Will Apple tolerate a 32-bit only Photoshop CS4?

In a word...No.

John Nack, Senior Product Manager, Adobe Photoshop at Adobe waxes about the upcoming Photoshop CS4 and 32-bit vs. 64 bit implementations in his blog. The show-stopper is that the Macintosh version of CS4 will be only available in 32-bit form while the Windows version will run in full 64-bit mode. (Adobe FAQ - PDF).

While most users -I'd guess more than 95% of Mac Photoshoppers - will only notice a 10% gain in speed by using Photoshop-64x for typical photoshop work, people who work with very large photos will see up to a ten-fold increase in speed. Big deal right? Apple could stand to lose up to 5% of their Photoshop market?

Not so fast. This is much more about perception. Apple wants their Mac Pro workstations to be the fastest in the world. Supercomputers! How else can they rightfully charge what they do?

Playing second fiddle to Windows isn't going to go down well, if at all, in Cupertino. This news probably has Steve Jobs on the phone right now deploying his crack application development team.

A few years back when Quark was totally incapable of moving its Xpress platform to OSX (the original owner had sold the company and the new owners weren't up to the task), Apple had to step in. They brought in their development team and has Quark up to speed in a matter of months. While this might have upset Quark's competitor, Adobe, it assured the Mac platform that Quark would remain on the Mac - thus stopping (some) Quark users from switching to PC (or InDesign).

Perhaps related to the Quark bailout (or Aperture/Final Cut Pro) is that Apple and Adobe haven't been getting along too well lately. There are Flash problems that are causing browser crashes. Apple isn't putting Flash on the iPhone to the dismay of Adobe and it looks like Adobe won't even be able to build a Flash program for the SDK. Apple may even be trying to circumvent Flash on the iPhone altogether with new CSS and Webpage tricks. Video on the web and PDF rendering are perhaps the stakes in this battle.

So is this whole Photoshop 64-bit thing part of a behind the scenes Apple-Adobe war? Possibly...but Nack seems pretty genuine in his concerns and specifically says "no this isn't part of an Adobe-Apple War." The story is that Adobe was told that going to Carbon was the way to go for them by Apple (as opposed to Cocoa which supports 64-bit memory addressing) - then Apple dropped 64-bit support for Carbon. Check this MacRumors forum for more information on this issue.

Adobe is probably genuinely unable to deliver the product... Adobe is, for what its worth, in a battle with Microsoft over the Silverlight/AIR development platform so it doesn't need any more enemies. The interesting part comes next.. Will Apple:

• ...deploy the Apple dev team to rescue CS4 x64...like they did with Quark Xpress 6.5
• ..suddenly support Flash on iPod Touch/iPhone...and maybe Adobe suddenly has the ability to port to Cocoa.
• ..build their own Photoshop...and Illustrator, InDesign, Flash to add to Final Cut (Premiere) and Aperture (Lightroom).
• ...say, "Want Photoshop? Use Photoshop Express."
• ...status quo. Photoshop CS4 on Mac is an inferior product for two years. Some graphics professionals move...Opinion in the creative/design world is that Apple is a 2nd rate platform for high end photo editing.
• ..buys Adobe!

What are your thoughts?

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