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A dilemma for Photographers who love Macs

Photoshop won't be optimized for Intel-based Macs for at least another year. Could this be a very disturbing trend? Will software makers eventually stop writing software for Mac OS X and only make Windows software since Macs and PCs will run Windows?
Written by George Ou, Contributor

In today's news, Adobe announced that they will release Photoshop for the Intel-based Macs next spring.  That's one year from now which is essentially an eternity.  For photographers that love their Macs but rely on Photoshop, they have a real dilemma.  Do they drop their beloved sleek Macs for a new Wintel machine or do they continue to suffer at one third speed with Rosetta CPU emulation with Photoshop?  Even a top-of-the-line dual G5 doesn't run as well as the new Core-Duo based PC or Apple MacBooks, but you can't even get a G5 in a notebook configuration because the older Mac notebooks only use G4 processors.

One possible solution is to use the newly released Bootcamp from Apple and dual-boot Windows XP to run the PC version of Photoshop to get maximum non-emulated performance out of the Core-Duo processors.  The problem is that no one likes dual-booting because you have to shut off the Mac OS and boot up Windows XP and vice versa every time you want to switch.  Parallels offers a virtual environment in which you can run Windows from within Mac OS X, but it's unclear how close it performs compared to running Windows XP on bare metal with Bootcamp.  In either case, this can lead to a very disturbing trend for Mac OS if it ever becomes a viable solution.  Will software makers simply forget about writing software for Mac OS X and simply produce a single Windows versions version of their software?

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