They ship on different schedules, have entirely separate engineering teams, and have very different UIs. Microsoft, for example, develops the Mac versions of its Office apps from an entirely separate application code base than the Windows ones. The cross-platform angle is also interesting. I don’t think Adobe can flat-out promise that CS5 is going to be Cocoa (or 64-bit) because they don’t know how long it’s going to take. Product Final Cut Pro remains Carbon-based), so we’re dealing with No one has ever ported an application the size of Photoshop fromĬarbon to Cocoa (as I mentioned earlier, after 9 years as an Apple The only supported 64-bit APIs (for UI code) on Mac OS X are Cocoa, and Adobe wants Photoshop to run in 64-bit mode on the Mac, so they’re rewriting the app in Cocoa. The big deal is CS5, the next-next version of Photoshop. (Parallels doesn’t support 64-bit OSes.) The Cocoa Rewrite It’ll be particularly interesting to see benchmarks comparing 64-bit Photoshop on Mac OS X using VMware against the native 32-bit Mac version. The uncomfortable truth is that the fastest way to run Photoshop CS4 on a Mac will be to run it under Windows. (If anyone can find market share information regarding 64-bit Vista, please let me know.)īut faster is faster, and even a 10 percent gain is important to serious Photoshop users. And as far as I can tell, the vast majority of Windows users use the 32-bit version. It’s also the case that unlike Leopard, which is a single OS that can simultaneously run both 32- and 64-bit apps natively, Windows Vista comes in wholly separate 32- and 64-bit versions. You probably don’t have images like that.

Keep in mind that a Canon 1Ds Mark III - which sells at Amazon for $8,000 - generates 21 megapixel images. But in cases involving massive data sets - those requiring more than 4 GB of memory (the 32-bit limit) - the speedup can be an entire order of magnitude:įor example, opening a 3.75 gigapixel image on a 4-core machine According to Adobe’s John Nack, in most cases, for the vast majority of real-world files, Photoshop in 64-bit mode will be “around 8–12 percent” faster. To a non-programmer, “64-bit” perhaps sounds twice as fast as “32-bit”, but that’s not how it works or what it means. The first is that this is not, in and of itself, that big a deal, at least for the vast majority of Photoshop users. The $64,000 Question Thursday, 3 April 2008Ī few various observations and comments regarding Adobe’s announcement that Photoshop CS4 will be available in a 64-bit version for Windows, but will only be 32-bit for Mac OS X.

Adobe photoshop 64 bit for mac