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Graphics Businesses Software Apple

Adobe Says PCs Are Preferred 853

Posted by pudge from the that-must-have-cost-ms-a-lot-of-money dept.
Father Of Free Choice writes "Abobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform for running Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator. I don't know how many Mac people this will upset, but given the large hold Apple has on design pros and film, this seems like a bad move on Adobe's part."
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Adobe Says PCs Are Preferred More

Adobe Says PCs Are Preferred

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  • Well, there's news (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BluGuy ( 617572 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:17AM (#5590604)
    It's not like Adobe hadn't hinted at that. How long did it take them to get a decent OS X version of their software out?

  • I don't get it... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bananaape ( 542919 )
    The link goes to some graphs of render times for PC vs. Mac and the PC is faster. Am I missing something?

  • As far as I can see (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 )
    There isn't any preference (in any software support kind of sense) being indicated, only that the PC is about twice as fast with a single processor than a Apple is with a dual processor. Everyone already knew Macs are dead slow.

  • a more up to date speed comparison (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:19AM (#5590611)

    For those that are interested, a more up to date speed comparison from the same person who did the benchmarking on the Adobe page can be found here:

    digitalvideoediting.com [digitalvideoediting.com]

    The new benchmarks use a P4 3GHZ and a Dual 1.25Ghz PowerMac.

    --

    Website Templates [dynamicexpression.com]

    • Re:a more up to date speed comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

      by kevinank ( 87560 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:52AM (#5591342) Homepage
      FYI, the graphs on the benchmarks on that Adobe page are badly misleading. The bar charts are graphed in decimal, but the numbers the reviewer used to construct the graphs are in base 60 (ie: time), and Windows happens to have the higher number of seconds in each of the charts -- making the Mac look much worse than it really is. The first graph shows the strongest bias, but all of them are distorted to some degree.

  • I just checked my calendar... (Score:5, Funny)

    by iiioxx ( 610652 ) <iiioxx@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:19AM (#5590612)
    to make sure it wasn't April 1st.

  • Kick Apple into shape (Score:4, Insightful)

    by no_demons ( 602587 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:20AM (#5590615)
    If nothing else, this will hopefully push Apple into getting a move on with some new, faster processors. It was only a matter of time that the Wintel lot caught up, and Apple's lead has been shrinking for a while now.

    To be honest, I'm surprised that it has taken this long. I guess it says something for the lead that Apple had built up.

    Looking forward to hearing about the G5 at the WWDC. : )

  • Old news? (Score:2, Informative)

    by jbellis ( 142590 )
    Seems to me that the Mac versions of Photoshop/Illustrator/Indesign have lagged the PC versions to market for several years now. Perhaps our submitter is just getting all worked up because of the url ("pcpreferred") of that page -- Mac hasn't been the preferred platform in Adobe's mind in a very long time.

    • Re:Old news? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mikey-San ( 582838 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:31AM (#5590733) Homepage Journal
      Are you smoking shit? This is completely inaccurate.

      Compare these [versiontracker.com]

      To these [versiontracker.com]

      From the looks of it, Adobe is keeping both platforms almost completely in synch with each other. Not a light feat, indeed.

      Oh, yeah, let's not forget that the last FOUR versions of Photoshop (4, 5, 5.5, 6, and 7), at least, were simultaneous releases.

      Ditto Illustrator 8, 9, and 10.

      What an asshat.


      -/-
      Mikey-San
      (I reserve the right to be inaccurate, since it's morning, and I hate mornings.)

  • it doesn't say anything about prefered (Score:5, Informative)

    by 512k ( 125874 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:20AM (#5590619)
    it just shows graphs that say the PC is faster than the mac doing stuff in after effects..and at the end it says, "While the computers used in this study are no longer the fastest in their respective classes, the information is still valid"

  • Konqueror - Safari -- is GIMP next? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    With Apple increasingly separating itself from Microsoft, creating their own browser based on Konqueror's KHTML technology, perhaps this move by Adobe will prompt Apple to create imaging software to compete with Adobe based on open source like GIMP?
    • Graphics program is not like browser.

      Adobe have put millions into photoshop, and similar programs - Image manipulation programs are really costy to develop, and the people using them like learning the interface once and for all (that is, photoshop). Calling a designer to go with GIMP is not impossible, but really impractical as we(i.e. the developers) have not enough expertise(disclaimer: GIMP team do have graphic expert, but wait, they are not full-time paid workers) nor time to develop something as sophi

    • With Apple increasingly separating itself from Microsoft, creating their own browser based on Konqueror's KHTML technology, perhaps this move by Adobe will prompt Apple to create imaging software to compete with Adobe based on open source like GIMP?

      I wasn't aware apple was using KHTML in their browser (then again, I don't keep up with apple).

      Even so, I tend to doubt they'll back The Gimp. My suspicion is that they'd want to shore up what little support they get from adobe instead. Just my two cents.

    • Re:Konqueror - Safari -- is GIMP next? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iiioxx ( 610652 ) <iiioxx@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:41AM (#5590795)
      perhaps this move by Adobe will prompt Apple to create imaging software to compete with Adobe based on open source like GIMP?

      Nothing against GIMP, but it would be a bad move on Apple's part if they did. Apple should be doing their damnedest to get application vendors to provide ported software to the Apple platform, not trying to reinvent every piece of software as an Apple product.

      When Adobe has the same application that will run on both PC and Mac with 100% file compatibility, it creates an environment where you can choose the best platform for a given user, without having to sacrifice application interoperability with other users. If Apple were to say, "screw Adobe, here's iSomething" it will force graphics shops to have to choose between PC+Adobe and Mac+iSomething. All this will do is take marketshare away from Apple.

      I think that Safari and Keynote (and the iOffice/iWork/iWhatever suite that is likely to follow) are simply a response to the dead-end relationship that Apple is in with one vendor - Microsoft. I don't see the practice of duplicating every major application as a trend for Apple in the long term. At least I hope it's not.

  • Image Errors (Score:5, Informative)

    by pmlyon ( 140757 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:21AM (#5590626)
    The images appear to be incorrect.

    If you look at the first image, it has two times, 54 seconds and 1 minute 25 seconds. The second time is shown at well over double the length of the first, even though it only took ~50% longer. If you look closely, you will see that 1:25 got placed at 1.25, and 0:54 got placed at 0.54, hence the error.

    Any of the images where the minutes are different are going to be skewed a fair amount. The error will decrease as the minute difference increases.
  • Adobe wants to embrace commodity (PC) hardware-- think about it-- which makes more sense? a user base of 500 mac users or 5000 PC users?

    Letting customers spend less money on hardware means there is more money leftover for buying pricey Adobe software. Moreover, Adobe may soon abandon one of its development team to shave costs-- guess which one won't survive: the one not making that much money.

  • Bad move?? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by destiney ( 149922 )

    How is it a bad move? They know which platform they sell more copies of their software for. Hint, hint.. it's not the Mac! So it makes perfect business sense for them to say what they prefer their users to use their products on.

    "Upset Mac people.." Come on! As if they aren't used to it by now.

    I'd be upset knowing I spend 2-3 times as much for my computer to do the same work a PC will do.

    That's just dumb.

  • Wouldn't it be cool if Apple made a native port of The GIMP for OS X?

  • Platform preference (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:22AM (#5590641) Homepage Journal
    Well, I guess I would have to say that one is more productive within their platform environment of preference in general. Yes, my dual Ghz G4 with Cinema display is not as fast as the P4 system it replaced, but it is generally a much more productive environment in that I can run on one workstation, code originally written for SGI, Office for Mac, Adobe products galore, remote sensing code, the website for our lab etc...etc...etc... and I could not do all of this nearly as well or as easy with the three systems my OS X workstation replaced including an SGI Octane, a Wintel system and an older Mac.

  • Is raw processing power the only consideration? Granted, an editor with more time is more productive. There are other cosiderations, however.

    In any case, the article referenced didn't exactly state what effect this pronouncement (of sorts) would have on Adobe's products. I don't think that they'll bag their Apple lines, but is Adobe going to use this to nudge their customers onto an platform? Somehow, I just don't see that happening.

    GF

  • /me shrugs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pike65 ( 454932 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:23AM (#5590645) Homepage
    At the end of the day it's the users who are going to decide what the 'preferred platform' is, and I know that a large proportion of graphic/web designers who could not be separated from their G4s without a crowbar and tub of Vaseline. Whatever Adobe say.

    However, does this mean Adobe are going to start favouring Windows in terms of releases and support? I suppose that could make more of a dent . . .

    • does this mean Adobe are going to start favouring Windows in terms of releases and support?

      What do you mean "start", kemo sabe? Look at the Acrobat 5 release and the way that certain features weren't available on the Mac version. Look at Acrobat Reader for Palm OS--the conduit launches Classic under Mac OS X, and wasn't available for Mac at all until v2.0.

      At least InDesign is ahead of QuarkXpress in terms of OS X support--not that that's a real difficult thing to manage....

    • Re:/me shrugs (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mosch ( 204 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:47AM (#5590846) Homepage
      No, it means that slashdot is making a big deal out of absolutely nothing at all.

      The entire theory that Adobe is now "preferring" the PC platform is based on the fact that there's a page called pcpreferred.html on Adobe's site. A page that simply says 'looks like some stuff is faster on this here PC'.

      The fact of the matter is that for most applications, both PCs and Macs are so damned fast that it doesn't matter which is faster, it matters which OS allows you to work more efficiently. Adobe's Mac support has shown no signs of trouble whatsoever. They continue to pump out simultaneous or near-simultaneous releases of their apps for both Mac and Windows. They continue to provide patches for both versions nearly simultaneously.

      This whole article simply shows how sensationalistic slashdot is willing to be in order to get some ad views. It's no different than any other editorial column really. You say something retarded, then watch everybody earn you money while they discuss whether or not you're a retard.

      • The entire theory that Adobe is now "preferring" the PC platform is based on the fact that there's a page called pcpreferred.html on Adobe's site.

        Oh, you mean it's
        PCpreferred.html
        and not
        PCPreferred.html

        There goes my theory that it was a page set up for referrals to Adobe software by your Primary Care Physician. :)

  • Adobe "has picked" ...? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Chromal ( 56550 )
    Well, it seems what Adobe has actually done is a bit less inflammatory than what the headline suggests. On the hyperlinked page, they simply display the results from a performance benchmark that indicate a 3.06Ghz P4 outperforms a dual 1.25Ghz G4 by a wide margin on some tests, which is a little confusing as the article said the P4 was a 2.53Ghz. Whatever.

    This changes very little and seems hardly worth the effort sensationalizing.

  • Perhaps part of the reason that Apple has a hold on these sectors of the market is that a lot of the software has (until now, apparently) been better on the Mac?

    For what it's worth, I'd like to see properly optimised code run on both PC and Mac, to see which really is faster for Photoshop et al. Would be a nice real-world comparison, which is worth a lot more to me than a benchmark...
  • It's not exactly Adobe proclaiming a preference for PC's, but rather they are simply presenting the results of one expert's analysis. Is this really surprising, however? Mac's haven't exactly been all about the data-crunching race between Intel and AMD, so it's hardly surprising to see it lag behind a PC in this sort of benchmark. There was a similar article a month or so ago in Maximum PC [maximumpc.com] that had a similar theme...
    • Here's how we're gonna stomp Saddam. [amazon.com]

      From the man himself:
      "Those who win one hundred triumphs in one hundred conflicts do not have supreme skill. Those who have supreme skill use strategy to bend others without coming to conflict"
  • OK, so Adobe links to one article showing that PCs are faster at certain tasks. How do you make the leap that Adobe "prefers" PCs? Have they never before shown any benchmarks between the two? Adobe may prefer PCs, but that's not at all what the mini-article on Adobe's site says. It's just ammunition for people wanting to use PC's, so they can say to their boss (or employee), "see, PCs are better." I bet they have stuff that goes the other way, too. Every platform switch is money in the bank for Adobe.

  • Huh? (Score:3, Redundant)

    by Zayin ( 91850 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:24AM (#5590657)

    "Abobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform for running Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator. I don't know how many Mac people this will upset, but given the large hold Apple has on design pros and film, this seems like a bad move on Adobe's part."

    The article linked says nothing like that at all. It just states that in a test performed in July 2002 a Pentium 4-based workstation outperformed a G4 workstation. It does not say that Adobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform.

  • This is not what Adobe is saying (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stubear ( 130454 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:24AM (#5590669)
    Despite what the HTML file is named, the page itself is not a claim from Adobe that users should be running PCs instead of Macs. The page merely highlights a benchmarking test that was found on another website, digitalvideoediting.com. This test compared rendering performance between P4s and dual-G4s on apps from Adobe commonly used by those of us who do digital video editing and post-production work.

  • Software differences (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sheriff_p ( 138609 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:24AM (#5590671)
    Slap me if I'm being silly, but how much do we know about the internals of these products, and how they're implemented between platforms?

    That is, could it be that the Windows Adobe team simply writes better software than the Mac Adobe team? How much of this can be put down to the underlying operating systems on both machines?

    Just thoughts

  • The New Math (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FunkyMarcus ( 182120 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:25AM (#5590673) Homepage Journal
    I love "metric time" as much as the next guy, but I wouldn't trust any review that equates 47 seconds with 0.47 minutes [adobe.com] [from the review].

    Mark

  • MDI Window model (Score:2, Informative)

    by mini me ( 132455 )
    Photoshop and Illustrator are the most annoying programs to use under Windows. They both use the MDI (Multiple document interface) model for drawing their windows which makes it very difficult to utilize the avalible screen space.

    MacOS and even the UNIX versions of Photoshop/Illustrator do not suffer from the same design flaws.

  • Doesn't match up... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mbbac ( 568880 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:26AM (#5590684)
    The clockspeeds of the computers mentioned in the introductory paragraph on that page don't match up with the clockspeeds of the computers in the charts. I'm wondering what other errors are present as well.

    Also, this doesn't look like an Adobe recommendation so much as Adobe showing one group's results of a comparative test. There is more to a computer than render speed, just as there is more to a computer than compile speed.

  • Adobe needs to watch their step. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:26AM (#5590685)
    Dear Apple,

    Please stop pissing us off. You've created products to compete with us in photo management. You've added nonlicensed PDF capabilities to your new OS (which we had to update for OS X!) and you've utterly stolen the video editing market from us - which was quite profitable, despite the absolutely abysmal Premiere.

    We will continue to promote PCs as the better machine on our website, despite the fact that we ship for both platforms, because you've stepped on our toes. We recommend you go back to making machines and stop with the polished, useful, FREE software.

    Thanks,
    Adobe

  • What's this about "preferred platform"? (Score:5, Informative)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:26AM (#5590687) Homepage
    The link doesn't say anything about Adobe preferring one platform over another, in the slightest. It's just some graphs indicating that PCs as a class perform better than macintoshes, which is something that i don't think anyone is denying at this point.

    While that kind of does seem like an endorsement of the PC on adobe's part, it also is just good business sense to explain to your customers what hardware your software runs best on.

    Speed at raw data-crunching is just one of the factors in which computing platform you are going to use, though if you're using AfterEffects or Photoshop or something it's going to be a much, much larger factor.

  • Typical bad benchmarking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BShive ( 573771 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:27AM (#5590690) Homepage
    It's possible to slant the results either way you want with a careful selection of filters. His credibility is pretty much shot by the long tirade about how great the Dell is, and this quote: "Further speeding up the Dell entry is new gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support."

    This has nothing to to with the tests he's running! It's also very possible that what he was doing wasn't taking advantage of both processors in the Mac. Given the sketchy information on the actual testing, we don't know.

    Granted, both camps do this kind of stuff - it proves nothing.

  • but given the large hold Apple has on design pros and film, this seems like a bad move on Adobe's part.

    Not to mention the fact that Photoshop for Windows chokes when you throw too many VM pages at it... Try creating a 1.5 gig canvas and zig-zag a 300 pixel dithered brush from one corner to the other. Even my 500 Mhz G4 is capable of finishing the task without a time-out.

    Just yesterday I tried this on a 2.6 Ghz P4/WinXP and got Mr. Hourglass for about 45 seconds 80% of the way through the render...

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:31AM (#5590735)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It's just business reality (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eyefish ( 324893 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:35AM (#5590760)
    This is a sad day for Mac users, but this is nothing more than business reality.

    Adobe gets most of their money from the PC market, and the truth is that regardless of all the hype Steve Jobs has made recently regarding the Mac G4's, almost all benchmarks comparing a top of the line G4 to a top of the line PC simply give the PC a winning mark by a landslide in graphics and video tests.

    Now let's not get into a flame war over this, I love Macs too, but hey, if I have to render a large project, and it takes half the time to do so on a PC, then I will use a PC even if its user interface is not as nice as the Mac.

    This is why for some time now I've been advocating that Mac OS/X be ported to the x86 architecture. It's the only way Mac OS/X will be able to run on equal footing to Windows. Let's face it, Apple being the only major consumer of Power PC chips for consumer (I know, IBM uses them on large servers too) is not a good incentive to innovate, while on the PC market AMD, Intel, and Transmeta are always killing each other to come up with the fastest and "bestest" processor, and at the cheapest possible price.

    Macs either move to the x86 architecture or they are dead. And *please*, I know many fanatics will argue that "what makes Macs great is the amazing integration between hardware and software, something which cannot be acchieved or guaranteed in a commodity-based PC market", however not only is this not true (Apple for example could publish open APIs to have hardware vendors support in order to support all needed integration, and it could also build Mac PCs itself if it chooses to), but simply getting stuck with the past. Yes, it'd be great to control the hardware and the software, but right now business reality is telling Apple that this is not the time to do so.

    So, let's get on with it: I know this is a blow to Apple, and I know many Mac users will cry foul to Adobe, but I also think this is a necessary blow to Apple (and mostly, Steve Jobs) to let them know that things are simply moving really fast in the PC world in comparisson to Apple.

    Heck, you can already buy WiFi "g" for PCs much cheaper than on the Mac already, plus all PCs nowdays come with USB 2.0, and FireWire is almost standard or really cheap to add (20 to 40 bucks or so). About the *only* things Apple has going for itself right now is (1) FireWire 800 (and I bet you'll eventually find it cheaper on PCs), (2) the iApps, which are very easy to use, but I bet Microsoft or someone else will copy them soon enough, (3) the iPod (competitors are getting close also on copying it and improving it as well), and (4) Mac OS/X, which is a nice piece of work.

    So Steve: Port Mac OS/X to x86 *soon* before you let Apple die in obsolescence. It's just you versus *thousands* of companies making products for the PC commodity market, a market which due to competition is making products better and cheaper all the time. The choice is clear, evolve or die.

    • Re:It's just business reality (Score:4, Funny)

      by rampant mac ( 561036 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:03AM (#5590947)
      "This is why for some time now I've been advocating that Mac OS/X be ported to the x86 architecture. yadda yadda *snip*"

      You can snag Darwin [apple.com] from here. There's a lot of $10 no-name ethernet and sound cards that need porting. Get to it.

      On behalf of all x86 users out there, thanks in advance! :)

    • Re:It's just business reality (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Gropo ( 445879 ) <groopo@yah o o .com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:35AM (#5591199) Homepage Journal
      Adobe gets most of their money from the PC market
      While this is true moreso today than in years past, the Mac market still constitutes a large enough percentage of Adobe's bottom-line that they would have to be mad to alienate this constituency... And as has been pointed out numerous times already, they haven't really fired any cannon-shots over Apple's bow, merely posted a link to a flawed benchmark.
      This is why for some time now I've been advocating that Mac OS/X be ported to the x86 architecture. It's the only way Mac OS/X will be able to run on equal footing to Windows.
      Except that any argument in support of this move ignores the fact that IBM's upcoming PowerPC architectures will be truly remarkable implementations of silicon and copper. The 970 and future Power5 'smaller cache, single core' derivative will indubitably shore up any performance gaps between PowerPC-based Apples and x86/x86-64 based Wintels.

      It also ignores the fact that the newest PowerPC's are imbued with a practical SIMD execution engine, the instruction set of which is not only heavily leveraged in MacOS X itself, but numerous 3rd party applications. The SSE2/3DNow! engines just don't stack up to AltiVec for widespread usage, and once Apple machines supply a 1.8-2.5Ghz, 200+ simultaneous instruction Integer/fpu core alongside Altivec, the argument for x86 Macintoshes will entirely evaporate.
      The choice is clear, evolve or die.
      ...Which is exactly why a 'small mammal' company like Apple will have no problem surviving well in to the next era of computing, while the great dinosaurs lose species' by the 24-pack (AMD lost how much last fiscal quarter?). Your suggestions are equivalent to urging Apple to evolve towards large, hairless bodies in a period of nuclear winter...

  • This is the dumbest bunch of graphs I've ever seen (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BoomerSooner ( 308737 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:37AM (#5590770) Homepage Journal
    Look at the graph showing the comparison between 56 seconds and 1 minute 25 seconds. It is showing seconds like there are 100 in a minute. If this was built by someone at my company and was getting this much pub, I'd berate their ass.

    Their scale:
    123456789123457 Mac
    12345678912345678912345678912345678912 PC

    .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 1.0 1.1 1.2

    How it should be:
    123456789123456 Mac
    12345678912345678912345678 PC

    .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 1.0 1.1 1.2

    Morons.

    BTW I hate these slashdot filters isn't that what the moderators are for?

  • Gimp (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:37AM (#5590771) Homepage Journal
    Ok, so the Slashdot take is a bit sensational, and not fact-heavy, but Adobe does have a rather strong hold on the Mac-using image and publishing market. It seems to me that there's only a few things that have to happen for The Gimp [gimp.org] to all but replace Photoshop for this purpose. All it really needs is some company to come along and give it a) plugins for dealing with patented color-management for ready-for-print applications (no problem as plugins with licensing, as long as you pay Adobe and the few other companies a royalty) and b) a Mac-native UI that fixes some of the basic brokenness of The Gimp's poor UI choices (e.g. the nearly un-navigatable menus).

    Both of these tasks are many orders of magnitude smaller than rolling your own Photoshop replacement, and The Gimp has a far more flexible plugin architecture and tons of people who are happy to write plugins in C, scheme, Perl, Python and other languages!

    Anyone have the money to kick something like this off? Consider this you Make Money Fast wakeup call!

    And, if you need more of a push... there's CinePaint [sourceforge.net] (ne "Film Gimp"), which you could integrate into your product and add a whole other market.

    • Re:Gimp (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:02AM (#5590936)
      Ok, so the Slashdot take is a bit sensational, and not fact-heavy, but Adobe does have a rather strong hold on the Mac-using image and publishing market. It seems to me that there's only a few things that have to happen for The Gimp [gimp.org] to all but replace Photoshop for this purpose.

      Photoshop and Gimp are wide and far apart Performance and Featurewise. I'm a Linux User all the way through - with strong ties to multimedia. Allthough I hate Windows (for good reasons too) and love Linux it's utterly impossible for Linux to reach design power parity with Windows. Even with a full license of Corel Photopaint and CorelDraw for Linux. This is - along with broad range gaming - still a major drawback with Linux.
      Since you're talking about 'not fact heavy' I'd like to point out that especially Photoshop is a programm that plays in it's own league with no other competitor even close to reaching the same power in grafical editing. Especially Gimp which, while being an astonishing OSS project with unmatched ease of installation and considerable powers, is far away from stuff like the PS rendering filters and scaling/interpolation algorythyms. One of the strengths of all Adobe 'pixel' programms.

      • Re:Gimp (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:42AM (#5591256) Homepage Journal
        Ok, you cited two things you like about Photoshop. Cool. Get on it. I expect plugins by the end of the month.

        Seriously, is it so hard to read the *rest* of what I wrote? I was suggesting that a company take The Gimp, modify it as needed (contributing back the OSS parts, and keeping proprietary plugins for patented stuff that they will have to chage money for to pay royalties and fund their staff).

        The Gimp is a pain in the ass to use, but most of what PS gives you above and beyond The Gimp in terms of real features center around the ready-for-print market (patents prevent much of this technology from entering The Gimp) and some of PS' advances layering features (again, likely patented). Their scaling and interpolation is nice (also probably patented, which again leads to my point), but rarely worthy of chosing them over a competitor. In fact 90% of the ready-for-print market cares about only 10 or so of PS' core features asside from simple image editing. Of those 10 or so features a good chunk are covered by patents, and that's really what's keeping PS afloat right now.

        Create a company that can ship patented plug-ins for The Gimp, and you remove the barrier that has kept it a second-class citizen for so long. Of course, getting the starting capital would be tricky in today's market, but this is a huge area with lots of profit to be had. The early worm will most certainly get the worm.

        Remember that the power of open source is that the larger and more complex the software that you're imitating/improving, the more of an edge you have because of the large community of contributors who have source code.

  • Times Change (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vizualizr ( 462581 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @10:48AM (#5590854)
    I've been using Photoshop for . . .um . . . about eight years now. Initially, all I used it on was a Mac, because quite frankly, Photoshop for Windows in 1995 was a gross, nasty piece of software.

    For reasons mostly related to my profession (Landscape Architect, at the time), I switched to a PC, and began the task of using Photoshop in a Windows environment. At the time, version 3.0 or so was getting better, but still pretty nasty. Now we're up to 7.0, and it is a remarkably better piece of software. I love it. I now do 3D work and image editing, and Photoshop work probably comprises 25% of my time. I'm extremely happy with it, as I am with the copies of Premiere, Pagemaker, and Illustrator that I use in the course of my work, as well.

    That being said, I have never been able to escape the notion that it has seemed that Adobe has never quite gotten the knack of porting the software over to the PC. Granted, it runs like a champ, but just little things . . .things I'm not even sure I can call to mind - the way menus lay out, the lack of some standardized interface items (like a save button) . . .have always left me feeling like the PC version of Photoshop and other Adobe apps are kind of afterthoughts - that Adobe must view the Mac version as the REAL version, and the Windows version as the weaker sister.

    I fight this battle with my cluster of close friends, most of whom are designer types, about once every three months. I think I've finally got them convinced that you CAN run Photoshop and Illustrator on a PC. For years, they assumed that you couldn't. But that opens up a whole different can of worms that I'm not even going go get into. Use what you want.

    So, I'd say this is a surprising development, given my experience with Adobe software over the years.

    • Re:Times Change (Score:3, Informative)

      by multimed ( 189254 )

      Granted, it runs like a champ, but just little things . . .things I'm not even sure I can call to mind - the way menus lay out, the lack of some standardized interface items (like a save button) . . .have always left me feeling like the PC version of Photoshop and other Adobe apps are kind of afterthoughts

      I'm sure it's more to do with the OS than Adobe being lazy or whatever. Apple is stricter with their UI guidlines for software developers. Partially because they've had such a legacy of documenting a

  • Here we go again... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by macthulhu ( 603399 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:09AM (#5590991)
    As a professional graphic artist who uses Adobe products on both platforms, I'm not quite sure I agree with the findings of the author. I always find benchmark results from either side to be suspect. I judge by user experience. I find that my results are better, and much easier to achieve, on either of my Macs. I have grown to accept Windows as a sometimes necessary evil, and am quite functional with it. However, and maybe some of you out there have noticed this, tools in Photoshop seem to work much more reliably on the Mac. For instance... color correction, minor adjustments to position, hotkeys, and anything done freehand seem to work less consistently in the Windows version. Strange stuttering, having to hit hotkeys twice, taking forever to place items exactly where you want them... these add up in a business where you are constantly playing beat the clock. Now, before you all start flaming me about being a newbie, or checking my manuals, getting a new keyboard... I have been using Photoshop since the beta for version 2, and Premeire since the very first betas. I've been making a living with CGI for over 12 years. Again, this is my experience with these products, YMMV. I suggest that Adobe is promoting stories like this to teach Apple a lesson. Apple has really put the hurt on Adobe with Final Cut Pro, and with their purchase of several other effects software companies, will soon start to hurt sales of After Effects. This is not to say that Adobe's products are inferior... I think they got lazy with their stranglehold on the market, and don't appreciate Apple filling the gap. What they should be doing is making better products for Mac users. We are largely responsible for supporting them up to this point, and would continue to do so if they kept up the good work. Taking so long to get Photoshop for OSX out did not make them any friends, and suggesting that they were going to stop releasing Premeire for the Mac didn't help either. Ask any of the "Mac Faithful"... Adobe runs a close second as a company that we would break a bottle on the edge of the bar and cut you for badmouthing. Bottom line: their Mac products are slipping, but in general still (IMHO) get the job done better. Let the flames begin...

  • Source of Error (Score:3, Informative)

    by ispivey ( 661270 ) <ispivey@@@mit...edu> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:13AM (#5591031)
    I doubt Adobe is the actual source of the stupid axis-labeling error -- Adobe attributes the images to Digital Media Net, the parent of the site that published the article this is based on -- so I'd imagine it more likely that the error's on DMN's side.

    It's interesting to look at Digital Video Editing, the site that published the original article entitled "Macs vs. PCs III: Macs Slaughtered Again".

    I'm not enough of an editing guru to comment on the validity of the tests, but the writing is strikingly unprofessional: "Mac stalwarts will cling to the notion that Mac OS X is so much better and easier to use than Windows XP". He's obviously got an axe to grind. Writers who compare Macs and PCs and *start out* with a chip on their shoulder kind of piss me off.

    It seems quite possible that Adobe asked the author for a couple of images, and he came up with these worthless, mis-scaled pieces of junk to force his own point. But maybe it was an accident, and I'm just a pessimist.

  • News Flash! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by skia ( 100784 ) <skia AT skia DOT net> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:39AM (#5591236) Homepage
    People who use Macs don't use them because they're faster.

    Adobe has for a long time now achieved feature and interface parity between their Windows and Mac products. That's no mean task, and they should be applauded for it. But it seems a little short sighted of them to name Windows the "preferred" platform just because it's faster. Photoshop may be the same on Windows and OS X, but Windows and OS X are very different. And no matter how graphically productive you are, you are still going to end up spending a large amount of time outside of Photoshop's isolated interface.

    If speed were really the end-all and be-all of graphic design (or computing in general) Apple would have died a long time ago and PC users would still be using DOS.

  • This is all about video production (Score:3, Insightful)

    by (rfm)2 ( 661490 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:48AM (#5591310)
    This "pcpreferred" page is part of the "DV" or "motion" section of the Adobe web site and I think that context is important. In the video space Adobe is having a real tough time competing against Apple's Final Cut Pro. Most Mac based video editing is now done on FCPro and Adobe's Premiere is losing market share. However, in the x86 arena Adobe doesn't have that competition. So it is in their commercial interest to try and move video professionals over to x86 because that is their only guarantee that Premiere get sold. I personally believe that x86 currently has the raw performance edge over PPC but that is not the only basis on which professionals make their choice. Final Cut Pro is not only a superior product than Premiere ii is also far better optimised to make use the dual-processors of the Mac platform. I think Adobe is just miffed and want to lure video professionals away from FCPro and the only way they think they can do that is by diverting the attention away from their relatively weak Premiere by emphasising the speed of x86 and some other Adobe products. Basically they are admitting that Premiere isn't cutting it against Final Cut Pro!

  • Color management defines the platform choice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MadHungarian1917 ( 661496 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @11:56AM (#5591369)
    As both a computer and graphic arts professional. One's choice of imaging platform boils down to workflow and the Wintel platform is just not there yet. I use Photoshop 7 on both the Mac and WinXP platforms and yes Photoshop renders more quickly on the WinXP it is useless for finished work because of the virtual nonexistance of Color management for the PC platform. On the MAC calibration is easy so the Pantone (tm) color you see on the monitor is what comes off your proof printer and eventually comes off the phototypesetter. There are far more people with digital cameras and scanners on the PC platform BUT for professional use the Mac is the preferred platform due to the tight integration of color management into it's OS's whereas Wintel thinks color management is a add-on product and the results reflect this view

  • Can I mod this article a troll? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ianscot ( 591483 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:02PM (#5591405)
    The word "preferred" in the url appears to be the entire basis for this /. story.

    Why, if one may ask, would Adobe miff a huge established user base by "choosing" one platform over the other, especially when they keep the Mac and PC versions more-or-less concurrent anyway? What possible motive would they have for declaring one platform "preferred"?

    On the other hand, I can think of a trolling motive for someone to see if they could get this thing posted. This "news" appears to date to 11 november of last year, to boot.

  • Adobe setting itself up for a Quarking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SoupIsGood Food ( 1179 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:08PM (#5591452)
    The most hated company in all of Macdom is not the beast from Redmond, who makes the tasty, lickable Office, but Quark. User-hostile doesn't even begin to cover its marketing and support... user belligerent is more like it. They flat-out refused to port to OSX (they still haven't), and they openly despise the Macintosh platform and insult its adherents at trade shows.

    They are this way because they believed they had an unbeatable product, a single killer app the world could not do without: Xpress. The Mac dweebs would buy and keep buying, because there was no credible choice.

    Until Adobe came up with InDesign, which is easier, faster, every inch as powerful, compatible with Xpress "Xtensions" and runs on OS X. Adobe shows their users lots of lovin', with trade shows, rational support, and deep Mac roots. Now InDesign is poised to topple Xpress into irrelevancy.

    Adobe does not have the only pro-caliber image editing app out there. If they're upset that iPhoto killed ImageReady, and incensed that FinalCut destroyed Premier, wait until Apple decides to buy the TIFF-any codebase, or Avisa Image, or just roll their own Photoshop killer based on the GIMP.

    Adobe is playing a very dangerous game. If Quark can be dethroned, you better damn well believe Photoshop can be, too. Apple's got pockets deep enough to do it, and marketing savvy that put FinalCut Pro on a Powerbook in the news vans of every TV station in the civilized world.

    You don't take on Apple and win.

    SoupIsGood Food

  • This is about Final Cut Pro (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wazzzup ( 172351 ) <astromacNO@SPAMfastmail.fm> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @12:25PM (#5591569)
    I haven't seen anybody mention it yet (probably missed it) but this is pretty clearly a shot against Final Cut Pro's bow. FCP runs only on Macs and it has been eating Premiere for lunch. Many in the industry consider FCP to be way ahead of Premiere in features, usability and interface. FCP's weakness is Adobe's main selling point: PC flat-out render faster than Macs. Period. They just have more raw power. The G4 chip has been orphaned by Motorola for the last 3 years. If Macs had the equivalent processing power of PC's, FCP would be a no-brainer for those deciding between the two packages.

  • SO WHAT? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by greymond ( 539980 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @01:13PM (#5591917) Homepage Journal
    Honestly people who are serious about graphic design, movie editing, and or modeling use BOTH macs and PC's PERIOD.

    When it comes to my client wanting me to either A) work on a specific platform so when I give them my files they know it will run on there machines fine or B) Needing an APP that only runs on one particular platform - Argueing over which is faster doesn't matter, it comes down to the FACT that as a graphic designer I NEED to have both my Apple Dual 500 AND my P4 1.6ghz Windows XP machines.

    Having one or the other ONLY in these fields WILL limit you.

  • Do You Even *Bother* To Read Linked The Articles? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bones3D_mac ( 324952 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @01:20PM (#5591967)
    OK, first read this... taken straight from the page:

    In the July 2002 issue of Digital Producer Magazine, Charlie White reported on a head-to-head duel between a single-processor Dell 2.53GHz Pentium® 4 -- the Dell Precision Workstation 340 -- and the fastest Macintosh then available -- a 1GHz dual-processor G4. The contest compared renderings of files created in Adobe® After Effects®, Illustrator®, and Photoshop® software that are typical to the video post-production workflow. The graphs below show some of the results, which were consistent. While the computers used in this study are no longer the fastest in their respective classes, the information is still valid. The PC outperformed the similar Macintosh machine, at an impressive rate.

    And this above all the pretty graphs:

    Graphics courtesy of DMN - DigitalMediaNet.com

    Listen up, dumbasses... this was an article written entirely external of Adobe and most likely was on Adobe's website simply because it was an Adobe product in the press. This has nothing to do with Adobe's own preferences.

    Furthermore, you can't take a single set of benchmarks as indesputable proof of anything. Different benchmark tests can get widely different results.

    Finally, if you look at the page one directory up, you'll see one of the links that says the following:

    Prefer a PC for DV? - See what an industry expert says about PC vs. Mac for digital video editing."

    It really has little to do with Adobe's preference for platform and more likely was put there because the sales of the PC versions are trailing behind the Mac versions. Adobe is at it's best when both platforms sell products evenly.

  • Same for this (current/long time) MacOS user (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phrogz ( 43803 ) <!@phrogz.net> on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @01:29PM (#5592027) Homepage
    I'm working right now on both a dual-GHz PowerMac G4 with 512MB RAM running 10.2.4, as well as a 1.8GHz P4 laptop with 512MB RAM running XP. (I have a KVM switcher for the middle shared screen of 3.)

    I have used MacOS since late versions of System 6. I have only recently, in the last couple years, been using Windows full-time.

    I feel like a traitor, but I have to say that, personally, I too prefer Windows when using Adobe apps. I don't know if it's the OS itself or shoddy programming for OS X, but Photoshop and Illustrator both seem slow to interact with uder OS X, whereas they seem snappy on XP.

    I prefer OS X over XP in almost all other areas, but I feel that someone (probably a combination of Apple and Adobe) has seriously dropped the ball for Photoshop and Illustrator under OS X. It's just not as usable, IMO.

    • This (current/long time) MacOS user = not a pro (Score:5, Insightful)

      by adzoox ( 615327 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @02:11PM (#5592398) Journal
      I would disagree. You must be using the features that are "atypical user" - most apps are faster on the mac that have PC counterparts, including the apps mentioned in the article. It's funny, PC "testers will just get a Mac, but have an optimized PC for tests. Out of the box PC or Mac is NOT optimized.

      Scratch disks, hard drive kind, size make huge differences for some reason on Macs, also lots of RAM, same kind fastest machine can take RAM matters too.

      Further, lots of geeks will disagree but to an artist it makes a huge difference - INTERFACE = PRODUCTIVITY - even XP is pixelated and ugly, there is little that is not pleasing to the eye on a Mac.

  • Nice Graph on Ya (Score:3, Informative)

    by lamz ( 60321 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @02:08PM (#5592381) Homepage Journal
    Has anyone noticed how screwed-up those graphs are, especially the first one? It says the PC took 54 seconds and that the Mac took 1 minute and 25 seconds. If you measure them both in seconds, then that is 54 seconds versus 85 seconds, but the Mac bar on the graph is more than twice as long as the PC bar.

    The PC bar lines up with .54 according to the lower index. Is this index supposed to represent seconds or minutes? If it's seconds, as suggested by the fact that the PC bar lines up with .54, then why is there a marker at 0.9? And more importantly, why does the Mac bar line up with 1.25, and not .85?

    Tricky! (But not as tricky as the incredibly misleading title on this SlashDot posting.)

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