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Jon Chappell

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After Effects CS4 to drop PowerPC support

There's a post on the Keyframes blog (the official Adobe blog of the AE product manager, Michael Coleman) stating that due to limited time and resources, they have decided to drop PowerPC support in After Effects CS4 in favor of adding new features for Intel users.

By focusing on Intel Macs, we save a huge amount of engineering and testing time. This means that we will be able to complete more features for a larger group of customers and deliver the best release possible. Plus, some CS4 technology is so new that it never existed on PowerPC Macs.

So After Effects CS3 is the last Universal Binary version so if you still have a PPC Mac, you'll have to buy it before the new one goes on sale (which is a bit tricky because a release date hasn't been announced). It should be noted that this only applies to After Effects and not Photoshop or the other apps but it's obvious that they will all go that way eventually.

I don't see this as a major issue as the number of Intel users is currently very large and will get even larger by the time CS4 is released. It's a shame for people with old PPC machines still kicking around (me) though, and it's reducing the resale value of the older machines. Universal Binaries were such a great idea but to companies who also develop for Windows and have very large codebases, it unfortunately makes more sense to make Intel-only versions.

Categories: Hardware, Software, Visual Effects
Post ID: 298Posted Sunday August 17 2008 2:10 AM

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