Adobe announced last week the beta of Soundbooth, an audio editing app from the company who seems to have its hand in every media-related cookie jar. Mac fans, however, weren't too happy with a little caveat to the application: it will only run on Intel Macs. PowerPC support, it seems, is slowly going the way of the buffalo.
Macintouch (a site to which I would normally link at this point if it didn't have the worst web-based interface on the planet) seemed to lead the charge against Adobe, claiming that they had abandoned the PPC users.
John Nack, Adobe's Photoshop product manager, had this to say:
Now, if you were Adobe and had started developing a new application at exactly the time when Apple told you, "This other chip architecture is dead to us," would you rather put your efforts into developing for that platform, or would you focus elsewhere?
This logic seems lost on a lot of online posters, who leap to some fairly outlandish conclusions. "Oh my God, next thing you know, Photoshop and the other apps won't run on PowerPC, and the next thing you know, they'll kill Mac versions altogether and just tell us to run Windows using Parallels!" At what point Adobe will burn Snuggle the Fabric Softener Bear in some dark pagan ritual isn't specified, but that must be the natural next step, right??
I have to ask myself, Why on earth am I devoting part of my weekend to writing all this? Why not blow it off and get out of the house? Maybe I should, but as a die-hard Mac user I feel like someone has to speak a little truth to the Mac community--or rather, to that vocal little group of zealots and forum trolls. So here's my message for those folks: You're hurting the Mac platform. You're hurting the Mac community. You need to crush a little aluminum foil against those antennae of yours, because you're hurting everyone concerned. You're making it harder (and less appealing) for people of goodwill to make the effort to support the Mac.
The man has a point.
I doubt that this would be much of an issue had Adobe been responsible, over the past year, in getting Intel versions of their apps out the door. I've heard their excuses and, although reasonable, they're still lacking. If Adobe wants to be choosy with their architecture support, that's fine... just find a position and stick with it. Snubbing both Intel and PPC users is never good for customer relations.
The true question, though, is this: are we seeing the beginning of a trend?
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