2006 December | The Mac Night Owl

Archive for December, 2006

A Memo to Professional Users: Stop Waiting!

Friday, December 29th, 2006

You’ve heard the claim: Mac users who crave the most powerful models have been waiting on the sidelines until their favorite image editing program, Adobe Photoshop, becomes Universal. At the same time, although a public beta is available now, the final version of the CS3 package won’t be out until spring.

Now it’s perfectly true that the beta version of Photoshop CS3 seems to work pretty well in many respects. Published benchmarks on Mac Pros show stellar performance, faster than any G5 you can point to. But it is a beta, and therefore it’s not suited for production work, and you wouldn’t want to depend on a product of this sort as a tool to make a living.

So it would seem, then, to make perfect sense to wait until spring before you buy a brand, spanking new Mac powerhouse. Maybe that’s true, but perhaps shouldn’t just sit and wait, as many have done, witness the reportedly stagnant sales of the Mac Pro.

As to that claim, well I think there’s little doubt that much of the reason for the tepid reception of the Mac Pro is the fact that some of the key applications power users require haven’t made the transition to Universal. In addition, there’s little doubt that Rosetta, Apple’s emulation software, slows performance rather severely, and is also memory intensive.

So holding off appears to make a whole lot of sense if you have a Power Mac G5 and don’t want to give up performance on some of the key applications that you need. But not everyone buys a cutting-edge Mac every year or so. I know of a few creative professionals in my own area that have Macs that are several years old, with G4 processors, so I suppose you could say they skipped a generation. Certainly if a computer is an important tool for your work, it’s hard to justify the expense unless you can show that the supposedly faster, newer model will indeed pay for itself in increased productivity.

So for the majority that would be upgrading from a much older Mac, a Mac Pro, iMac or even MacBook Pro are likely to run the current release version of Photoshop and other high-power applications a whole lot faster than the hardware they are using now.

In addition, Apple hasn’t been sitting still. Rosetta’s performance and reliability has improved steadily as Mac OS Tiger was updated. The recent 10.4.8 release, for example, only lists some minor improvements in Rosetta, yet benchmarks show that Photoshop’s performance is upwards of 30% faster in emulation. Marvelous! It also means that the Mac Pro can actually run Photoshop as fast or faster than a G5, and that’s before the CS3 Universal beta enters the picture.

What about other applications? Well, there’s always Microsoft Office 2004, which benefits somewhat from the improvements in Rosetta too. But it’s not a processor-intensive beast. Lumbering, yes, and it can use lots and lots of RAM. Indeed, Entourage can runs slow even on a the speediest PowerPC Mac, though performance is decent on the Intel-based models. This isn’t a critical factor, however, and it’s surely not the deal-breaker.

Although it probably won’t impact users of Adobe’s Creative Suite, I would not be surprised to discover that Rosetta will continue to undergo improvements and may be noticeably faster when Leopard arrives. No, this expectation is not based on any secret knowledge, but I think it’s a fairly safe guess.

So, after investing a whole lot of money on a new Mac, you wouldn’t have to commit additional funds for various and sundry software upgrades. You can see where all of this might add up.

In fact, I dare say that business users may be at the low end of the curve when it comes to buying upgrades of that sort. You see, it’s not just a new Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, but the add-ons, the plugins, which may be required to accomplish key tasks.

So those doing desktop publishing may also have to wait for newer versions of font managers and workflow applications too.

But if your new Mac can deliver productive performance in emulation mode, you wouldn’t be forced to buy everything you need from the start, but phase the products in over time. There’s also the issue of those inevitable early-release bugs that may make you want to wait for a maintenance update of a new application before diving in.

In short, if you crave a new Mac Pro, there may already be enough reason to buy it now and not wait until everything else you need is ready too.

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Some Nice Things About 2006

Thursday, December 28th, 2006

Just before writing this article, I sat back and looked over the material I’ve presented over the past few weeks, and it seems I’ve been very negative; so much so, in fact, that you can rightly assume that all I want to do is rant.

But that’s not so!

In fact, I tend to be a very optimistic sort of person, which you have to be as a long-time Mac user. I remember how many years Apple was marginalized as a niche platform that few cared about. People said they’d go out of business soon, so why was I wasting my time using Macs and writing about them? Why indeed!

Well, the reason I got into Macs in the 1980s is the very same reason I continue to use them today. Pound for pound, a Mac is a better computing investment than a PC. As much as Apple has screwed up its hardware and software over the years, the basic user experience has remained extremely positive. As I’ve said a number of times, I don’t like to fiddle with things, unless I have a problem, something gnawing at my soul until I decide to fix it. Yes, I install system toys from time to time, largely as an experiment to see what they do. I also check out software updates several times a day to locate the latest and greatest versions of the products I use on a regular basis, but also to see if there are any tools that can do the job better.

You see, I’m satisfied up to a point.

At the beginning of 2006, I felt good about the Mac universe. The early developer buzz about the potential of the Intel-based Macs seemed very positive, particularly claims that the processor switch would make Mac OS X run faster. Could it be true? Well, when I had a chance to try out the first round of MacIntels, which consisted of the iMac and MacBook Pro, I was convinced. Where Mac OS X could surround you with spinning beachballs on the fastest PowerPC model, on Intel, the operating system awoke as if from a long slumber. So, it was meant to run on x86 all along! Maybe Apple was fooling us, knowing that it would make the switch when the time was right.

Yes, there are slowdowns on Intel-based Macs too, but not so much, not so often.

When I finally got ahold of one of the first 17-inch MacBook Pros, I left a comparably-sized PowerBook G4 behind and never looked back. It was so much faster, except for that little lag with emulated software. I found myself using the notebook more and more for regular work. You see, in the past I dreaded the process, because everything ran so slow. No more. This was one powerful puppy.

But I was really amazed with the speed at which Apple accomplished the processor switch. Did I hear Steve Jobs say it would all be done by the end of 2007? Yet it was all over in August, with the introduction of the Mac Pro.

Naturally if your new Intel-based Mac came with a few defects, you wouldn’t be quite as impressed. Consider those hot-running MacBooks and MacBook Pros, or some of the former that would suddenly shut down for no reason. I didn’t encounter any of these problems, although I couldn’t say the Mac notebooks I’ve tried felt cool to the touch. I suppose if you want to have dual-core processors with cutting-edge performance something has to give, although I gather the second-generation models, with the Intel Core 2 Duo chips, don’t run quite as hot.

I was particularly impressed with how quickly the developer community came on board with Universal applications, to run on both PowerPC and Intel. It all begin with a trickle, months before the first MacIntels were released. Then it became a torrent, numbering in the thousands. In fact, the figures are fast approaching 5,000.

And just recently, Adobe released a beta version of Photoshop CS3, Universal, so it runs at full speed on the newest Macs. Although it’s a little ragged around the edges, as you might expect, the early benchmarks are extremely encouraging.

I don’t have as much to say about Apple’s digital music initiative. I have an iPod, and I use it from time to time and it works really great. Microsoft’s Zune was a non-starter, but would you have expected anything different?

For 2007, if folks can get past the stuff about those stock options, all systems are go for Apple Computer. You may disagree, and I’m sure I’ll find plenty to right about. But right now, everything looks real good from this little vantage point.

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