Apple shuns Adobe Photoshop in favor of Pixelmator 3 to show off Mac Pro performance

If you look at Apple’s website showing Apple’s upcoming Mac Pro, click on the “Performance” tab at the top of the web page, and scroll down the web page until you encounter the “design and layout” section.

You’ll notice something interesting. In the past, Apple has extensively used Adobe Photoshop to show how much faster the new Macs models are compared to the previous Macs models.

Not any more. Apple is now using Pixelmator 3:

Apple shuns Adobe Photoshop in favor of Pixelmator to highlight <ac Pro perfromance
Apple shuns Adobe Photoshop in favor of Pixelmator to highlight Mac Pro perfromance

 

MacDailyNews Take: We’ve been using Pixelmator daily for years now and highly recommend the application.

Sleep tight, Shantanu.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “mark” for the heads up.]

Related article:
Pixelmator unveils Pixelmator 3.0 FX – October 22, 2013

51 Comments

  1. Isn’t surprising at all – they’re mac exclusive, they pride themselves on ease of use and clarity, and they use a lot of Apples Core APIs. What’s not to love about this company? Would be my dream for them to take on AE while they’re at it 🙂

      1. No way, there’s a deep-level elegance about Pixelmator that Apple wouldn’t be able to adhere to with everything else they are doing. That’s my one disappointment. Their applications get a lot of high-level love (new features), but still lacking in the low-level small details in so many ways.

  2. Best $20.00 I ever dumped into the App Store. I have adobe cs6. And I’ll never move to upgrade again. Adobe is too expensive and the new interface is like a windows user interface. Clunky,… If you haven’t bought pixelmator do it. It’s just too good a deal and a great program.

    1. Same here.
      Never thought I’d use photo editing software as much as I have since buying pixelmator.

      After letting some others use pixelmator on my MBP.. They purchased it as well.

      Photoshop? What’s that? 😉

      Just like Microsoft, finished.

  3. Pixelmator is a app that is on your computer. It is also sold through the App Store. Photoshop is now in the cloud as a subscription service. Apple wanted to show the speed of the speed of the Mac Pro. Photoshop would only show the speed of the internet connection and servers used. Good reasons to use Pixelmator is you can use it without being connected to the web, you don’t have to pay every year to use your work, and you have control of your security.

    1. E X A C T L Y ! ! ! !

      If they had used Photoshop there would have been lots and lots of questions as to the speed of the link back to Adobe and the systems upon which things run at Adobe.

    2. Photoshop CC (and the other CC apps) are NOT cloud apps. They are simply distributed via the cloud (just as Pixelmator is initially downloaded via the Mac App Store).

      I agree with you about the subscription model (although for some people it comes out cheaper than what they were forced to pay previously), but Adobe CC apps only need to dial home via the internet once every 30 days to validate that the user’s subscription is still valid.

      So, the choice to not demo Photoshop is more about Apple consciously choosing to feature Pixelmator over Photoshop – not because it wouldn’t have been a valid show of speed.

      Very happy to see Pixelmator featured – it is a great app!

    3. Photoshop is an application that gets installed on your hard drive just like Pixelmator. You work on your photos on your hard drive just like you did before the CC. Photoshop (and other Adobe applications in CC) ping Adobe to make sure you’ve paid your rent and are qualified to use the app, but other than that it’s just like using any other application.

      I use Pixelmator rather than PS and I really like it. It fits my needs a lot better than Adobe’s bloatware and I’m not a fan of renting software from a company as shortsighted as Adobe, but Photoshop and the other CC applications are still the standard for publishing.

  4. Not surprising. Pixelmator is built on Cocoa and the CoreImage framework, taking full advantage of all of the performance work that Apple’s put into their frameworks. Photoshop suffers from Adobe’s refusal to adopt Mac-only technologies.

    -jcr

    1. I still use Quark. I like Quark, I hate InDesign. InDesign is basically PaceMaker with interface elements borrowed from Illustrator and Photoshop. Quark can’t be beat for doing heavy typography work. It’s a pure true typography program. I hate the typesetting structure in InDesign. Plus the way it handles picture and graphic insertion sucks with the double bounding box. I still use version 7 of Quark. Too expensive to upgrade, but still better than the newest version of InDesign. Now with Adobe’s prescription plan for software, forget it. My clients are basically saying they won’t pay the Adobe tax and stick with CS 6 as long as it’s compatible on Mac running the latest OS X version. Now, if there was just a good program as Illustrator for doing vector art, I’d be set.

      1. I’m sort of the opposite of you, I like InDesign, hate Quark. I don’t think InDesign is anything like PageMaker (having used just about every version of both), except they are both layout apps … which Quark is also. Even without its vector and bitmaps effects, focusing on typography and layout only, InDesign is far more powerful than PageMaker ever was.

      2. Gregory, I too use and like Quark. Never had all the problems that a lot of folks had with it, so I was never tempted to “jump ship”. And though it is an expensive upgrade, (aren’t they all these days!), you might consider moving to Ver. 10; some of the features that were introduce in Ver. 9 are really nice, particularly if you are big into the use of styles and conditional styles for type and items. I’ve stuck with CS3 for most of my Adobe needs; Adobe keeps adding bells & whistles; just more stuff to wade through to get to what you really want. Plus, I don’t like the idea of renting software.

    2. I’m still using Quark 6.5 on my plastic iMac, although I have had a newer aluminium iMac sitting on another table for a year or so, with all the new Adobe software installed, including InDesign. I just can’t summon up the energy to switch!

  5. “Apple shuns Adobe Photoshop…”.
    Fitting. I remember when Adobe cynically shunned Apple.

    And when it comes to companies who in the past left Apple users high and dry, I have a long memory.

      1. I do too, of course, it was uncouth.
        Adobe is company that offered many useful programs over a long period of time and I offer no argument. But, of late their high handed attitude is not welcome.
        This a classic example of a King becoming a tyrant. We all know how people react to tyranny. I am a Mac user from 1992 and immensely pleased that today they are strong enough to look after their flock.

  6. As a Web designer, I used to be heavy into Abobe products. Over the last 5 years or so I’ve completely eliminated them all. Pixelmator is the last bastion. I’m using it instead of Adobe Fireworks. So fast!
    I will never go back!

      1. Who uses Dreamweaver any more? I haven’t used it in about 7 years. You use MySQL and PHP on your server with the CMS of your choice (Drupal, WP, Joomla or whatever). You manage the website from your browser. You edit files with a good code editor.

        Back-up is done on the server. But if you need to sync files for development, testing and staging, then you use Github or something similar. Though, good code editors (Coda, Espresso, etc) will also sync local files to files on a server, like Dreamweaver.

      2. Oh please
        Who uses dreamweaver?
        We use Sublime Text, or Brackets from adobe, it works pretty well with live preview (browser plugin for brackets / Sublime)

        I have to admit, Pixelmator is awesome.
        If you don’t have it, go grab it. Because you already have a mac, and you’re lucky Pixelmator was made exclusively for mac.

      1. I use Sketch. Mostly output to Rgb PDF. Cmyk conversion happens in-rip or with Distiller and profiles from the printer. A lot of my press stuff is Rgb now. Never bothered me that pixelmator was Rgb only.

        Haven’t used it for straight spot colour seps tho.

  7. I’ve never been a fan of PhotoShop. From day one it’s been bloated, overpriced and more of a program for designers than photographers. They should have called it DesignerShop from the very start. If you want a program for REAL photographers you should look at Apple’s Aperture. It’s for people who don’t fake their imagery.

    1. I love the following feature and use it frequently … By hovering over the word with the cursor in Safari and holding Cntrl + Cmd Keys the following explanation showed ….
      Shantanu was a Kuru king of Hastinapura, who is mentioned in the Mahābhārata epic. He was a descendant of the Bharata race, of the lunar dynasty and the ancestor of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. He was the youngest son of King Pratipa of Hastinapura and had been born in the latter’s old age. The eldest son Devapi suffered from leprosy and abdicated his inheritance to become a hermit. The middle son Balhika devoted his life to conquer Balkh. Shantanu become the king of Hastinapura by default.

    1. Out of curiosity what government are you referring to? I am sure, wherever you are from, others would have similar comments with respect to their gov, it is a universal sentiment.

  8. Illustrator? Photoshop?

    I use Manga Studio 5 EX. It blows Photoshop away for specialised comic work. Makes PS look like the ‘jack of all trades’ that it is.

    For Image Processing? Pixelmator 3. It’s very good. Excellent for £20.

    For mobile painting? Procreate on iPad. It’s blistering fast at painting to shame the likes of Painter.

    You don’t ‘need’ Photoshop any more. It earned its reputation. But latterly? Bloat. Expense. Mere feature bumps for large outlay. No wonder they’re going Rental.

    For less than half the price of Photoshop 6 you can get Manga Studio 5 EX, Pixelmator 3 and Procreate and still buy yourself a bag of chips.

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