in MacBook Pros are due to the fact they have 2 slots and no one has made SO-Dimms larger than 2 GB, but I'm assuming you know that and are just fooling

Mac OS X was released in 2001, Cocoa was introduced to the world the year before that. So, they've had at this point 8 years to develop for Cocoa, if they had some framework laid down in Cocoa by now, any changes would be easy at this point. I would think they would have been developing for Cocoa for the simple fact that all their apps would be far more impressive. Compare the performance of Photoshop with Pixelmator, you can easily see the benefits Cocoa has. Even if they haven't been planning on selling a Cocoa version soon, I would hope they'd have had some developers at least working on it. Carbon wasn't going to live forever, that was clear from the beginning. The fact they are still carrying code from Mac OS 9 seems is frustrating considering the amount of money these software packages go for. Their problem is they have a bit too much bloat. A lot of what they can do with the software can already be done in the Core Graphics of the OS.

"Apple abandoned Carbon, mandating everyone move development to Cocoa, which essentially takes a complete rewrite of the codebase, "not a trivial task," as they say. "

I am an Apple "fanboy" to the extreme, but I'm glad Adobe called them to the carpet on this one. Apple should have allowed 64bit carbon apps (since this was already a planned capability before Apple pulled this functionality from Xcode) and should have developed a transition time-frame for carbon apps to be dropped for 64bit support in Xcode.

In other words, Apple should have continued their support of 64 bit apps using Carbon or Cocoa now and then verbalized that the next version of Xcode in 2009-2010 will no longer support Carbon 64bit apps.. only Cocoa.

The Adobe Suite (especially Photoshop and Illustrator) has over a decade of legacy code. It'll be nice to clear all that out and have a new, updated, version (with more bugs I'm sure) but this is A LOT for Apple to ask without having a Carbon -> Cocoa planned 64bit transition plan. Yeah, Adobe should have had the foresight to know this was coming and should have begun transitioning to Cocoa sooner, but Apple still did them (and other developers) dirty by suddenly forcing Cocoa development for 64bit!

This isn't your neighbor Alice coding yet another notepad in her basement after work. These are professional developers for a major software vendor, who's only business is... software!

If Adobe weren't so busy thinking of new and creative ways to confuse their customers with 30 different product names ending in CS3, they might be able to manage development in a more intelligent and timely manner. :P

"but this is A LOT for Apple to ask without having a Carbon -> Cocoa planned 64bit transition plan. Yeah, Adobe should have had the foresight to know this was coming and should have begun transitioning to Cocoa sooner, but Apple still did them (and other developers) dirty by suddenly forcing Cocoa development for 64bit!"

Carbon WAS the transition plan into Cocoa, that is what many don't seem to understand. Cocoa supported 64-Bit from the beginning. 64-Bit Carbon code would require nearly as much re-write as Cocoa anyway. Apple didn't force this transition out of nowhere because developers have had 8 years to get on board.

Why would Adobe dis Mac users? I don't get it. I guess it's time for another software vendor to take their place, hopefully one that won't delay major software releases. This is f*cked up.

Adobe products already have strange file size limits. Dreamweaver can't handle as large an html file as Kompozer can and Gimp.app can handle much bigger bitmap sizes than Photoshop Elements on the same machine.

Carbon, from the very beginning, was labeled as the transitional framework (it should have been long dead already). Adobe shouldn't have wasted so much time and effort on it in the first place, or better, should have developed a copy of their package with Cocoa in parallel.

Surely there's some shortsighted head to blame for that...

I'm sure everyone here outraged by Adobe not making Photoshop Cocoa is equally outraged that Apple, 9 years after they purchased Final Cut, and, as others have noted above, 8 years after debuting Cocoa, has still not transitioned it to Cocoa. On top of that, Final Cut is not cross-platform code the way Photoshop is, which should make the job a lot easier. Final Cut would benefit greatly from being 64-bit. Apple fanboys, get with the program.