, I agree the actual performance is what it is. But to lay the entire blame on the hardware is bogus, actually. Particularly when Adobe claims it is (maybe, but poorly).
until their money runs out.
You want a bunch of devs that take no crap from anyone? Look at those crazy GNU folks. Man, they’re mean! GIMP and Film GIMP kick ass all over anything Adobe will ever make. Cuz its free!! Get it? Hahaha…
Who the heck would want to source all their apps from Apple. They would be crap. Any company that controls hardware/software without competition will die. That is why Apple NEEDS third parties (Adobe, Macromedia, and yes, even Microsoft) or no one in their right mind would recommend a product from this company. Remember don’t put all your eggs in one basket, we all no what happens when things go wrong! Just my two cents.
…Only that Adobe is rubbing in Apple’s face. Not sure why they’d want to do that when they already spent gobs of money porting over product.
So many people think that the 970 is Apple’s saviour, I disagree. I think that if Apple doesn’t move to something like x64, they’re screwed. The 970 is a decent performer – on paper – but it’s already showing it’s age! 1.8 GHz at launch? By the time this thing gets underway you’ll have processors rated at TWICE that speed.
There is truth to the argument that GHz isn’t everything (look at the Athlon for instance), however that only goes so far. IBM and Motorola are no longer interested in seriously competing with the like of AMD, Intel, and VIA. IN fact, their process technologies help CREATE the Opteron!
IBM’s main thrust with the 970 is the server market. Motorola lost their way with the 68000 series and has taken (or left) the PPC in it’s own embedded world now. In short, neither company CARES about Apple’s 5% marketshare.
I think Apple needs to seriously consider moving on here. The small-cache Opteron (Athlon64) would be a good choice IMHO. At least they wouldn’t be 0wns0red by Intel – something they loathe to think about.
appleforever: Yes, it’s good that Apple has realized that it can bring some competition into their market by making their own apps like Safari and the “iApps”. And it should only push developers harder to make even more kick-ass software. Remember Watson? It *STILL* blows Sherlock 3 out of the water, and for a reasonable price.
Do you really think Apple could develop (in a reasonable amount of time) an app to compete directly with Photoshop? Why would they? I can see the browser (IE sucks on OS X) and video software (hello Premiere, multiple timelines, please?) issues… but Photoshop is *the* graphics standard on both Windows and Mac, and I think Apple knows it.
They just need to settle on a chip architecture and STICK WITH IT so the software companies don’t just get comfortable (like with AltiVec optimization) with an architecture only to have it change (why do you think the PPC970 supports AltiVec?). I think that’s why the x86 platform has been consistent — the software companies know how to write for the x86 architecture because it’s been around for a while.
I guess I’m done (thanks ADD).
Joe said: “Any company that controls hardware/software without competition will die. That is why Apple NEEDS third parties (Adobe, Macromedia, and yes, even Microsoft) or no one in their right mind would recommend a product from this company.”
First of all, Apple has competition. Buttloads of competition. It’s called windows. If they produced a Photoshop equivalent, they would have competition. It’s called Photoshop. Even if Photoshop stopped being made for the mac, it would be made for windows and that would be competition. People are just confused when they claim that Apple making the app (a la iPhoto or iTunes) eliminates competition. There’s always competition and it’s very very vigorous. It’s called windows and the whole frickin wintel platform.
why use a PC and have to deal with an ugly, illogical UI and have it lock up every few hours when you can use a Mac and run it all day.
Gee, that would almost be salient, except for the fact that a) WindowsXP is really stable and b)there are no UI differences between Adobe Windows and Adobe Macintosh products.
Adobe stands to sell more units now to Windows users than Mac users…
As someone who uses both Windows and Macintosh machines I find most Adobe products work about the same in terms of overall workflow. Video compositing in After Effects is way faster on a PC but that is about it. When you look at other bottlenecks other than speed [like file management and color calibration issues] it is very difficult to pick a winner on this.
I was very close to moving my work over to a PC based workflow about a year ago but refinements to Mac OS X in the past year as well as improvements to Adobe products [i.e., InDesign and Photoshop] have kept me on the Mac.
I think people should really just go with what they know and stop the bickering about which OS is better. That argument became tired and boring about half a decade ago. Time to move on…
Look as long as Adobe keeps up a nice product for Apple (properly optimized, reasonable use of mac technologies), they are fine. Apple will leave them alone. But if they start dragging their feet too much, apple will take matters into their own hands.
By the way, it would be easier to replace photoshop because many of the picture formats are open anyways
You said: “Do you really think Apple could develop (in a reasonable amount of time) an app to compete directly with Photoshop?”
Apple has four billion dollars in cash. They could buy something. They could use pieces of the Gimp or other open source routines. Christ, there’s tons of graphics stuff alread built into OS X. Look at Graphiconverter. It’s a $30 shareware program that does 70 percent of what Photoshop does. Apple could buy it and write the rest using salaries paid with fractions of a percent of their 4 billion in cash.
Also, Cocoa is a rapid development environment. People are amazed at how fast you can write stuff. Lots of the huge numbers of man hours needed to write and maintain something like photoshop — it’s not necessary any more. 50 people and some purchased code and in 18-24 months you have a product.
Benchmarks are now old and do not reflect current machines from either side. Apple’s new high end Mac has gained more performancewise relative to the PC platforms gains (percentage wise, not actual Mhz.) Apple has also released further optimizations to OS X. What I find really interesting is that Adobe has not commented on whether their software is at all to blame. Namely, have they optimized it for the Mac. It appears that they have not implemented Velocity Engine optimizations to the extent they could have, nor are they taking advantage of Quartz Extreme for compositing work.
Apple is now taking the position that if others do not innovate in area’s critical to Apple’s users that Apple will enter that software market. Adobe obviously is making the first PR move in an area that Apple is planning to release this April at the NAB press conference. Those July 2002 benchmarks provided the impetus to Apple to move in this critical space for them. Adobe was caught sleeping, wanting to maintain source code and functional parity between the two platforms. That was a mistake on Adobe’s part. Apple is not looking for parity but superiority both functionally and performancewise and if others will not deliver it they have the budget to innovate very well.
..is BS!
Just where do you find talented people who are familiar with OpenOffice.org or the GiMP? Stop to consider for a while that the inertia of popular products like Word or Premiere carrys them even if they are inferior (which is arguable). Schools have training progams and there are loads of books and online materials with which to learn more mainstream products.
Case in point, here at my school we were using Premiere for the PC. Not only did it have issues with certain Firewire devices, but it’s interface is circa 1994. I guess they don’t dare change it too much so as to not confuse prior users. In short, it sucked. Why did we pick this? Because it was the ‘standard’ – and everyone else was using it and told us to use it.
Then I d/led Vegas Video from Sonic Foundry. Uhmm.. Totally kicks it’s ass – and I mean in EVERY way. Needless to say we’ve switched to it now, and the students are having MUCH more success.
A similar situation is with a program called Scala (Scala.com). You could compare it to Powerpoint, but you’d be wrong to do so. It does a LOT more than that and is easier to use.
But it’s a sad truth. It doesn’t necessarily matter how good a product is, it matters if it’s accepted as the best by the majority and you don’t even need a monopoly to stifle this kind of innovation. One more example:
As a network tech working for various banks, I noticed a lot of them still used Token Ring – this in the age of cheap, reliable Ethernet.
Their networks were slow, horribly overworked (booting Windows 3.1 and 95 from the network will do that). We’d be repairing or adding on to these networks and yet given the opportunity to switch to something better (and cheaper), we were repeatedly given no option but IBM equipment. Why not change? Well, not until IBM did. It seems that many of the top execs had IBM in their portfolios… Self interest, go figure.
Hey Folks, right on that page pushing the P4 (and a Dell workstation at that) is a link to an Adobe page that has the Dell workstation on it to buy. So where do you think the impetus for the article is? Perhaps they are getting a bit of the action? As a previous post mentioned, it is pure economics. Dell probably is giving them a good deal to drive interest in their workstations.
And the truth about rendering speed? I am sure the numbers for those files themselves are correct– but so what? As Jobs shows everytime they have a new Mac, you can get some files that render twice as fast on the mac as on the PC and vice versa. Turns out in the real world, there are pluses and minuses with either way you go.
Adobe has been really good at officially being agnostic about which platform someone should use, even when it has been painfully obvious that one of the sides was markedly inferior in rendering speed or what have you. So why would they change their tune now? Look for the new factors, and you get a more full picture. Getting a cut of hardware pushed on their site would be a significant one. Much more than the diffferences shown in rendering speed.
There you have it. My 2 cents.
The compiler to use on the Mac is codewarrior. It’s maker, metrowerks, is now owned by motorola. It beats gcc into a fleshy pulp.
54 vs 124 seconds is graphically illustrated as if there were 100 seconds in a minute, not the 60 the we currently employ here on Earth.
You figure a big, fat grown-up company like Adobe would know this.
There’s roughly a 2/3 performance margin for Adobe apps on Mac vs. PC. Considering that they apparently don’t take full advantage of the second processor, this looks more like an indictment of Adobe’s software (not to mention their poor proofing skills).
Apple is becoming their own version of ‘Microsoft for the Mac’. In fact, that could be Apple’s new company slogan. Apple’s move to brushed steel as its corporate UI look says everything that needs to be said. The new Apple is all about ‘authority’ and ‘autocracy’.
It is no secret that Apple has a poor history of supporting their ISV’s. Apple tends to like in-house software vs. having ISV’s for their platform. Can anyone say “Claris”?
For all we know, Apple may be doing their own ports (in brushed steel of course) of more Linuxware to OS X including GIMP and Cinepaint (Film GIMP). Apple will then release these apps as part of the OS thus cutting Adobe out of the Mac market. Needless to say, Adobe would consider this an attack on Adobe core business.
There have been and currently are significant anti-Apple feelings within the inner circle at Adobe. For all that Adobe has done to help build the Mac platform, Apple has shown little or no gratitude. Witness Final Cut Pro. One of the reasons Macromedia sold it to Apple was that Apple promised not to do a Windows version. The other reason was that Apple promised to use Final Cut Pro to hurt Adobe. This is not healthy relationship behavior on the part of Apple.
Adobe is probably rethinking the license terms for Quartz that is for sure.
It’s hard to name any ISV that likes Apple. Even MOTU has had to put on their happy smilies in the face of Apple’s acquisition of EMagic. One can only think that MOTU wishes they had a Windows or Linux version of their product.
In spite of alienating ISV’s, in many ways Apple’s new moves are good for Apple. The company has realized that they themselves need to make Apple Island a nice place to live. No one else is going to do it for them because no one likes them. And so Apple is going out and plundering the apps they like and then building the ones they can’t buy for a good price.
As for ‘innovation’ it is hard to call brushed steel dumbed-down user interfaces ‘innovation’. More like ‘machinery for the mindless’. Apple sells to the well-heeled but technically unskilled computer buyer.
That brings us to Apple’s big problem. The Achilles heel of Apple remains their high-priced hardware. No matter how good the hardware, few people are ABLE to pay twice as much for a Mac vs. a PC. Once DRM comes to the Mac, people will really question why they should purchase a Mac. They will be locked into all Apple hardware, all Apple software, all Apple monoculture. Works for the Macheads but finding new users will likely be difficult.
As usual, one can always trust Apple to keep Silicon Valley’s favorite soap opera interesting.
I am a mac user and I do lots of work in Photoshop and Final Cut and many many other programs…. Intel and AMD has faster chips at this point….. with moterola lagging behind its no surprise. This by no means will make me want to switch specially with X really coming along really well. I am wondering like Bascule how long adobe will recommend PCs over macs, when the 970 PowerPC by IBM, will be running in the not to distint future PowerMacs… the 970 is a incredible chip that will allow apple to leap frog intel and AMD… Lets keep this forum clean from flaming k? thanks guys!!!
While I think the idea of Apple coming out with a “replacement” for Photoshop is pretty ludicrous, that’s entirely for market share reasons. A whole industry has grown up around Photoshop, and it’s even bigger and more fiercely devoted than the industry around Quark Xpress–you know, the application which is singlehandedly doing more to stall OS X adaptation than any technical shortcoming in OS X itself, and which a company with Adobe’s resources is having a great deal of trouble denting with InDesign, even though Quark has all but been pushing their own customers in Adobe’s direction the last couple of years. From a practical standpoint, nothing will replace Photoshop in the near or even medium-term future, no matter how good it is. It’s simply too entrenched.
Having said that, on a technical level, Apple could start by simply purchasing the apparently recently abandoned TIFFany from Caffeine Software, once the premiere image editing application on NeXT and used for a while by Warner Animation. To check out a review:
http://www.applelust.com/alust/resources/Reviews/Archives/tiffany/r…
Why? Because Photoshop is WHY I bought a Mac, and one of the main reasons I stick with MacOS. When I was in art school, the PCs were NT4, the Macs were OS 8, and both sides were in the 300mhz range with the same ram and SCSI hard drives. Photoshop was faster for some things on the PC and faster for other things on the Mac- the bottom line being that the Mac meta key is right next to the spacebar, so you can keyboard commando at lightning speed.
What got me to switch was application transparency- I could drag from IE right into a new photoshop file, or from Photoshop to Director- from any app that supported a graphic to any other app that did as well. The environment that Adobe products are horned into in Windowsland is so damned godawful that the Mac UI was quite simply the only choice. And for me, it still is.
Interface aside, you pretty much HAVE to have top of the line gear to run Photoshop 7. It runs like ass on every machine I’ve used it on- from an iMac 266mhz with 288 ram up to a G4 733mhz with a gig of memory. Even using SCSI160 for swap space, Photoshop 5 still runs circles around 7- in OS 9 or OS X, the application is a dog that drags down the entire system in every environment and hardware configuration I’ve tried it in.
In short, Photoshop 7 is completely unacceptable for production use. After Effects is headed in the same direction- I doubt my division can afford to spring a few grand for a hardware accellerator board.
Our division is not upgrading our hardware to keep up with Adobe code bloat. We acquired the latest versions of the Adobe products we use to do some testing…. and found out that upgrading all of the production machines would simply end up costing us time. The speed differences between Photoshop 6 and 7, Illustrator 8 and 10, are comprable to a Lamborghini and a bicycle on a straight stretch of empty highway.
Macromedia’s going in the same direction, from my experience- though fortunately, we don’t rely on “what the web can be” so much as we rely on Photoshop and Illustrator. Given the state of our budget and Adobe’s feature-crazed, optimization-challenged coding teams, we’ve begun to look into other alternatives.
“There’s roughly a 2/3 performance margin for Adobe apps on Mac vs. PC. Considering that they apparently don’t take full advantage of the second processor, this looks more like an indictment of Adobe’s software (not to mention their poor proofing skills).”
Until you consider the “price” of the Mac in question compared to the PC in question. Then consider that for the same price as that SMP Mac you could put together an SMP PC that would trounce the Mac even worse than the Uniprocessor PC did.
Maybe Mac users should be happy that Adobe didn’t choose to use an SMP PC as well.
Adam.
I don’t know why I even come to this forum. It is so emotionally charged with those who lust after Apple’s demise. Unfortunately for such people, Apple is set to gain serious marketshare. Once Apple gets a 970 based machine to the market place, it is game over for Intel and AMD. Say whatever, but I have nothing more to say on this matter. I just know that if it comes down between Intel and IBM, my money is on IBM. IBM is set to trounce Intel in the processor arena once again. They did it before with the G3 and will do so again with the 970. Apple had a lousy OS to go with the G3 and large parts of the OS were still based on 68k code. Needless to say, it did not win many converts from the Wintel arena. It is about to change and change in dramatic fashion in the very near future. Adobe treads on very dangerous ground with this one. If Apple goes after Photoshop and Indesign with new in house designed products, Adobe will hurt a great deal. They simply cannot make it solely on Windows. I sure don’t see very many folks using Premiere on Windows laptops. No amount of tweaking by Adobe or Intel will keep Photoshop competitive on x86 with an Apple equivalent running on the 970. If Altivec can keep the G4 competitive with that anemic bus, just think what the 970 will do with a fat one.
Michael: “As for ‘innovation’ it is hard to call brushed steel dumbed-down user interfaces ‘innovation’. More like ‘machinery for the mindless’. Apple sells to the well-heeled but technically unskilled computer buyer.” Why is it that FCP is cleaning everyone’s clock?
ha, ha, you guys are going to be real unhappy soon, if you think you are now.
As someone said, it’s the “industry” standard. There’s no competition. Guess what, that means they can charge too much. Software should be getting cheaper, instead the monopoly products like Office and XP and Photoshop cost way too much, with too little upgrading for too much money. It’s a situation ripe for apple to dust them. The Office replacement will be here before fall and Adobe is next. Take no prisoners.
Seems to me that Adobe would sell the same amount of software if either a mac or pc was sold. While I agree that pc’s are faster (at most things) at the moment, the question I have is why say this?
There must be some friction between Apple and Adobe so maybe they are trying to harm Apple computer sales to get back.
Once Apple gets a 970 based machine to the market place, it is game over for Intel and AMD. Say whatever, but I have nothing more to say on this matter. I just know that if it comes down between Intel and IBM, my money is on IBM. IBM is set to trounce Intel in the processor arena once again. They did it before with the G3 and will do so again with the 970.
Intel is the biggest CPU maker in the world. They have revenue that is far greater than that of Apple. Even AMD, far smaller than Intel, sells more CPU’s than IBM. Furthermore, while IBM may have their doubts about AMD’s future as an independent company, IBM is a big fan of the Opteron and x86-64.
IBM does not trounce Intel when it comes to desktop CPU’s. Quite the contrary. When it comes to 64 bit server CPU’s, Intel does surprisingly well with the Itanium.
With all the hype on the PPC970, it had better perform very very well indeed. Anything less than a complete victory over Intel will look like more Apple reality distortion to the world. Note I am not talking about the folks who live on Apple Island here. They will be happy with any new Apple chip, even waiting six months for something that is only 170mhz faster than the last chip, has a crippled memory bus, and only supports 2GB of RAM, 1/2 what the chip can address directly.
Even if the PPC970 is a good chip (and I think it will be), there will be no mad rush to buy Apple machines. There will still be a price penalty and OS X is by no means the best OS out there for anything other than Apple’s niche markets. Even there, many people are switching to PC for music, graphics, and publishing. And Apple has pretty much conceded the educational market.
Until something new actually SHIPS from Apple, it would be nice to not be getting all the Apple Island brochureware posts. Right now with what you can buy on the market today, Intel/AMD absolutely pound Apple when it comes to performance. There is no comparison. Apple is dog slow. Maybe tomorrow Apple will have something comparable. That is if they don’t cripple it themselves so they can sell two sets of hardware upgrades to the Macheads vs. just a single upgrade.
There is no price penalty. wake up
Apple BOUGHT Final Cut Pro from Macromedia. They certainly didn’t do any ‘innovation’ other than using their checkbook and promising Macromedia to really give Adobe the shaft.
You’d think it would be good for all of us if there was something better than wintel, you know, to make wintel better. No, they would rather there be nothing better than wintel. and have apple go out of business. but at least nobody could say they had a better computer, that’s the most important thing, isn’t it. boy ain’t that smart.
I wonder what Adobe would think about a 64 bit, Altivec optimized, open source competitor, with an Apple logo on the box, and at less than half the price?
Maybe it is time Apple start using some of the 4 Billion it has in its coffers. How bout purchases or mergers with some of the following companies: SGI, Macromedia, Quark, Nintendo, Mathematica, Avid, Sun.
Apple needs to play the game the way MS does. How bout purchasing Stalker software. (http://www.stalker.com/CommuniGatePro/default.html) I don’t claim to be an expert but this would seem to be a great alternative to exchange server and could be a big blow to MS. Bring Sun, SGI, Redhat in as partners and offer this without per seat license, could be a neat combo with star office.
I don’t know the status of FWB’s old softwindows but how bout purchasing those assets and combinding them with bochs. Work on this virtual x86 emulator with the same companies above. This could also be a huge blow to MS. If all the OS companies could run Win with little performance hit this would not be good for MS.
How bout partnering with IBM to integrate ViaVoice into OS-X? Bring a polished VUI to market. Who would want a tablet PC if you could speak to your computer as a primary input. Apple put this into it’s OS a long time ago but it feels like an unfinished project that has languished way to long.
Sorry for the rant. Apple makes great products but it needs to start making more or better strategic moves to counter it’s competition as well as keeping it’s so called friends honest.
If you actually compare what performance you get for your dollar, to achieve a similar level of performance there is indeed a price penalty. On the Mac side, it costs far more to achieve the same performance level as what you get on a PC.
The Apple Islanders are so insecure they have fits when Adobe publishes the fact that PC’s are far faster than Macs. If Mac is so gloriously superior to every other computing platform, why the hissy fits?
The market speaks more loudly than the few vociferous Macheads and PCheads that live on this forum. Apple’s global market share goes down every day courtesy of a company that is 90% marketing and 10% technology.
I think the problem with that scenario is that Photoshop is way too much of an industry standard to be displaced, and they arrived there primarily through functionality.
Ironically, Microsoft is far easier to challenge in the Office field than Adobe is in the image/prepress field, at least when you look at the professional market (i.e., the one the Mac does best in). While matching Office’s functionality is a formidable challenge, it’s not unmanageable, and there’s several “close start” codebases Apple could use as a springboard if they were really inclined (AppleWorks being the most obvious one, of course). And, there’s a lot of discontent with Microsoft, particularly among Mac users who tend to be disaffected with the company to start with.
In graphics, though, there aren’t people clamoring for a Photoshop replacement. There just aren’t. People who can do with Paint Shop Pro or GIMP do. People who need what Photoshop can do generally can’t find anyone credibly competing with them–Corel is the only company that tries, and they’re usually a few versions behind whatever Adobe is doing. The only crack in Photoshop’s armor is around version 7 itself–as someone else alluded to earlier. It’s slower, more of a resource pig, and (other than being “Carbonized” for OS X) primarily focuses on new features that benefit web rather than print designers. But web designers are the group most likely to be able to make do with the cheaper alternatives.
Even so, the chances of Apple deciding they need to go after this market with their own software is very slim. Safari exists primarily because the OS X port of IE sucks teabags and Microsoft hasn’t shown any interest in fixing it. I have trouble imagining that Apple is really going to seriously take on Microsoft Office–but it’d be (marginally) easier to make a business case for than going after Photoshop.
I don’t need Mr. White to tell me that PCs are currently faster when they happen to work. And if you do NOT step outside the box, they do work. But when it comes to considering Windows, I won’t forget the color printing fiasco with the Minolta printer, all the bugs, all the vulnerabilities, the inasnity of having a registry, the corruption thereof, the illogic of networking when there is no domain server, and the rinky-dink drivers for everything. So Adobe can recommend all they want, my dollars, well spent, should keep them honest…
If you have other information Michael, please provide it. You’re the one who asserted there’s a big price penalty. Now back that up.
Perhaps I have gotten a little ahead of myself here. I started out saying I don’t think Apple will go after PHotoshop unless Adobe is derelict of the mac version, like they have been with the After Effects programs relied upon in a big way (too big a way) in the benchmarks cited here. Basically, I think that’s still true. But you never know.
gosh, it will feel so good knowing there’s nothing out there better than your windows PC.
Your description of Final Cut Pro’s history is a little misleading.
The product Apple bought from Macromedia, Key Grip, was prelaunched 4 times without shipping, a victim of internal politics as Macromedia decided the web was the future. The entire engineering team was bought by Apple before the product was finished.
“Innovation” is a very squiffy concept. The design concepts and implementation were done by that team, and they continued to be done by that team after the transition from Macromedia to Apple. (Some of that team including its leader, in fact, came from the team that created Adobe Premiere.) The real measure of innovation at the corporate executive level is simply who had enough faith in the product to open the checkbook, and that was clearly Apple.
Unless I’m reading this wrong, Adobe is quoting an article from a July 2002 article. In the world of computers, that’s a long time ago. Results might have changed.
I do know that the title of the page does say “pcpreferred”… but I wouldn’t take that to mean Adobe is promoting PCs over Macs. Macs are PCs, Wintel machines are PCs… PC is just personal computer… not a brand.
Macs have always been optimized more for graphics than PCs have. Perhaps a fast clock speed has not caught PCs up with Macs. But raw speed (ghz) is just one factor in a very complex formula to determine how fast a computer performs taks… and at that, different computers will perform different tasks at varyings speeds.
In other words… this page means nothing. Certainly not worth over 80 comments.
Move along, nothing to see here. Move along.
I think Adobe is simply responding to the popularity of Final Cut Pro which I believe is in direct competition with Adobe’s Premiere?
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/main.html
Apple is doing well with its software offerings. maybe too well? Why should Adobe continue to push Apple when it has DV editing software of its own?
btw-showdowns between wintel and mac boxes are futile from the outset. Speed is sexy. Isn’t it great to hear everyone moan about speed in these forums. Yes yes yes, those of you with the fastest computers are the best. I do hope you can keep it up. Keep up with all the latest computer offering I mean. We do have faster computers than the Dell Precision Workstation 350.
I wonder if large rendering/(movie-making) firms worry about speed alone? I wonder how much Charlie White knows about rendering large blockbuster films such as Minority Report (see Adobe premiere site)?
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Articles/chazzbio.htm
The above url links to the the bio of the author of the showdown in question. I wonder if “chazz” learned his DV prowess while working as Director for Wisconsin Paw & Beak, a live broadcast about pets and their owners.?
see complete cv at
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/Htm/Articles/chazz_resume.htm
in closing, macs and wintels are very different machines. buy the one you like/want/need. I am sure that Premiere is a great piece of software. I am not so sure that Mr. White’s article is great.
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/cgi-bin/getframeletter.cgi?/2002…
It surely reflects his opinion in no uncertain terms.
ps- “sorry, charlie”
“Even if PCs have indeed overtake Macs speed-wise the last 1-2 years”?
LOL.
Yeah, it just happened. Spare us. PCs have been faster than Macs for years.
All this is funny to watch. The question right now isn’t whether PC’s are faster than Macs, because they are both faster AND cheaper AND they’ve been that way for several years now. The only question is how big is the gap ?
PCs are faster (right now) and cheaper (desktops). I have never said otherwise. More versatile? There is more software, so yes in some sense.
That’s PCs – cheap, fast, more software. Everything else goes to the mac.
Yeah, it just happened. Spare us. PCs have been faster than Macs for years.
More or less two years. Before that Apple was always a performance leader.
It isn’t too unrealistic that IBM’s consumer PPC chips may outperform their x86 counterparts. Given what Apple has said about the relative speeds of Power5 to Power4 processors (Power5 being roughly 4 times as powerful as a comparably clocked Power4), a Power5-derived PPC970 successor (released in 2005?) would be roughly twice as fast as the Intel Tejas, given current trends.
Obviously design limitations aren’t limiting existing processors, it’s an issue of manufacturing processes. IBM is a much larger producer of semiconductors than Intel or AMD, and currently enjoys the technological lead in manufacturing processes. An IBM-designed PPC chip overtaking x86 certainly isn’t unrealistic.
If I had iPhoto2 before buying Photoshop 7, I would not have wasted my $150. Adobe knows it must look elsewhere for customers. There are plenty of sheep in the PC World. They just need to be sheared.
Adobe is pushing the “PC is faster than Mac” only with Adobe After Effects. They have a valid reason for doing this, and it isn’t because of speed.
Apple is slated to release a major revision to Final Cut Pro. It a nutshell, FCP will have a feature set that will allow a video editor to replace After Effects with FCP. Since After Effects isn’t a Cocoa application and is not entirely optimised for AltVec instructions, the choice on the Mac would be for FCP. It will also save an editor almost $1000 in unnecessary software.
Adobe, in realizing this, is sticking it to Apple by promoting the PC. Obviously they’re going to embrace a third party article pumping their product. It’s natural since it’s about to become irrelevant on the Mac.
So, who cares if Adobe is telling people to switch to a Mac. The next version of FCP will make After Effects irrelevant. And you can’t use FCP without a Mac.
I think that Adobe is losing his market in video on the mac, because a lot of professionals are moving to FinalCutPro because this software is much better than Premiere, and runs incredibly fast on the mac.
Premiere runs better on pc because it is not written to take advantage of the mac plateform, and this the same thing for Aftereffetcs. Do the same tests with the same softs on the pc, but by taking for the mac FinalCutPro and Combustion, you will get impressive results.
Adobe can not compete against Apple and Avid, and they try to keep some users, its normal.
Adobe’s video solutions runs faster on pc, yes sure……., but the pc is not faster than the mac on video production, because high class video softwares exist and runs better on the mac.
Perhaps Adobe is miffed that Mac OS X users don’t need to buy Acrobat in order to create PDF files since the OS can print to PDF directly…PC users have to pay for this feature. Then there’s iPhoto which does a lot of what most folks need for digital photography and prevents them from pay $$$ for Photoshop…
I agree with the above poster who suggests that perhaps Apple is hurting Adobe’s business and this might be a payback.
to see Adobe attacking Apple given that Final Cut Pro beats the pants off Premiere for production.
It is time for Apple to wake up. Either they should start making x86 based PCs or go out of business. They will have much better chance of success if they enter the normal PC market aimed at designers and multimedia systems.
The graphics/video market comprises less than 2% of the total computing market. Adobe can recommend all they want. If Apple lost 20% of their creative users (not going to happen), they lose maybe, .4% marketshare. On the otherhand, Apple is building the computer Jobs wanted to produce 10 years ago. THAT computer is finding a home in the enterprise that could care less about video editing. Increasing its share in the enterprise by 2% results in an overall marketshare increase of 1.8% I think Apple has already made the choice: enterprise vs graphics. Not a hard decision.
“And this page is under the Video section of Adobe, and we all know that Video encoding needs speed and this is what customers need when they do pro video work.”
Maybe more about the fact that Final Cut Pro blew Premiere out of the water..
A dual 1.25 processor wasnt and still isnt “Identical” to a 3.06 Ghz machine.
Even if they both ran at 3.06 Ghz, they wouldnt be identical.
Benchmarks are misleading.