When Adobe released a new version of Premiere for the Mac platform after an absence of several years, it arrived with support strictly for Intel-based Macs. The same held true for two new applications, Encore and Soundbooth, and Adobe’s excuse had it that removing support for older Macs would allow for much speedier development and testing. That meant we’d buy able to buy their new apps much sooner, which surely would help Adobe’s bottom line.

All right, so maybe that made sense at the time, since a large number of content creators were no doubt moving to the speediest Macs on the planet with which to create their audio and visual masterpieces. However, you can see the handwriting was definitely on the wall, although I, for one, didn’t expect to see a wholesale removal of Power PC support for at least another few years.

How wrong I was!

In June, Apple announced 10.5’s successor, Snow Leopard, intended to be largely a bug fix and performance enhancement release, without a lot of snappy features to entice you to upgrade. Although the official word on which Macs would be supported has yet to come from Apple, some developers were quick to violate their confidentiality agreements and report that the preview edition they got at the WWDC were slated for Intel only. While it’s possible that might change, the prospects don’t appear very promising.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

This article was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 6:30 PM and is filed under News and tagged with: 10.5, 10.6, Adobe, Apple, Backup Solutions, Blu Ray, Intel, Iphone, Itunes, Jim Dalrymple, LED, Leopard, Mac, Mac Platform, Macs, Macworld, maintenance, MobileMe, multicore, New Mac, Night Owl, One Of These Days, Panasonic, Peter Cohen, Power PC, Quarkxpress, snow leopard, Soundbooth, Steve Jobs, successor, Tiger, upgrade.