04/03/2008, 9:15am, EDT
Thursday, April 3rd
Adobe to delay 64-bit CS4 for Macs
Adobe is already in the middle of developing its Creative Suite 4 series of applications, but Mac users will have to wait behind PC owners in order to take full advantage of their platform, the company has announced. While there is no formal release date planned for any version of CS4, Adobe says that only Windows Vista users will have a completely 64-bit suite at launch, with Mac conversions coming sometime thereafter.
The issue, says Photoshop product manager John Nack, is that many of the programs in the Mac version of CS4 are written with Apple's Carbon code, rather than Cocoa, which is the only option that supports 64-bit processing. "We have to rewrite from scratch," explains Nack. "This makes the cost of the move considerably greater than for Windows. So we will ship 64-bit Windows version first."
It is uncertain which CS4 Mac apps will make the leap to 64-bit at launch, with the exception of Lightroom, which is already written in Cocoa. As such, users can currently download a 64-bit version of the Lightroom 2.0 beta. The main advantage over 32-bit is said to be the ability to address 4GB or more of RAM, which is crucial in programs such as Photoshop and Lightroom, where it can dramatically shrink the time needed to load large image files.
Filed under: software, digital imaging, Graphics/Web Design
Other story tags: Windows, Vista, Adobe, Lightroom
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CS3 runs faster in PC virtualization than it does in 10.5.
How freakin sad is that.
Mac Pros would be a different story tho...
I would have expected a different lame excuse this time, like the dog ate their only copy of it, or their grandmother died or something.
So calm down! It's coming!
It is also true that Apple has abandoned 64-bit Carbon so I'm sure this is the reason for the delay. If Apple has said from the beginning their would not be 64-bit Carbon for Intel, then I'm sure they'd be well along in re-coding it.
This is a massive job here - the only choices are doing what they are doing or delaying the Windows version to wait for the Mac version just to keep a few people happy. If you ran Adobe, would you do that?