Intel Macs and Adobe .. what now?

whippet

With the sooner than expected (in my opinion) of the MacPro's .. where does this leave people who need to buy new macs and creative suite?

I believe that Adobe are not prepared to update until Q1 2007, can the new Mac Pro's be trusted to run CS2?

Have Apple jumped the gun with this release?

Oriel

Apple certainly haven't jumped the gun - if anything, Adobe are trailing by a long way. The new Mac would easily be able to handle CS2 anyway, in my opinion.

DadaKopf

The new Intel macs can handle CS2, but according to tests on a review I read, the programs run between 20-40% slower than Mac CS2 running in a PowerPC environment.

Adobe CS3 will be fully native.

I'm struggling with a decision to buy a MacBook Pro or not. This is a major sticking point for me. Personally, I'm also waiting for the MacBook Pro to ship with the Intel Core Duo 2 chip, and a dual layer DVD burner.

Hugh_C

sinecurea wrote:

Apple certainly haven't jumped the gun - if anything, Adobe are trailing by a long way. The new Mac would easily be able to handle CS2 anyway, in my opinion.

Have you read the specs for the new machines?

that delivers up to twice the performance of the Power Mac G5 Quad.

Gimme one o' those NOW!

Yep, I'd say it could handle CS2 even through Rosetta.

Urban Weigl

Once you have enough RAM (I recommend at least 1GB, preferably 1.5 or 2GB), Adobe CS2 runs quite well even on the Intel-based Mac mini.

I'd expect it to kick ass on these new machines, and once CS3 comes out, you should see another 50% speed boost.

But I have to agree, Adobe are really lagging here. To demonstrate this, let me tell you: even Quark XPress is a Universal Binary now. Adobe need to get their act together.

ButtermilkJack

Urban Weigl wrote:

...I'd expect it to kick ass on these new machines, and once CS3 comes out, you should see another 50% speed boost...

Unfortunately in my experience this is not the case. The new machines do not handle the Adobe Suite very well at all. Apps will run... and at times there may not be a huge noticeable difference... but I've found that the majority of tasks will cause serious issues on the Intel Macs. If you run 2 or more Adobe apps at the same time, one of them will crash at regular intervals (I've found it's usually when you try to bring and inactive app back into play). Also, using Apple+Tab to switch between apps takes forever. It can take anything up to 2 or 3 minutes ( :eek: I know, hard to believe) to bring an already fully loaded app back into play.

Machines used are Intel iMac (2GB RAM) and Intel MacBook (1GB RAM). The CS3 suite would want to run a hell of a lot faster in Universal Binary if it is going to be a success.

Fingers crossed...!!

K.O.Kiki

ButtermilkJack wrote:

Machines used are Intel iMac (2GB RAM) and Intel MacBook (1GB RAM). The CS3 suite would want to run a hell of a lot faster in Universal Binary if it is going to be a success.

Fingers crossed...!!

Well that's just -- dumb, comparing a Core Duo machine with a dual-Core 2 Xeon machine.
The Mac Pro, I expect, would be just a bit more than twice as fast -- faster FSB, updated (newer) architecture & 2 processors! :eek:

Urban Weigl

All I can say is that for me, Photoshop and GoLive (both CS2 versions) run perfectly on an Intel Mac mini with 2GB RAM. No hold-ups or crashes. GoLive does very occasionally crash, but no more so than the PowerPC version did.

As a result, I would expect it to kick ass on the Mac Pro, though obviously not nearly as fast as a universal binary version would be. It's still going to be faster than a G4 and close to a dual G5.

But as I said, Adobe are really dragging their feet here. Even Quark XPress is universal by now, and they're usually the slowest when it comes to updating things.

Oriel

Any crashes would be down to the software alone, not the fact that the processor is Intel.

ButtermilkJack

K.O.Kiki wrote:

Well that's just -- dumb, comparing a Core Duo machine with a dual-Core 2 Xeon machine.
The Mac Pro, I expect, would be just a bit more than twice as fast -- faster FSB, updated (newer) architecture & 2 processors! :eek:

Eh, I think you missed the point completely there! I was only stating the two machines that I have used so far... and purely for the record. If you read the post again you will see that I was only describing the experiences I have had running the Adobe software on Intel Macs, and suggesting that a 'Universal Binary' version of the software should run faster than a 'PowerPC' version of the same software. I didn't make any comparisons.

Jumping to conclusions and adding insults... Well that's just -- dumb

K.O.Kiki

I guess I should have used "silly" instead -- no offence was intended!

Aaanyway -- benchies of Mac Pros @Geek Patrol:

• 2.66Ghz, 1Gb RAM
• 3.0Ghz, 4Gb RAM

Both tested against a G5-Quad w/1Gb RAM

ButtermilkJack

K.O.Kiki wrote:

I guess I should have used "silly" instead -- no offence was intended!

Ah no, none taken at all. I was only having a bit of a laugh.

K.O.Kiki wrote:

Aaanyway -- benchies of Mac Pros @Geek Patrol:

• 2.66Ghz, 1Gb RAM
• 3.0Ghz, 4Gb RAM

Both tested against a G5-Quad w/1Gb RAM

I take your point... but, and maybe I'm wrong on this, I would've thought it wouldn't matter what specs you had in your Intel Mac, if software is not built for the Intel system it's going to give trouble anyway

It may well be that Mac Pros are out-performing PowerPC machines, but if the software is not built for the new platform, then all those muscles are useless I would think?

SystemError51

whippet wrote:

With the sooner than expected (in my opinion) of the MacPro's .. where does this leave people who need to buy new macs and creative suite?

I believe that Adobe are not prepared to update until Q1 2007, can the new Mac Pro's be trusted to run CS2?

Have Apple jumped the gun with this release?

The Intel-Tiger and the Universal Leopard comes with Rosetta. This is a layer of the system which allows you to run PowerPC binaries on an Intel chip.

In short: If you have Photoshop CS2 for PowerPC, it'll work on any Intel based Mac without much loss of performance.