Adobe’s flagship product, Photoshop, will abandon Mac OS 9 support in its next major version, sources close to Adobe told MacCentral. While no final date has been set for the release of the next revision of Photoshop, Adobe is expected to introduce the product this fall.
“It’s a big step for Adobe, but Apple made it clear that the future of the platform was going to be OS X,” Jupiter Research analyst, Michael Gartenberg, told MacCentral. “The cost for developers to maintain two architectural releases is extremely prohibitive.”
When Adobe announced Photoshop for Mac OS X in February 2002, the product was expected to bring creative professionals to Apple’s Mac OS X operating system in large numbers, but there was no need for them to switch to a different OS — Photoshop 7 was compatible with Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS X.
This gave creative professionals the choice to stick with Mac OS 9, which was a comfortable and proven operating system for them. However, creative professionals who want to use the new version of Photoshop when it is released this fall will have no choice but to move to Mac OS X — system requirements for Photoshop will call for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar or higher.
Although Apple still has some older models of Power Macs that will still boot into Mac OS 9, all new machines built in 2003 will only boot into Mac OS X. With the savings in development and support costs and the fact that Apple has moved its focus to OS X in hardware and software, other companies will probably announce similar initiatives.
“Other developers are likely to follow suit because it cuts their support costs, provides a stable platform and OS X is the way to go,” said Gartenberg.