For years, Mac users have been saying that their computers are superior to Windows in every way. They claim their operating system is easier to use and more intuitive, applications work better on a Mac than Windows, and the hardware is superior. It was also a CPU battle: Motorola was better than Intel. In spite of all this talk, Mac market share never really amounted to very much.

Today, Mac users play the same song and dance even though the hardware is identical to what runs on Windows. As for the CPU, Apple chose Intel over Motorola due to its better performance. Is OS X easier to use than Windows XP or Vista? This really depends on the user’s perception and their willingness to learn the operating system.

One area where Macs will fall very far behind Windows is with Photoshop. Adobe recently announced that they will not be releasing a 64-bit version of this software for OS X for its CS4 suite. It will just be 32-bit and the Windows version will be 64-bit.

The 64-bit Arena

The advantages of a 64-bit CPU is that it can access 4 GB of memory (32-bit Windows can use 2 GB and OS X can use 3 GB) and can do 64-bit math operations. Handling larger data structures like this, as opposed to the current 32-bit ones being used today, will greatly increase performance for math intensive 64-bit applications.

In order to take advantage of a 64-bit CPU, you need a 64-bit operating system. OS X isn’t fully 64-bit and Windows Vista has much better support for 64-bit operations. Vista is gradually replacing Windows XP so it will be widely used by next year and its users will demand higher performance software.

Development Tool Problems at Apple

The reason why there will be no 64-bit OS X Photoshop is Apple’s lack of focus and direction on their development tools. Photoshop for OS X was written using the Carbon API. The 64-bit version would have used the 64-bit Carbon API, but Apple dropped it. Now all 64-bit applications on OS X need to use Cocoa which means a complete re-write for Adobe to port Photoshop to it. This is a very time consuming and expensive endeavour, so they’ve chosen to hold off on a 64-bit CS4 version and build it for CS5 later.

An Easy Choice

The Mac community is not very pleased by this decision, but it was brought about by poor choices by Apple. It also makes sense for Adobe. They need to make money and more money can be made developing for Windows than Macs. The last time I checked, there were about 650 million Windows users and 22 million Macs. Which market would you want to capture a good market share with? Which market pays your bills?

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