back to article Adobe sounds Apple PowerPC death rattle

Adobe will not support Mac PowerPC-based systems in future versions of its Creative Suite product. It's the latest blow for PowerPC users, who may have bought their Macs as late as 2006 in Apple's pre-Intel days. In June, Cupertino lined up a nail in the coffin of its ageing PowerPC flotilla by announcing that its upcoming …

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  1. h 6
    Go

    CS2

    Works perfectly fine on my dualy G4 at home. I don't need CS5 on it.

    Yes, the home Mac is nowhere near the 8-core Mac Pro at work, but saving down in CSx is all I need to do.

    Move along, no news here.

  2. phoenix
    Grenade

    Nothing new here move along....

    This is not the first time this has happened to the poor ole crayoners. Apple themselves have pulled one or two rugs way from users ion the past with OS changes prior to OSX rendering their over priced software useless. Also quite frankly most of the 80 so quid OSX versions have been paid bug fixes and they laugh at windows users.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Blow?

    "It's the latest blow for PowerPC users, who may have bought their Macs as late as 2006, in Apple's pre-Intel days."

    Surely you mean bonus given that it means they won't be able to run yet another bloatware release from Abominable?

  4. Richard 102

    Stop Press Shocker!

    Apple is dropping support for PowerPC in Snow Leopard; no sense in delaying the impending inevitable.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Non-issue!

    Given that CS4 is about a grand, who in their right mind is going to be looking to put CS5 on a 3+yo Mac?

  6. Ian Halstead
    Flame

    Ah.... Adobe. Now let me think...

    They'll still manage to slip some carbon code in there somewhere. And not adhere to Apples guidelines for shortcuts. And still stick to the annoying and time wasting activation process that means you can't rededicate a machine to another purpose without first remembering to deactivate their software. And still have a complex array of baffling product matrices.

    Apart from the fact they intensely annoy me they are a great company. Maybe that should read 'grate' company.

    Even their name is mud.

  7. David Simpson 1
    WTF?

    So

    So ? Apple are the ones who ended support for PowerPC is it a big surprise that App vendors would follow suit ?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    So really...

    All this means is that Adobe have more CPU power to utilise unnecessarily.

    Wake me up when Adobe actually write a piece of software that isn't bloated to buggery and runs with decent performance.

  9. mrweekender
    Go

    That's progress folks....

    ...nothing to see here, move along.

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  11. Giles Jones Gold badge

    Hardly a problem

    Stick with the current version or upgrade your Mac.

    Snow Leopard is Intel only as well, so it's time to move on if you have a PPC Mac. They're pretty slow by modern standards anyway.

  12. Bruno Girin
    Thumb Up

    Who can afford CS anyway?

    Considering how much Adobe wants for its CS suite theses days, who can afford to buy it anyway? I've stayed on CS2 on my PPC Mac because I couldn't justify the expense of upgrading. So that's yet another reason not to upgrade.

  13. martinX

    Not really surprising is it?

    CS 4 was only released in October 2008. I'm guessing that a lot of professionals are still exploring the creative possibilities with it and aren't butting heads against its limitations just yet. By the time CS5 comes out it will be late 2010 or 2011, and those PPC machines will be 4 or 5 years old. Any creative pro wishing to buy the latest and greatest SW would surely be matching it with new HW by that stage. You know it makes sense.

  14. bobdevis
    Grenade

    Can't say I blame them

    Can't say I blame them.

    How big is the pool of people who are content with a dead platform without the luxury of Wine or VMWare and NEED the newest CS?

  15. technica

    Oh, Well

    This is not a problem, it's a FEATURE!

  16. Steve Todd
    Stop

    Just to point out the bleedin' obvious

    but as of next month Apple won't be supporting the PowerPC chip either. Snowleopard is due then, and it's designed to provide precisely the kind of services that Adobe want for CS (OpenCL GPGPU acceleration, Grand Central multithreading, full 64 bit support etc). Since they have to complete a full port from the Carbon C APIs to the Cocoa Objective-C framework then it would be unlikely that they target an outdated version of OS X at the same time.

  17. Harry Roberts
    Pirate

    After being burned by CS4

    There can only be improvements in CS5, right Adobe?

    Perhaps the reason they're dropping PowerPC is because you need a 3ghz+ Intel/Opteron workhorse to even use the slow POS.

    Pirates, because that's what we'll all become to get a working version of Illustrator or Photoshop.

  18. Antidisestablishmentarianist
    Thumb Up

    This is not a problem

    People who can afford the Creative Suite can afford to upgrade to Intel based machines. I'd be surprised if they haven't already.

    As for those with warez copies, well boo hoo.

  19. adrianww
    Flame

    I'm not too worried...

    ...about them dropping PowerPC support, but I wish they'd do something about their bloody ridiculous pricing. A year or two ago when I was looking to buy a couple of upgrades and a few new licences for CS3 (as it was at the time), I was told that the discounted price to me was going to be...the standard retail price. Or, as it's otherwise known, slightly more than you would pay if you just bought a few copies of the boxed product direct from Amazon or some box-shifter on Tottenham Court Road. Hell, even buying copies from the Apple Store would have been cheaper!

    And, although it wasn't a huge number of seats, this was still a purchase that - according to Adobe's website - fell well into the first tier of volume discount (which, to any other company, would usually mean something lower than RRP).

    I pointed out that this was obviously some new definition of the term "discount" that I hadn't yet heard about, but the Dutchman on the other end of the phone didn't seem to be too au fait with the whole sarcasm thing. So I just told him that, under the circumstances, I wasn't going to bother buying anything, we'd manage with what we had and Adobe could stick their heads up their collective bottoms and whistle for my money until such time as they decided to become a bit more reasonable in the pricing department.

    If I didn't have some fairly strong principles, I'd just rip the damned stuff. It's no wonder there's so much counterfeiting out there when software companies have an attitude like that. Overcharging, customer-gouging poltroons.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    zOMG, people *still* have non-intel hardware?

    I bet the people who complain are people still using abacuses and haven't tried out this new fangled thing called 'television'.

    But seriously though, this is hardly a surprise!!!! Apple have done bloody well getting Adobe to support PowerPC for this long.

    Also, they can still use CS3 or CS4. What is wrong with them?

  21. David Halko
    Stop

    No Surprise Here

    This is a disappointment, but no surprise.

    Apple stopped supporting PowerPC for the past couple versions of iMovie, already.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Good...

    Perhaps they'll now be able to free up some staff to improve the next release. CS4 has been a low water mark for both usability and stability.

  23. Yazovets
    Linux

    Serves 'em right

    Good to see Apple fanboys in grief. :)

  24. Kevin Harvey

    CS3 and PowerPC

    Adobe not supporting PowerPC any more is not new, Photoshop CS3 was the last version supported and CS4 will not work on PowerPC laptops.

  25. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    hobbyists need not apply

    file this under "Thank you Captain Obvious"...

    given our media department, over the life span of its Macs and Windows boxes spends 3 or 4 times over the hardware price on software per computer I think that shows that professionals well and truly budgeted in for the move on from PPC units some time ago.

    As for the whining about the price of CS... .. pfttt if you're a professional who can't cover the cost of every second CS upgrade then maybe time to look at either what your charging or if you're even in the right business.

    Even with in the low budget area in the education market where I work profit from a single one of our larger commissions would pay for the whole CS suite or a new nicely kitted out MacPro (and our media department doesn't qualify for the academic discount as they are a "independent" commercial entity).

    For the hobbyist photoshopers Elements or Lightroom covers pretty much 99.99% of their "needs" for most stuff.

    Most of my mates are either professional commercial or wedding photographers and given the cost of purchasing maintaining and upgrading your 2 (or 3) pro level DSLRs and/or medium format cameras and your post processing work stations every 2 to 4 years the cost of the appropriate Adobe CS's price is chicken feed, the profit from one wedding or half a commercial shoot will usually cover this

    wtf for "this is newsworthy how?"

  26. bygjohn
    FAIL

    Re: Serves 'em right

    "Good to see Apple fanboys in grief. :)"

    Where? Having just read through the article and comments, there isn't actually anything from a Mac user who's bothered.

    The article implies grief, but with nothing to back that up, and the comments are from Mac people unbothered by this news or snarky comments from Apple haters.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Designers

    are a bunch of moaning, what everything pillocks anyway, I should Know, I support an office of about 35 of them, we only have 2 PPC G4 laptops left and 3 PPC G5 duelies that are nearing the end of their lives left in circulation so Im having trouble seeing what the issue is here, one day you will have to upgrade, accept it and buy a new computer, or better yet, Complain to your IT admin (unless your IT admin is me, in which case I'm on lunch - permanently) and get them to replace your aging archaic platform.

  28. adrianww
    FAIL

    @AC, 03:32, 14/ 08/09

    Covering the cost of CS3/4/whatever is not the issue. What is the issue is that the software is still somewhat overpriced and the stuff on the Adobe website about volume licensing largely seems to be a rather confused work of fiction.

    In our case, we don't use CS for any kind of direct fee-earning work. We're not a graphic design or media house, we're a manufacturing, wholesale and retail operation. Graphic design (and pretty much anything Adobe) is pure overhead on our books. We use it 'cos it's the best tool for the job when we need to do advertising layouts, product packaging, etc. and we have found from experience than doing those jobs in-house with our own team has proven to be more cost effective and give better results than outsourcing them to an external agency.

    So, on the one hand, yes I could afford to wander out and buy a bunch of CS licences if the urge took me. But there are other, better and more important things that I can spend the money on instead. It also irks me when I wave a shiny umpteen thousand pound purchase order in the face of a software supplier, only to be told that my "volume discount" on the purchase would be 0%. So, for as long as we can live with our existing mix of CS2/CS3 installations, I'm in no hurry to chuck any more money Adobe's way. Yes, the product is generally good, but their pricing structures and attitude to the paying customer leave much to be desired.

  29. Adrian Esdaile
    Jobs Horns

    Er, what?

    Oh, an article about Macs.

    OK, back to installing software on my new Windows 7 rig.

    Which I put together in er, 2003 for memory.

    And still works.

    And runs the latest OSes.

    And is still fast enough to do useful work.

    And cost about 1/4 a Mac at the time for a better rig.

    And I can go on, if you want....

  30. Michael 36
    Jobs Halo

    Not really a problem

    The issue arises because Mac users are able to keep their machines longer as they are not so badly affected by OS bloat. I still use a G4 running X even though the G4 was discontinued two years before X was released.

    My question is whether Adobe have added useful features, which would suggest an upgrade , or merely munged the app around hoping people would buy it.

    If you don't need the feature - don't upgrade.

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