Adobe's going to hurt itself with its seemingly-purposeful delays in getting their products moved to UB.

No Universal Binary = No Sale. Adobe has known that Apple was shifting to Intel/UB since last June just like everyone else, so they had plenty of time to get this done for a new version of Photoshop Elements that wasn't going to ship until 9 months later (March '06).

Get your act together Adobe, and then I'll consider buying something from you again.

Agreed, macntx - anything that is not Intel-native is an automatic no-sale for me as well. Once OS X was out, I didn't buy any Classic software again, and this will be no different. If you ignore the Intel Macs, then you will be punished with lower sales.

... now those who have decided to forego X Code in favor of their own backwards coding solutions will be paying for that stupid decision ten-fold.

In other words, really, Adobe has two choices - porting their apps to X Code (i.e. rewriting them), or do a hack port job, moving their Windows code base over, and dressing it up with the Mac UI. They are not alone, as Microsoft is in the same boat (though I'm not holding my breath for anything useful to come out of the MacBU anymore).

"The new Magic Extractor easily removes subjects from photos, with advanced edge de-fringing, for scrapbooking and composites."

This *MUST* be a favorite tool of North Korea, and would have been a hit in the former Soviet Union.

I will be picking up a copy of Elements 4 when it's available.

This is another reason why I won't be picking up a "Rosetta Mac" any time soon. The bleeding edge sometimes just isn't worth it.

But I wonder if the reason for no UB is different from what Adobe is publicly saying. I guess it's possible that they really are that incompetent or just plain stubborn that they couldn't get a UB version out in 9 months.

Here's what I suspect is really going on. They won't have CS in UB until late this year or possibly next year. Not everyone needs all the whiz-bang features of CS2. I don't use most of the features of even version 7, to say nothing of CS and CS2. Why would I need the bloatware that will be CS3? How many people are like me and have been wondering why we shouldn't just save our money and use Elements?

Adobe is probably afraid that a UB Elements now might eventually hurt their sales of CS3.

Not quite. PS Elements is based on the full PS engine. When that goes native, PS Elements will go native in its next revision.

You guys act like 9 months is a short time. PS Elements is a complex application - it's quite possible that it takes longer than that, especially for an application with processor specific optimizations like PSE has.

Buy PSE, don't buy it - whatever - just ask yourself this: is not having PSE at all better for you that having a slower version of PSE because it runs in Rosetta?