Adobe/Rosetta Performance Problems

This is tough to read and feel good about as a designer. Adobe is saying that Universal apps could be at least a year away, that could present a dilemma for anyone looking to purchase a new Mac between now and then.

During his keynote at Macworld Expo San Francisco, Jobs showed Photoshop running smoothly under Apple’s emulation environment called Rosetta, but noted while Photoshop was usable for a few tasks, the performance would not be adequate for professionals.

While Adobe confirmed virtually all of its applications run under Apple’s Rosetta emulation environment, it said that customers would experience a few problems as well as a noticeable performance gap.

“In general, applications that are not designed to run on Intel-based Mac computers, including current versions of Adobe’s creative professional applications, may be noticeably slower than they are running on PowerPC-based Macs. Instead of experiencing much-anticipated speed enhancements, customers are likely to see some degradation of performance.”

The company said that customers could mitigate some of these performance issues by using machines with large amounts of memory–at least one gigabyte of RAM, but recommends that professionals use PowerPC-based Macs for maximum workflow efficiency.

“Mac-based customers looking for optimal performance may prefer to run Adobe Creative Suite 2, Studio 8, and their components on PowerPC systems until we release future versions of our software as Universal applications,” the company said.