Adobe balks at Intel Mac transition costs

Adobe will not provide a quick update to allow Photoshop to run on Intel-powered Apple Macs

Adobe will not provide a quick update to allow its flagship Photoshop graphics editing suite to run on Intel-powered Apple Macs because the cost of creating such an application is too high. 

"There is no limited-cost option for getting most of the performance available on the platform for Photoshop in a short amount of time," Adobe engineer Scott Byer wrote on a company blog. 

Byer claimed that creating a version of the application for OS X on Intel is "no small task" because Apple's Xcode development tool is unable to handle the job.

"Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but the truth is that we don't yet have a shipping Xcode in hand that handles a large application well," he wrote.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs revealed in June that the company would switch to Intel processors, when he also unveiled the latest version of Xcode.

Jobs promised at the time that switching would be easy for developers. But Byer's blog points out that the process is more complicated.

Owing to Apple's market share in the graphics design sector, the availability of Photoshop is considered a key obstacle for professional users to switch to Apple hardware running Intel chips.

Apple currently uses Intel chips in its iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Mini machines. The iBook and Power Mac machines are still powered by IBM's PowerPC chips.

Apple's switch from PowerPC to Intel chips constituted a major change for software vendors because the two processor families have different architectures.

In a sense the chips speak a different language; for an application to work on the Intel chips programmers have to teach them the Intel language.

To make for a smooth transition, Apple has created Rosetta which translates PowerPC instructions into Intel code. But this interpreter makes for much slower calculations.

Tests indicate that Photoshop on the new Intel Macs runs at only half the speed of a previous generation PowerPC machine.

The newest version of Photoshop, CS2, was released in April last year. Adobe declined to give a projected release date for the next version, but said that it typically takes 18 to 24 months.

This would indicate that an OS X Intel-ready version of the application could take until April 2007.