Adobe: Upgrade your hardware for Creative Suite 3; stay tuned for pricing details
On Adobe's first quarter earnings conference call it became clear in a hurry that if you want to get the full impact of Creative Suite 3 you better upgrade those Macs. Meanwhile, more color on Creative Suite 3's impact and pricing will come next week.
As for that first item, the fact that Creative Suite 3 will best with the latest OSes and hardware shouldn't be surprising. In fact, the Mac upgrade cycle will be driven by CS3 to some degree. Adobe said after releasing mixed financial results (Adobe statement) that CS3 will work with Apple's current OS and Leopard due in the spring.
As for Windows, Adobe said CS3 will also work best with Vista instead of older Windows releases. And if you have older Adobe applications they aren't likely to be updated for Vista. Those issues, however, are relatively minor considering Adobe's upgrade cycle is much more tied to Apple than Microsoft.
Here's what Adobe's chief operating officer Shantanu Narayen had to say (see SeekingAlpha earnings call transcript) about CS3 and the hardware you'll need to get the most pop:
"The reality is for the new CS3 products, most of them will run on both the old Macintoshes, the Power PC-based architecture as well as the Intel-based architecture. People see significant performance gains when they move to the new hardware architecture. But between the current OS that's shipping and the next OS, it's unlikely that there will be significant advantages because the next OS is not yet released. So, if Apple makes underlying changes that improves performance, customers will see it. But we don't have features in CS3 that take advantage of an unannounced and non-shipping Mac OS at this point."
When asked about whether Adobe was testing on Leopard, Narayen said:
"We continue to test with early versions of OSes with our partners whether it be Microsoft before Vista was released or Apple."
As pricing details on CS3, Adobe was mum ahead of Monday's launch. Here's what Adobe Bruce Chizen had to say:
"Regarding the Creative Suite, we've had about a year-and-a-half to get this right. And I can assure you that we have gotten that right and it's well planned, well thought out. We will be introducing 13 new applications, 19 different product configurations, seven technologies that cut across all of those applications and two services. It's clearly the biggest release in the Adobe's 25-year history of being in business. Next week, we will give you all of the details about which SKUs come when, which applications, which segments, video, web, etc. come over what period of time. So, stay tuned."