There has been really some rumble going on with Adobe's decision to not support nor to update/port their older Adobe CS applications (CS1 and CS2) to Apples latest Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard.
This has kept me, too, from early switching to Leopard, though I quite liked the features of the new Mac OS. But not being able to use my Adobe CS applications any longer other then being forced to spend a outrageous amount of money upgrading to CS3 - which I personally believe is quite an impertinence by Adobe (and maybe even Apple?).
And then there are those rumors that CS3 tends not to work as expected on Leopard either... Adobe, what's going on? Can you once for all start communicating properly to your customers? To the back base of Mac users who helped YOU get where you are now?
So when I got my new MacBook last week, which I use to work from home or from on the road, I did not care to much that it would be Leopard and I had not Adobe's applications with me as this won't be my main computer anyway and I had, in the past, been quite all right using alternatives to Adobe Photoshop on the old iBook.
I must say however, that on the iBook, I did somehow get to have Adobe apps - actually just by coincidence, as I realized we still had an unlicensed package of Adobe CS lying around that even was sealed and cellophane wrapped. It was part of an OEM bundle for a scanner we bought once but at that time we had already been working on CS2, so it got stuck on the shelf and people forgot about it. So, in the last days of my iBook, I did have a properly installed and licensed version of Adobe CS.
When my new MacBook came and I sat down to set everything up, I wanted to have all of my files and stuff over from the old iBook on to the new MacBook. I was then going to kill everything from the iBook to set this one up for one of my employees for on the road, she would just need a running system and iWorks, nothing else.
So when the migration assistant asked me to boot my old computer in Target Disk mode so it could migrate everything onto my new MacBook, I did not really think of my Adobe CS on the iBook. I just found out later, that in the migration process, even after killing everything eles on the old iBook, my old Adobe CS found its way over to the MacBook running Leopard.
Now I knew of those: it won't work kind of things. I also knew that trying to install CS or CS2 would not work because I tried this once, too, on another newer Apple computer just before downgrading that one to Tiger...
But there they were, my Adobe CS application icons, and out of curiosity, expecting those apps to crash, I double clicked them and was VERY surprised:
Adobe InDesign CS, Photoshop CS and Illustrator CS work perfectly fine on my Leopard Intel-based MacBook!
A look into Activity Monitor just reveals that they are PowerPC applications, but Rosetta seems to do a good job translating the PowerPC code over to the Intel processor.
I have been using Adobe CS to some extend now on the MacBook and yes it might not perform as it might running natively, but to be honest, this is within a scope of those nerds saying "yeah, I can *hear* how much better my stereo sounds using those half inch gold covered purest copper cables, har har har!"
So far: no crashes, no problems, no nothing. I might be an isolated case, who knows. But then, I can only say: if you are upgrading from Tiger to Leopard and want to give it a try, use Carbon Copy Cloner and a spare hard disc to replicate your current system (and most of all, be able to return back where you left in case things do fail non-the-less). Then upgrade to Leopard (people said an Archive and Install seems the best option - or do a disk format and clean install and use the migration assistant to have your stuff migrated from the backup disk drive you created in the step before.
This will result in your software and files being in place as before again - no installer needed for Adobe apps (it really seems to me that it is *just* the installer that breaks and yes, this would be difficult for Adobe to update as they would need to provide new CDs to people - so it might just be a simple cost and logistics problem here for Adobe).
With all of that on my mind - I wonder when the first US citizen will sue Adobe and force them to fix their installer?!! I mean, being in Europe I could only dream of so much consumer power but then, with my knowledge of now, would I spend the money and time in lawyers for *that*? And who knows, maybe Adobe comes up with some REAL newness to their apps that justify for that whopping amount of money for an upgrade to: CS4?! :-)
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