Thursday, October 26, 2006

Adobe Soundbooth: No PowerPC support, ever.

Adobe has announced a new sound editing application called Soundbooth, and has posted a free beta preview of the application. That's the good news. Now the bad news:
Will there be a PowerPC version?

No. Apple is quickly moving its focus towards Intel Macs, and no longer sells Power PC systems in many places. By focusing on Apple's future, we have been able to bring this powerful application to the Mac platform much more rapidly, and with a stronger feature set.
Visit the Adobe Intel Mac FAQ for more information.
That is extremely disappointing, especially considering that the vast majority of current Mac users have PowerPC Macs, and many stores (including Apple's own refurbished Mac store) still sell PowerPC Macs.

[Update 2006-10-30]

Adobe's John Nack responds:
Here's the reality: Apple's migration to Intel chips means that it's easier to develop for both Mac and Windows, because instead of splitting development resources optimizing for two different chip architectures, you can focus on just one. That's all good, and it makes Mac development more attractive. Users benefit from having developers' efforts go elsewhere (features, performance tuning, etc.), rather that into parallel, duplicate work. In the case of Soundbooth, the team could leverage Adobe's expertise in building great audio tools for Intel chips (namely Audition) to bring the app to market faster and with a richer feature set.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

PowerPC is dead, baby... We are distributor of Apple in Czech republic, and currently have TWO pieces of PPC machines (iBooks, nobody wants them). Everything is intel.

Anonymous said...

Wow, that's a bad move by Adobe. I know many Mac users some of which have the G5 from 9 or so months ago which was not intel based. They are not going to buy a new computer after having just spent over $4000+.

Anonymous said...

This should have been made universal. Isn't that the smart thing to do? Compile it as both.

Anonymous said...

Ok, I thought the point was that the Apple dev tools (Xcode?) make it really really easy to make an app universal so it runs on both PPC and Intel. Frankly this is typical Adobe...

Anonymous said...

Exactly! Doesn't Adobe know that with XCode they can make a universal version for both PPC and intel?! This is a really dumb way of forcing people to buy new Mac systems. I guess Adobe wants to loose money on this product.

Anonymous said...

Well, I don't think Adobe wants to lose money on this product. I think what they want to do is pick up a few new Mac users. Curious how the successful Audition product has been running on your PPC machine?