By David Fekke
January 17th, 2011
A firend of mine is a graphics professional, and he asked me if he should get a Intel based iMac for his job. I told him absolutely not!
Alright, I know what you are saying. "David, you are a mac guy, how can you tell a graphic professional not to buy a mac." Here is why, Adobe. Adobe is not planning on leasing any of their CS apps as dual binary until CS3. Typically, new versions of Adobe apps are released every 18-24 months. CS2 was just released about 6 months ago, so it will propably be late 2007 before Adobe has CS3 ready.
This means that Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign would have to run in emulation on an Intel based Mac. It is certainly faster than running 68K code in emulation on a PowerPC, but the experience would suck.
So with that all being said, you can buy a mac for these apps as long as it is a PowerPC based Mac. I would suggest buying a PowerMac G5 if you need to run CS2.
If you are using Motion graphics such as Apple Motion or Final Cut Pro, Apple is supposed to be coming out with dual binaries for these apps in March. The wait will not be as long for Apple's apps. Quark Inc. supposedly has a beta of Xpress for the Intel Mac.