Adobe will not provide a quick update to allow its flagship Photoshop graphics editing suite to run on Intel-powered Mac computers because the costs of creating such an application are too high.
“There’s 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.
He noted that creating a version of the application for OS X on Intel “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 we don’t yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large application well.”
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs revealed that the company would switch to Intel processors last June, when he also unveiled the latest version of XCode. He promised at the time that switching would be easy for developers. But Byer posting points out that the process is more complicated.
Due 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 only uses Intel chips in its Imac, Macbook Pro and Mac Mini machines. The Ibook and Powermac machines are still powered by IBM PowerPC chips. The company doesn’t disclose road maps.
Apple’s switch from PowerPC processors to Intel chips constituted a major change for software vendors because the two processor families have different architecture. The chips in a sense speak a different language. For application to work on the Intel chips, programmers have to teach them the Intel language.
To make for a smooth transition, Apple has created the Rosetta technology 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 most current version Photoshop CS2 was release in April last year. Adobe declined to give a projected release date for the next version, but said that they typically take 18 to 24 months. This would indicate that an OS X Intel-ready version of the application could take until December this year to April 2007.
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