Friday, March 24, 2006
Intel-ligence
Friends and colleagues have frequently asked me why I went ahead with a Quad G5 tower at work instead of holding out for an Intel-based Mac tower. The reason is very simple. Non-universal binaries don’t run as fast under Rosetta emulation as they do on a native PowerPC—if they run at all. Yes, there are a handful of popular applications that are completely incompatible.
This may not be a major problem except that, at work, Photoshop and InDesign are my two most frequently used applications. Currently, CS2 apps will run much faster on the Quad G5 than any Intel-based Mac.
Some have suggested that I could get by on running the apps under emulation for a little while because it seemed sure that Adobe would hurry to get CS3 out soon. But I’m glad they’re not. First of all, we have no information yet when Intel-based towers will be out, nor does anyone have a real clue when Final Cut Pro Studio (another oft-used app) will be made Intel native. Moreover, Creative Suite users have been quite vocal that they do not want to pay what is sure to be the same upgrade price for CS3 just for it to be Intel native. It would be a rip off. I, for one, am thrilled for this news:
Adobe Creative Suite 3 due in Q2 2007
…Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen earlier this week said that customers were looking for new features and that Apple’s large customers would be slow to migrate to Intel-based Macs.
It means two things for me. 1) CS3 will have new technologies and features, just as we’ve come to expect from Adobe’s updated software. And 2) with CS3 being a bit more than a year away, I feel far more justified in having gone ahead with the Quad G5. It’ll remain the best computer to use with CS for a full year and will still be an excellent machine even after Intel-based towers are available.
Update: Michael pointed to someone else’s comment on the reason it makes no sense to release an Intel-native version of CS2.
» Posted by ALBj at 01:55 PM (ET)
Category: Mac, News
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