Photoshop CS4 64-bit, but not for the Mac
In a move that may confuse some people, Adobe have announced that the next release of Photoshop CS4 will be 64-bit for Windows, but only 32-bit for the Mac.
Digging deeper into the story reveals it is linked to Apple’s recent announcement that they will no longer be developing a 64-bit version of Carbon, and will concentrate instead on Cocoa. Carbon and Cocoa are 2 Mac API’s for developing OSX applications. Apple has been trying to drop Carbon support for some time and fully concentrate on Cocoa. However, many applications that have been available on the Mac for a long time were originally developed using Carbon (as Cocoa is a relatively new API). This has previously impacted Microsoft, who had to update large parts of Microsoft Office 2008, and now Adobe has indicated that they would need to update or review up to a million lines of code to be fully Cocoa compliant. Obviously a tall order, and it seems that they may well take a few versions of Photoshop to complete the migration.
A very thorough description and analysis can be found over at CNET.
The biggest issue that will face photographers is the ever-growing size of image files. With a 32-bit operating system, only 4GB can be used by a single application. It is not unknown for Photoshop to use much more memory when working with images with multiple layers. Also, as more Mac’s may be able to support 8GB or 16GB of memory in a couple of years, such a restriction may be too much for some Mac users.
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