Adobe's next Lightroom to forsake PowerPC Macs
Adobe Systems, taking the same course with its forthcoming Creative Suite applications, will offer the next Mac OS X version of Photoshop Lightroom only on Intel-based machines.
Apple has chosen to discontinue support for Macs using PowerPC processors beginning with its next operating system, version 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, which is due to arrive in coming weeks. Adobe said last week that its next Creative Suite will follow suit. The CS family includes programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, DreamWeaver, and Flash Professional.
Lightroom, which is for editing and cataloging photos, isn't part of the suite, but it's headed the same route.
"The next full version update of Lightroom will not run on PowerPC-based Mac computers," Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post last week. "Lightroom 2 updates will continue to support PowerPC."
Meanwhile, Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack, while fond of PowerPC, took a pragmatic tone on his blog: "By the time the next version of the (Creative) Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either."
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
If you spend roughly 4000 usdollars on a piece of equipment you´re supossed to work with, you HAVE to ditch it before 4 years?
Not good for the environment, I guess.
I realize that, eventually, all hardware has to be replaced, however at the price of the power pc and the fact that 4 years is not actually a very long time, i find it amusing that you would justify this like you are.
However since it's not Apple software I can't blame Apple. The next o/s by Apple is not going to support power pc either, however the power pc may be 5 years by the time that o/s comes out which is more acceptable.
I am a firm believer that any hardware you buy should be good for at least 5 years from the purchase date.
If your logic is true, people that criticized Vista had no case. They "shouldn't" expect new software to support old hardware.
And this is one of the claims that some people recommend Macs - they should have a longer life span compared to a PC (which is of course untrue).
I agree with you that people need to realized that if you want to use new software, you should upgrade the hardware to get better performance.
I used Vista prior to SP1 and I had no problems with it. I had it pre-installed on my then new laptop. I know also other people that had no problems with Vista from the beginning. So I think it is a bit of an exaggeration to claim that "when Vista came out, it did not run well on any hardware."
As for the "Vista ready" machines, I think it was a disgrace by Intel and Microsoft to act the way they did.
But this doesn't affect the point about people's claims that Macs have longer life span than a PC, which is not true. As far as I know, Snow Leopard is not going to work on PowerPCs based Macs.
This is interesting due to the fact that actually Microsoft is supporting old hardware with Win 7 (although I'm claiming this according to other people's statements...). I think that Microsoft doesn't have the luxury not to support old hardware, due to the fact that a lot of organization use old hardware (more than 4-5 years old). This is one of the reason I think Vista wasn't adopted by these organizations.
Anyone who is running a 4 year old rig to do their professional work is not exactly the kind of pro Adobe is looking for. That's a choice they are making.
I still run some PPC systems, but I do recognize that they're no longer front line systems and I don't worry too much about high end software upgrades.
All Adobe needs to do is continue to sell CS4 for those without Snow Leopard.
I also have older systems running PS 7 and Illustrator 8. Those systems are used for specific tasks, as are most of the systems on my network. The lovely thing is there are no conflicts with running different versions and if you are a long time user who knows the program, support for older versions is not an issue.
Adobe CS rocks, no matter what version it is.
As other point out, many people are still using CS2 and CS3 let alone CS4. Because of the economic crisis, we have not upgraded most of the Macs at work with CS4. So when the money is better, they'll just be getting CS4 anyway.
CS5 is not due out until at least April and as late as October 2010 (if Adobe sticks to its normal schedule).
There are several issues with play into this dropping of PowerPC, which makes it more justifiable than one might expect. First, They had already gotten well along with the 64 bit version of CS4 when Apple decided to cancel the 64 bit version of Carbon. So all of a sudden, the CS5 project was redone to be completely Cocoa. That and the fact they also have been porting it to 64 bit means that there are strict limitations on how backwards-compatible they could be. It would take a whale of a lot more work to make all that stuff work with PowerPC and considering more than half of all Macs are already Intel-based, that just doesn't make much sense. For professionals who need to best performance, the way they could get to it the quickest mean dropping PowrPC.
Same with Apple and OS X. In fact, if you go to John Nack's blog, you'll find the overwhelming response from his readers is that the dropping of PowerPC is a good thing. It's a bit sad for some people, but they can use CS4 for years to come if they want. Adobe finally had to cut off Photoshop 7 from the upgrade path simply because it became too cumbersome.
Of course, Apple haters and Adobe haters will always find a way to complain and object. That's the nature of the beast.
Now, they've got to upgrade their computers on a shorter time-scale than they might have preferred in the current economic climate (whilst they may have the latest and greatest on the desktop, perhaps they were hoping to keep older laptops for longer; or maybe they made a big investment in the last of the G5s and weren't yet ready to get a whole new system.)
Adobe might find that they get even less upgrades than they'd hoped for, and more migrations to other software tools.
Case in point: my little company is PPC only and stuck with CS3. While the enhancements in CS4 were nice, nothing was a do or die, gotta have it upgrade. Now, CS5 will have to wait until we can afford to upgrade all of our hardware, which is going to take a while in this economy (and that there is certainly nothing wrong with CS3, whose interface I prefer over CS4 anyway).
I don't think Cs5 will be better than cs4 anyway; I tried flash cs4, but I hated the removal of keyframes and tweening, so I stuck to cs3.
I kinda have to agree with adobe, if you can spend thousands of dollars on a new creative suite, you probably have the money to get a new computer. There is nothing in the new creative suites that I will want to use anyway, so it doesn't affect me too bad.
I do feel bad for those old dual core. 3.06 GHZ G5 powermacs though. . . those machines would be perfectly capable of running CS5, and yet they have been kicked out.
- by treefinn October 6, 2009 2:10 PM PDT
- For Lightroom users this creates a big problem if they retain their ppc g5 computers and are stuck with a Lightroom that can't be updated. Which is if you use raw files that require new camera profiles to work. For example the new 2.5 version has bugs that make Sony, Panasonic and a few other brands have static glitches showing up in files that can't be eliminated and will effect old files as well. The only solution is to use version 2.4 but the raw files (arw for Sony) are not recognized as they require the new updates. A bit of a catch 22. Shutting LR from PPC means photographers that don't feel the need to buy new intel processor computers won't be able to use LR with raw files.
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