The creative industries have always been central to Apple’s userbase and marketing, with many using OSX to run Adobe software. However, it appears that Apple’s latest update, Lion, is breaking a whole host of Adobe products.
Apple has had a long-term spat with Adobe and its Flash technology that is still widely used on the web, but Apple have point blank refused to allow the software on iOS, and therefore neither the iPhone nor iPad can view flash-based websites, videos, or services. Back with the original iPhone or even the iPhone 3G, the resource intensive Flash would have had trouble running on the available CPUs – but with dual-core CPUs clocking over 1GHz now coming as standard, that is no longer an issue.
Apple has managed to spin this spat as themselves being promoters in HTML5 and the open web, ignoring their own walled garden app store environment due to the current “halo effect”. However, the recent lack of co-operation between the two corporations does now appear to negatively affecting Apple as well – with more than a dozen of Adobe’s industry standard creative tools not working properly on the latest update to OSX. Users of Adobe’s ubiquitous Photoshop software, for example, cannot upgrade. With these tools the reason many people use iOS, it will not be Adobe that loses customers but Apple that loses people who would otherwise have purchased the upgrade who will now stay with the previous version. Apple’s marketing will also suffer with the widely claimed idea that Macs are more stable simply not being the case if you want to run Adobe (or many other) software titles.
Known issues have been reported for users of Adobe Acrobat, Drive, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Flash Player, Lightroom, LiveCycle, Photoshop and Premiere Pro. A number of users have been writing on forums that OS X Lion has slowed down their Macs – something which is less common with newer models, but that is a lot of unhappy Apple customers. Could this be Apple’s Vista moment?