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Thursday, April 20, 2006
Apple has done what most companies never do, release a product before it’s projected announced date. With Intel driven iMacs, Mac minis, and MacBook Pros in many homes and businesses months before the announced date of June of this year, there are a lot of happy campers.
But Camp Mac isn’t all happy as there are some in Media Forrest that are scratching their heads as to why Adobe won’t release a Universal version of Creative Suite, Studio, or After Effects (which was actually just released as 7.0). Reports stating that Photoshop is a dog in Rosetta may hold some of those pros off from getting a snazzy new Mac with that Intel inside.
Also, the Office Lake section of the camp is wondering about Microsoft and it’s lovely Office suite. Sure, there’s the Apple iWork alternative, but when you’re dug in, you’re dug in and those who’ve already invested into Office for the Mac want a Universal version. I myself have noticed how slow Office 2004 applications start up when compared to other Universal apps.
Ya, new updates would be nice from both of these camps and soon. Truth is, though, neither is giving any time indication and history shows both to release major updates about every 12 to 18 months. That could mean a fall release of Adobe stuff (at best) and most likely a 2007 release for any of these products. What’s that going to do for Apple?
This comes back to the question SvenOnTech posed last year at the Intel announcement. Would it hurt sales of current PowerPC stock? Well, while Apple did see a slight dip down, overall it didn’t. It probably won’t hurt Apple on it’s PowerMac sells either. It’ll keep the pro workstations around churning the IBM chips until the two knucklehead companies decide to release Universal applications. Once that happens, it’s most likely you’ll see Apple release Intel versions of the workstations and discontinue the PowerPC hardware.
Apple most likely isn’t going to get hurt by Adobe’s and Microsoft’s lack of attention to new technology. In fact, I’d venture to say it will be these two companies that will see some suffering to the bottom line. I can tell you right now that I won’t be purchasing Office 2004 for my Mac because I know eventually there’ll be a Universal version out and why blow a few hundred on a slower version? I’ll manage on my even older version of Office X until the upgrade as well as my copy of Photoshop 7. For me and many others like me, we don’t have that kind of dispensable cash to just throw at software when we want. I hope Adobe and Microsoft realize that sooner than later.
April 20th, 2006 at 7:09
Reviewers and critics are spoiled. I went from a Dual 1GHz G4 (QuckSilver, which I will keep forever) to a 2GHz MacBook Pro. And I did not notice any difference in my apps running under Rosetta. But when you’re jumping from Mac to Mac like a computer whore, then yeah, I guess you would notice a difference. The comparison isn’t fair. People won’t be jumping from a curent day G5 to an Intel right away. So chill out.
April 20th, 2006 at 14:41
Sales to Apple users are such a SMALL part of Adobe and Microsoft’s income, why on earth put any more effort into software production than they already did?
April 20th, 2006 at 15:07
Stefan, Mac Office is less than 3% of MS profit but, Mac software is over 40% of Adobe’s sales.
Although most of us wait years before getting a new Mac the Publishing and graphics companies over 3 people upgrade every couple of years. Upgrading from my MDD 867 the Rozetta applications whould seem fast to me. But professional graphics folk would feel a big drag. These people will resist buying Mac towers until Adobe makes a universal suite. Only professional web, media writers and pundits care about how fast Office runs. I cannot out type Word even on an old Mac. It hardly matters that it takes awhile to open when most folk leave it open for days.
roger
April 20th, 2006 at 15:57
I have an acquaintance that works at Adobe and he told me they were in no hurry to do the re-write…
I sell Macs (Have for 22 years) and have seen a real run now on 17″ and 20″based G5 iMacs (That I stocked up on) to my graphics customers…
I don’t think Apple will change the towers anytime soon because of the slow switchover by Adobe!
April 21st, 2006 at 5:47
Actually Stefan, over forty percent of Adobe’s software sales come from Mac users. Adobe clearly does not want to risk losing 40 percent of its business. In addition, Microsoft makes several hundred million dollars a year on the sale of Office for the Mac. (Both these facts can be verified by doing a Google search). That is no small bag of beans when you consider many of Microsoft’s businesses lose money (e.g. its X-Box division). In fact, it is why Microsoft gave Apple 150 million dollars in exchange for Apple stock when Apple was facing hard times. Microsoft was protecting its several hundred million dollars a year profit (It should be noted, Microsoft makes less per sale from Windows users using Office(Unless it is an education edition of the software)).
Two other points. First, Office works fine under Rosetta, with no appreciable speed hit from the last model Mac. In some cases, if you are upgrading hardware from a couple of years ago, Office runs faster under Rosetta. Accordingly, Microsoft does not need to be in a hurry to update Office.
Second, an Adobe engineer who works on the Creative suit for Mac in a blog has said Adobe is in fact working hard on brining the Creative Suite to the Mac. Doing so, however, is a major amount of work. From a business perspective, Adobe said it made more sense to not support the Intel Macs until the next major release of Creative Suite. That makes perfect sense.
I will provie the link for this (as I just read it): http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html
Finally, people forget that Apple released the Intel Macs 6 months early. This is hardly enough time for developers to bring over complex aplications, especially when they were not written with Apple’s development tools.
April 21st, 2006 at 5:56
Roger, I will add, that Apple has not released Towers using Intel yet. Accordingly, current pro towers do support Adobe’s current offerings. The high end G5 Towers have better (although not by much) benchmark ratings then the Core Duo processors). According to the blog article I just mentioned, by the time Apple actually ships a Pro tower, Adobe will be close to having CS3 ready.