A Year of Changes
June 8th, 2005First the Macromedia/Adobe thing, now Apple announces they’re switching to Intel chips. Working on the web is chaos this year (even moreso than usual).
Now I have to admit: the Adobe/Macromedia buyout is going to affect me more than the Apple/Intel announcement. I love designing with Macromedia Fireworks, and I sense that program is doomed a year from now. As superior as Fireworks is to Imageready, it can’t hold a candle to Adobe Photoshop for a dedicated user base. With any luck, Adobe takes the flexible vector capabilities from Fireworks and integrates it into Photoshop. Otherwise, I have to learn ImageReady.
By comparison, the Apple thing is much less traumatic. I have a G4 now, and I could buy a G5 by the end of the year. That would easily hold me through the transition period, and I’d be due for a new machine sometime in 2007 when the Pro machines ship with Intel processors.
While I do find it dubious that the G5 stats on the Apple site seem to suggest that we’re transitioning to a slower architecture, I’m sure we all took those charts with a grain of salt in the first place. I mean, when you’re talking about the kind of chips that are shipping in the top of the line Macs and PCs, does performance really matter for average tasks? I mean, unless you’re cracking the genome or editing feature films in HD, does a few percent of performance really matter enough to make a platform decision based on it?
I choose the Mac because of the interface, plain and simple. It could run on G4s, G5s, Pentiums or gerbils and it really wouldn’t matter one way or another, as long as the performance is acceptable. A computer that allows me to get my work done without interference from a kludgy user interface or constant security concerns will allow me to be a lot more productive than a few megahertz here or there.