Adobe Creative Suite - Win to Mac

ibook911 · August 6, 2004 11:21AM

Hi.

I purchased my ibook three weeks ago, and I love it. I have owned the educational version of Adobe Creative Suite since January. Now I am thinking that I would prefer to use the Creative Suite on my mac rather than my Windows machine.

From what I understand, Adobe allows you to pay for a change from Win to Mac. Does anyone know how much that costs? I appreciate your help.

Finally, do you think I will find the programs much slower on the mac? My ibook is 1 ghz, 768MB RAM. The XP machine I'm currently using CS on is a 2.66 GHZ P4 with 768MB RAM. I have the Photoshop CS trial on my mac right now, and it actually opens significantly faster than Photoshop on my XP machine. Some of the photo manipulations seem faster on my XP machine, but some I clock faster on the mac. I guess what I'm seeing is that there isn't a big difference in how these machines run Photoshop. Does that seem like it would be logical? On my XP machine I do often run Photoshop and Illustrator at the same time. Do you think my ibook can handle that?

Thanks.

karl kuehn · August 6, 2004 11:57AM

First off... Mhz is not a measurement of speed, it is like RPM on a car, only comparable when you are using the same processor (or engine). That is not only true when you are comparing between x86 (the Intel processors and others) and the PowerPC (G4 for example), but also when you are comparing different chips from the same manufacturer (G4 vs. G5 for instance). Mhz can be used as a very in-exact measure when comparing in a line of chips, but don't depend on it too much.

And when you are talking about Photoshop (or other Creative Suite Programs), they are useable from 500Mhz on up on Apple computers (more is always better), but it is more often the amount of memory available that kills performance on those applications. We usually run with a Gig of memory or more, just to be sure. With large amounts of memory available you should not have any problems running multiple programs at a time.

PS... desktops almost always have better motherboards, so a desktop wil be faster, but an iBook can work.

ibook911 · August 6, 2004 1:30PM

I realize you cannot compare the speed of the processors, but you can look at all the numbers of the two machines, to give yourself an idea (not comparing them direct, but to know how a particular machine runs the program).

I mean, being the two machines I use, it is normal to say what they are and how the Creative Suite applications perform on each. Otherwise, you wouldn't have any idea what machines I was even talking about, so I had to mention what they were. However, I certainly know from experience that using the speed of processors to compare is a terrible idea.

I guess I'm just going to call Adobe regarding the price to change from Win to Mac. I've read that people have done this, but no one says how much it costs. I'll report back what Adobe says. Thanks for the help. The Windows machine is a notebook too, so I'm in the same situation there too.

Eventually I do want to take your suggestion and change the 512 stick in my ibook to a gig stick, so that I can have 1.25 gigs of ram total, but I would like to see the price on gig sticks come down a bit.

Do you think my side by side comparion test of Photoshop on my XP machine and Photoshop on my ibook was a good idea? I'm going to do it with some other tasks and clock the speeds on those too. What is perhaps the most intense photoshop action I could test them on?

karl kuehn · August 6, 2004 1:57PM

If you are comparing machines for a take, then it is always best to run that task on them both and compare how they do. So you did the right thing there.

ibook911 · August 6, 2004 2:08PM

More good news Karl: Adobe is allowing me to switch the Win copy for Mac, and I only have to pay shipping: $5.95! Pretty cool!

Adobe Creative Suite - Win to Mac

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