Adobe Dragging Its Feet with Intel-Macs? Not Quite.

But, QuarkXPress 7 already runs on Intel-Macs, say some. That is not entire­ly true. QuarkXPress 7 is still in beta, albeit a pub­lic beta. Despite the close rela­tion­ship between Apple and Quark, Quark is not call­ing their Intel-Mac-compatible appli­ca­tion ready for release. Whether it is or is not ready is irrel­e­vant; Quark is cau­tious­ly allow­ing a shake­down peri­od for the Intel-Mac and Quark’s flag­ship appli­ca­tion run­ning on that plat­form. Wisely, Quark is tak­ing advan­tage of the vis­i­bil­i­ty and good­will earned by being the first major appli­ca­tion pub­licly announc­ing com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, but also, even more wise­ly, is not ful­ly com­mit­ting to the untried Intel-Mac sys­tems by releas­ing a dot-oh ship­ping prod­uct. Whether QuarkXPress 7.0 suc­ceeds or fails is a crit­i­cal mat­ter for Quark; it may very well decide whether XPress con­tin­ues to be a major mar­ket play­er, or is rel­e­gat­ed to the abyss of “legacy software.” While main­tain­ing good rela­tions with Apple and Mac cus­tomers is cru­cial to the sur­vival of Quark’s soft­ware busi­ness, deliv­er­ing a prod­uct that works is the high­est pri­or­i­ty. Releasing XPress 7 for Intel-Macs too ear­ly puts the application–and the company–at risk for bugs in the Intel-Mac hard­ware or oper­at­ing sys­tem to cause show­stop­per fail­ures in XPress–which would be a mar­ket share and pub­lic rela­tions dis­as­ter for Quark even if the issues were beyond Quark’s control.

Adobe, Microsoft, and oth­er large devel­op­ers of Mac soft­ware face the same con­cerns as Quark. Software devel­op­ers are leery of Apple’s his­to­ry of rush­ing prod­ucts to mar­ket with­out thor­ough test­ing. Mac fans will recall the not-quite-ready-for-primetime Macintosh OS X 10.0, and the fact that Apple did not afford soft­ware devel­op­ers suf­fi­cient lead-time to work with the final OS X 10.0 devel­op­ment build and SDK before the oper­at­ing sys­tem was released to the public.

“Why wait for Creative Suite 3,” some­one recent­ly asked me. “Adobe should just [port] CS2 ver­sions of [their appli­ca­tions] today.” Why? What is the ben­e­fit to Adobe cus­tomers of purchasing–even if only for the cost of media and shipping–another copy of Creative Suite 2 or CS2-version appli­ca­tions sim­ply for instal­la­tion on an Intel-Mac? “Because cus­tomers want to use Intel-Macs,” is the usu­al reply. Setting aside brag­ging rights and the cool­ness fac­tor of being an ear­ly Intel-Mac adopter, log­i­cal­ly con­sid­ered, there is no sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fit to obtain­ing and installing a recom­piled ver­sion of Creative Suite 2. Certainly not one that jus­ti­fies the added expense of purchasing–again, even if only for the cost of media and delivery–as well as the neces­si­ty to acti­vate the soft­ware and recon­fig­ure its pref­er­ences and workspaces.

Additionally, even an Intel-Mac-compatible ver­sion of Creative Suite 2 does not sat­is­fy every cre­ative pro’s appli­ca­tion needs. How will those PDF proofs be sent to clients if Entourage, Thunderbird, and oth­er email appli­ca­tions haven’t yet been port­ed? Sure, iMail works on Intel-Macs, but does iMail sat­is­fy everyone’s needs? How will one pre­flight and impose those PDFs? InCopy is only slow­ly pen­e­trat­ing the mar­ket; how will the aver­age user write word proces­sor files for place­ment into InDesign? Where does a Creative Suite-based work­flow break down when workflow-critical plug-ins will not run? Font Book is a good intro­duc­to­ry font man­ag­er, but with what will pro­fes­sion­als man­age fonts used by the Creative Suite? How reli­able is the col­or input to, and out­put from, Photoshop if spec­tropho­tome­ter and device col­or cal­i­bra­tion soft­ware isn’t yet avail­able for the new proces­sor chip? What about print­ing and scan­ning? Early ver­sions of OS X had seri­ous issues with the dri­vers from major print­er man­u­fac­tur­ers (many Hewlett-Packard print­er own­ers had to jump back to Classic Mode just to print!); what are the chances that Apple and all the hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers have ironed out all the com­pat­i­bil­i­ty issues this time around?

Rarely does an entire cre­ative work­flow run sole­ly on Adobe’s cre­ative pro appli­ca­tions. Even if Adobe released its prod­ucts for Intel-Mac today, work­flows would break down the moment they required an appli­ca­tion, plug-in, or tech­nol­o­gy that hadn’t yet been recom­piled for Mac-Intel. Initially, stub­born Intel-Mac users would find them­selves jug­gling projects and assets between two machines; ulti­mate­ly, they would choose pro­duc­tiv­i­ty over cool­ness by switch­ing back to the old­er Power Mac that does run every­thing need­ed to get the job done.

Adobe will port its appli­ca­tions to Intel-Macs–probably with Creative Suite 3–which I pre­dict won’t be released until January of 2007, if not as late as April. In turn, Microsoft and all the oth­er Mac soft­ware and hard­ware devel­op­ers, large and small, will also port their prod­ucts to Rosetta. But, they will do it in time, after the Intel-Mac plat­form has proven itself, and after the respec­tive soft­ware mak­ers have ver­i­fied to their own sat­is­fac­tion that their prod­ucts are ready to be released for that plat­form. It is in the best inter­ests of these com­pa­nies to get Intel-Mac-compatible ver­sions of their prod­ucts to mar­ket as soon as pos­si­ble, but not at the expense of reli­a­bil­i­ty, func­tion­al­i­ty, per­for­mance, or cus­tomer satisfaction.

In the mean­time, have patience. Intel-Macs may be faster and more pow­er­ful, but faster and more pow­er­ful doing what?

Adobe, InDesign, Quark, InCopy, QuarkXPress, Mac, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Office, QuarkXPress 7, Quark 7

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14 thoughts on “Adobe Dragging Its Feet with Intel-Macs? Not Quite.”

  1. Brian

    Many of these argu­ments are valid, but miss the broad­er point. Apple and Adobe have done a poor job of allow­ing pro­fes­sion­al users to antic­i­pate a roadmap for the future. If I’m forced to pur­chase a new Mac based sys­tem today, what do I buy? A PPC based G5 that will be obse­lete in the near future and offer sub par per­for­mance once the uni­ver­sal apps hit the shelves. An Intel based Mac and live with Rosetta enu­la­tion slow­ing every­thing down, then face a unclear upgrade future that prob­a­bly involves pur­chas­ing soft­ware a sec­ond time? Or do I just dump Apple and go to Windows where the roadmap is clear and appli­ca­tion per­for­mance is bet­ter? I find it fun­ny that Apple named their emu­la­tion lay­er for a arti­fact that final­ly gave us insight to the past, while their approach to pro­fes­sion­al users con­tin­ues to show thay have learned noth­ing from their history.

  2. Jim Oblak

    Windows has a clear roadmap??!!!!

    Shirley, you jest.

    The past has shown us that there is no way to pre­dict a clear roadmap for the future.

  3. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    All sorts of puns about roads come to mind, but I will (with dif­fu­cul­ty) restrain myself.

    Brian, Jim gets straight to the point: There are no roadmaps to be had. Apple and espe­cial­ly Adobe are respon­si­ble for most of the lit­tle pre­dictabil­i­ty we have in pro­fes­sion­al cre­ative and pro­duc­tion tech­nolo­gies. Apple brought the graph­i­cal user inter­face to mar­ket, priced laser print­ers with­in reach of indi­vid­u­als, and cre­at­ed the con­cept of Plug N’ Play, among many oth­er inno­va­tions. Adobe cre­at­ed the print­er lan­guage on which Apple’s laser print­er ran, pio­neered non-device res­i­dent soft fonts, devel­oped PDF, and is the inno­va­tor behind an over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of the appli­ca­tions, sys­tems, and method­olo­gies we use to do our jobs. Because of them we know today’s PDFs will work in tomor­row’s work­flows, our fonts will serve us for many years to come, and that today’s Macs can exchange files with tomor­row’s PCs (and vice versa).

    With the break­neck pace of tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment, there isn’t very much more one can plan on. I think both companies–as well as their contemporaries–are doing the best they can to keep up with, and main­tain a slight lead on, the changes intro­duced by every­one else.

  4. Brian

    All of the admit­ted­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary devel­opem­nts hap­pened over a decade ago. Since that time Apple has increas­ing­ly turned to secre­cy as a mar­ket­ing tool. Microsoft how­ev­er relies on a much more open hard­ware & soft­ware devel­op­ment & sup­ply chain. There are pub­lic beta ver­sions of all their upcom­ing ver­sions of soft­ware so busi­ness­es can test func­tion­al­i­ty with their exist­ing process­es and test upcom­ing tech­nolo­gies. Instead Apple releas­es new hard­ware, says the soft­ware is on the way, and announces that the hard­ware will be dis­con­tin­ued in a year. Very dif­fer­ent from a fore­cast­ing and sys­tem plan­ning standpoint.

  5. Jim Oblak

    I smell bias.

    Public betas are not defin­i­tive signs that a com­pa­ny is open with devel­op­ment. Public betas sim­ply show that a com­pa­ny has a mas­sive mar­ket for a prod­uct and they want to ensure that their prod­uct works well. It is also a spec­tac­u­lar mar­ket­ing tool and a way to get ear­ly adopters. Quark, Adobe and Apple also offer beta programs. 

    It was only under EU rul­ings that Microsoft is open­ing more code.

    Time always march­es on. How can I get sup­port for Windows 98? The only rea­son why Microsoft seems to be mov­ing at a bet­ter (slow­er) upgrade pace is because it is a lum­ber­ing giant. That is both its asset and its weak­ness. No one is hap­py about whiplash devel­op­ment but we would be equal­ly unhap­py if we were still using Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 6.

  6. Brian

    Not bias, just frus­tra­tion. I’m not look­ing for sup­port of a lega­cy sys­tem. Just answers about how appli­ca­tions will run and per­form on their cur­rent hard­ware and OS so I can make strate­gic deci­sions regard­ing IT invest­ments. I’d like to go with the Intel Macs, espi­cal­ly after see­ing some of the revised bench­marks that indi­cate the per­for­mance claims Apple made for uni­ver­sal appli­ca­tions seem to be accu­rate. But I have no way to know when that will be some­thing I can buy. I’m frus­trat­ed that Apple has announced a fair­ly agres­sive (time­wise) phase out of a plat­form before the soft­ware many users of that plat­form rely on has even been announced, released, or test­ed. I blame Adobe on this issue just as much if not more than Apple, it cer­tain­ly appears that Apple made the devel­opem­nt tools avail­able. But there real­ly is not good alter­na­tive to run­ning the CS regard­less of platform.

  7. Steve Rea

    Why does it sur­prise you that Apple is phas­ing out old machines before new soft­ware is ready? This is the 4th time they’ve done it, we should be used to it by now.

    (6502 to 68000, 68000 to PPC, OS 9 to OS 10, and now PPC to Intel)

    I agree that it is annoy­ing, but it will always hap­pen (and hap­pens in the Windows world too. Try buy­ing a new pro­gram for Windows 95 or even 98).

    The big irony is that Intel is very forth­com­ing on their roadmap, and have out­lined their plans for for the next 10 years. Apple won’t tell you what they’re doing tomorrow.

  8. Matthew Treder

    True enough, Steve, although Intel’s prod­ucts and Apple’s are as dif­fer­ent as…er…apples and oranges. Or at least apples and com­put­er chips.
    Intel can draw a roadmap of the United States with­out harm to its mar­ket­place posi­tion, while Apple’s got a pack of me-too’s from Microsoft to Malaysia wait­ing to iCopy, iInfringe, and iReverse-engineer its eyeCatching iGadgets and giz­mos. (And iApologize InAdvance for the iNsufferable i’s…)

  9. Paul Richardson

    First of all I would like to say, great arti­cle. Though there is one point that sticks out in my mind that was not cov­ered. When i think about Quark Xpress, Microsoft Office, and the Adobe Creative Suite, I remem­ber that these prod­ucts were almost all built pre OSX. Most, if not all of them con­tain lega­cy car­bon code that does not work prop­er­ly with­in roset­ta. Not only that, but if mem­o­ry serves me cor­rect­ly, they were all built with code war­rior, not Apple’s Xcode. Thus anoth­er road­block in get­ting these apps out. I sus­pect that there is a great deal of code that is hav­ing to be redone in there prod­ucts, and thus the long wait for an firm announcement.

    Just my $0.02, take it for what you will.

  10. Pariah S. Burke Post author

    Thanks, Paul.

    I’m not sure about which of those apps were devel­oped with code war­rior or Xcode, so I don’t know whether to agree or dis­agree with you. I do believe that QuarkXPress 7 was rewrit­ten and com­piled to be a uni­ver­sal app, giv­ing it native func­tion­al­i­ty on Intel-Macs.

  11. Paul Richardson

    Just read (warn­ing: pdf link) from Adobe’s web­site. they do men­tion switch­ing the entire code­base over to Xcode. I think that you are cor­rect with QXP 7. From what I have read it looks as though they have been using Xcode and do have a fat bina­ry of it.

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