In my last entry about Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptop, I noted that even though it’s a first generation machine, it’s probably not the best thing to buy if you spend your days in Photoshop painting pixels. The reasoning behind this is because Adobe Photoshop currently runs in emulation using the Rosetta emulator technology. Adobe has publicly given notice that Intel-native versions of their Creative Suite will wait until the next major version, so considering CS2 is still pretty new, I can’t imagine Adobe launching CS3 for more than a year — meaning another year until Photoshop runs at full speed. How bad is the emulation speed drop? Let’s find out.
Jason O’Grady posted some Photoshop-related benchmarks that compared the new 2.0Ghz MPB to the previous 1.5Ghz G4 Powerbook, and the results were shockingly bad.
The first test turned an image of a lightning bolt into a kaleidoscoped version of it, with rotating and blurring. The MacBook Pro took nearly 43 seconds vs. the G4 Powerbook taking about 30 seconds. The second test takes a 10MB image and scales it up to half a gigabyte, with sharpening done at each small step. The MacBook Pro took 4 minutes 3 seconds, while the G4 Powerbook only took 2 minutes 16 seconds.
In both tests, the new MacBook Pro was thoroughly trounced by the previous generation Powerbook because Rosetta emulation of Photoshop is absolutely terrible. I’ve also heard reports that the emulation is buggy as well as being slow, with random Photoshop crashes happening when switching between applications. I can’t wait until the Intel PowerMacs come out, because that same day I’m going to buy a quad version of the old G5 ;)
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As best as I can tell the Adobe Creative Suite 2 crashes seem to happen when you’ve got more than 1 Adobe app open, and usally happen in an app in the background.
My guess, though I have no way to prove it, is that this is related to Adobe Bridge not being compatible on the Intel side since it works as, among other things, a preference.
This is from a few weeks of working in multiple Adobe apps and seeing this happen on my Intel iMac.
I’m with you on getting a quad G5 the day the Intel PM’s are announced. It just makes sense if you use Photoshop for any length of time.
I still want a MacBook. :)
That is actually not “shockingly bad” for emulation. Most emulation fares a lot worse than an approximate 50% performance hit. I am actually surprised it works as well as it does, not that that helps the situation any. I personally, will be waiting for the Adobe updates.
Col – I think the last time you used Photoshop was 1985 ;)
Yeah, if you HAVE to have the instant gratification, by all means go out and buy one of the obsoleted Macs, but if you are maure enough to have developed that trait called PATIENCE, you will be rewarded greatly in probably less than one year.
C’mon Abby, you’re saying that people who work in the creative industry and use Photoshop should be patient enough to wait? When Apple introduces their new laptop for professionals in the creative industry, and it runs Photoshop slower than what’s already out there, I think there’s a major problem.
Calling Photoshop users who are die-hard Mac people like myself immature seems a bit immature now doesn’t it? ;)
“When Apple introduces their new laptop for professionals in the creative industry, and it runs Photoshop slower than what’s already out there, I think there’s a major problem.”
It’s a major problem but one that Apple can’t do much about. The Intel Macs are faster in every way than the machines they replace. It is Adobe who has shown little interest in updating their software. They are making claims that Apple’s Xcode tools don’t work but that is bogus. Other companies are coming out with Universal Binary versions of their software every day.
Adobe is playing games with Apple again. Getting up on stage and claiming to support the Intel move but behind the scenes they aren’t going to upgrade their software for another year?
They better watch out or they may find out that the rumored Photoshop killer from Apple isn’t a rumor after all.
If it is aimed at professionals that in some fashion or other get paid for their time, then the longer it takes to do things, the more it will cost. So in that sense I think patience isn’t the issue; production cost is.
One would expect these number to be reversed (hopefully) and perhaps they will once everything is “native.”
Fully agree with James. Adobe’s already had 8 months to work on a upgrade. And if Adobe is nowhere near ready when the Intel-based replacements for the Power Macs come out, Apple may have a Photoshop competitor ready.
So yes, the situation isn’t great in this one particular area, but if you have an older Powerbook (1 to 1.25), then the difference starts to disappear. And if I absolutely must have a new computer right now, I’d buy the Powerbook 12 or 17″ now, or a Power Mac (depending on how portable I needed to be). So it’s not like Apple has left the Photoshop creative without any choices.
Apple released Aperture last fall. Perhaps they’ll release another high quality app that can do more things already found in Photoshop. Hell, Apple could release their own Photoshop and it’d probably be much better (a bold statement?) However, they can’t do that, in order to maintain a good relationship with Adobe, which does seem a little sour at the moment.
Mike,
Photoshop not running at near natives speeds isn’t Apple’s fault, it’s Adobe’s. I understand the issue of not having Universal binaries ready until CS3: We’re major upgrades of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, ImageReady AND GoLive!; That’s some major work right there in itself. But Adobe has had the same type of development time as all of the other companies that write Mac software and I think that they could have at least released an update that allows CS2 to “talk” better with Rosetta.
It also seems that you’re not being fair to Rosetta as well. Emulator software of any nature is by no means perfect no matter what OS it’s used on. But if you’re only losing 15 seconds in the first test and two minutes in the second test, then I’d say that that a damn good breakthrough as emulation goes. From this post and your previous post about the MacBook Pro you seem to be looking for any reason to trash the new laptop. This is the first version of an entirely new product: ofcourse it’s not going to be perfect and offer users the speeds and options that they desire on the first go round. That’s why you take the time to develop the product. The first PowerPC computers were far from perfect, but everyone managed. Why is this situation any different for you? Are you the type of person that doesn’t like change or is there something about he move to Intel that has you questioning the MacBook Pro?
It’s not as if you are stumped for choice with Macs for professionals. If the speed is that important then there’s a whole range of G5s built for it.
For emulation, it’s not bad. We compared an iMac intel 1.83 to my Powerbook G4 1.67 and found that there wasn’t much difference in running Photoshop CS (not CS2). CS2 itself was a performance hit. In our tests the iMac Core Duo was faster than a 1 GHz Powerbook so there’s not really much difference.
Apple have said that the time isn’t right for graphics professionals to move just like Mac OS X 10.0 wasn’t the right time either. It’s not about whether you want the baddest machine on the planet and it’s not really about patience – it is entirely about maturity. Buying the latest machine that doesn’t run the software you need and you KNOW it doesn’t run well and then complaining about that fact seems a bit bass ackwards. It’s not as if it was a secret.
Adobe has had ONLY 8 months to work on this and as many producers of big apps will tell you, it’s not that easy. Apple have been thumping at developers to use XCode but when you have a huge amount of code (Office? Creative Suite?) it’s not that easy. 8 months to refactor the code for a different IDE and then make sure you test on systems that are not even shipping is entirely the reason why Photoshop is not the poster child for the Core Duo machines.
According to developer reports, it’s a crazy fast machine. Matt Raible says it kicks butt for Java and DHH states it offers fantastic RoR speed.
Remember how long it took Adobe to get a copy of Photoshop working for OS X a few years ago? That was forever as well. Why is Adobe so slow? Man.
Too bad Macromedia just released Studio 8, as I find Fireworks is a very suitable replacement for Adobe’s lackluster product.
I’m still going to say that Photoshop running slow is partially Apple’s fault, and here’s why:
Photoshop might just be the most popular application run by creatives in the world, and Macs are what many in the creative industry use as their daily machines to get work done. Apple should have worked out a deal with Adobe (since they knew full well that Photoshop is *the* killer creative app) considering they knew way ahead of time that the Rosetta emulation software would be running Photoshop slower. Apple knew that Photoshop would be slower on the new machines, and because they didn’t convince (or pay) Adobe to come out with a native version of Photoshop when it became crunch time, that’s Apple fault.
Photoshop is used by creatives, it runs slow on the new machines, therefore Apple should have done everything in its power to fix that problem and speak with Adobe *prior to launch* if they valued their creative professional customers.
You, Sir, are spectacularly clueless. The fact that Photoshop runs at half the speed emulated as it does on its native hardware is an incredible achievement. Rosetta emulation is not “terrible”, it’s mindboggingly fast compared to other solutions. It’s sufficient for everybody but the top five to ten percent of Photoshop users — and most of those have probably recently bought a Quad G5, anyway.
Michael, I must be in the top 5-10% of Photoshop users then. I use Photoshop all day long, every single day, to do work and pay the bills, so if it’s not as fast as it should be then I can’t buy a new Intel-based Mac. I’m not sure how that makes me clueless though :)
Personally I would prefer to buy a new machine that is is going to be the most efficient over a 3 year period than purchase an old G4 that is going to be well below in speed once the new release of adobe hits the market.
I do use photoshop very heavily in a professional environment, so I am just trying to get my head around how much this will effect my workload before I make the purchase but at the moment I am looking at wearing the slower speeds in the interim, but the reports of random crashing is very concerning.
Thank god I found this:
http://diglloyd.com/diglloyd/free/MacBookPro/index.html
I use photoshop professionally all day every day, but not for print work. For video and multimedia work i NEVER wait for photoshop on my 1ghz pbook g4.
I know that print pros need every scrap of cpu time to work wiith monster files, but if my 90 layer 800×600 comps are instantaneous to work with on a 1ghz g4 laptop, then running half speed on a 2ghz cpu… seems to me like it would still be instantaneous. I suppose if all i was doing was running complicated actions i’d see the speed loss…
I dont mean to bash the people who need every last scrap of processor power for their work. For them its not something they’d even discuss online. They would glance up, shake their head and get back to work. For most people, it would be like running word on a slow or fast machine. you gotta get into some rather obscure scenarios before you’d notice the difference.
I’m just saying that the issue is biggest for a really tiny portion of the market. Even among serious photoshop users, i’d say that a small percentage ever runs into performance walls with photoshop.
And really, among that small percentage of hard core print guys who are maxing out their cpu, how many of them are on LAPTOPS? If speed were an issue, they’d be running a desktop regardless.
On top of that, If speed were everything, they would have stuck with cs1.
I think the photoshop speed issue is moot.
However, the crashes/stability? thats another story. In fact, thats a really huge concern.
apples decision to release the Intel based machines now is a sound economical and strategic decision. Waiting for adobe to be ready with CS3 would be a lousy decision. Apple rules the creative industry, and most users will either wait for CS3 or put up with any speed difference till it comes out, not really a concern for apple. what they would be a concerned about is running on G4s for longer and losing more of the domestic market share. Switching now to Intel allows apple to gather a great domestic market share and new users.
Most professional users would never push PS to its limits, ive just spent several months working on 600meg to 1.8 gig files every other day, on a pentium M 1.6ghz. not lightning fast but does the job adequately.
im at the time of looking to update my laptop, but my problem is which apple to get, not worries about PS not running as quick for a few months as i will be holding onto this machine for 3 years. if i updated every 6 months, sure id buy a G4 Powerbook, but thats just silly.
I’m heading to college in the fall and, because of this,am in need of a laptop. I was pretty set on getting a Macbook because I’ve heard time and time again that Mac is better for ‘creative’ indeavours…. I’m starting to really get into film stuff, but I’m also an avid photographyer and photoshop user. Should I buy the Macbook and use Photoshop in Windows till the new CS3 comes out? Or should I stick with Windows and suffer in the video aspect? ahhhhh!