For nearly two decades I've been a card-carrying member of the cult. I usually write my PDFzone articles (this one included) on a Mac. We've got the AirPort and iPod thing going on in the house, and I learned word processing back in the day using this primitive software they called Microsoft Write, on a Macintosh SE/30.

Second of all, PDF pragmatists, don't rip on me for calling Adobe benevolent, because I'm not in the business of doing that on a regular basis.

But I shall do so here.

Tech reporters spotted Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen chumming around with Steve Jobs at the Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference, throwing support behind Universal Binary editions of Adobe's Creative Suite apps Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. TidBITS also reported earlier the week of May 1 that a Universal Binary Acrobat 8 will ship in the fall of 2006.

Technically, a Universal Binary edition is a new version of the application that can run on both PowerPC and Intel-based "Mactel" Macs. In effect, though, it's one more upgrade getting pushed on Mac users, who needed to upgrade to move to PowerPCs and then to switch to OS X and now to this.

Sure, those upgrades were all needed; sure, they were vastly superior technologies. But we had to eat their cost at Apple's convenience.

It's just hard for me as a longtime Mac loyalist—like a lot of us, I stood behind the Mac even when Steve Jobs didn't, flitting off to start his own company there in the '90s—only to see Apple turn into a rock-n-roll hype machine instead of the little company that made a better, more powerful and intuitive desktop computer for publishing and home use.

"They've become an iPod company," said Mike Jahn, longtime PDF evangelist (when you think of Agfa Apogee PDF workflow, think Mike Jahn) who now makes his living in the print-on-demand book industry. In his opinion, he said, "[Mactel migration] was a business decision that had everything to do with: one, getting cheaper hardware, and two, becoming more mainstream with the OS."

Jahn doesn't agree with me that Mactel is one upgrade over the line of sanity. He said he thinks the operating system and the platform really don't matter anymore, and that the glass is half full.

"It doesn't really matter to me," Jahn said. "It's still Unix under the hood. … I would be very shocked and amazed if this [weren't] a process in which, one day, people can not buy Windows. They will be able to buy Mac OS on whatever box happens to be on sale at Best Buy."

In the world of print design and prepress PDF, he suggested, all the heavy lifting is—or soon will be—done at the server level, and the desktop terminals at which designers work will be the cheapest box money can buy.

Click here to read about Adobe's Acrobat user community.

While us oldsters in our 30s, 40s and 50s care about operating systems and the political ramifications thereof, the teenage and twentysomething kids running around in Jahn's house, he said, flit from Mac to PC without trouble. Heck, they don't even need any stinking letters on their keys; they bang away on Das Keyboards, addling Jahn, the technology pioneer himself, who says he can't use the things.

Are you listening, Apple? Apple has always struggled to be relevant beyond us cult-of-Mac people. Imagine being the poor sot who bought his first Mac in late 2005 just to find out that it's obsolete as of … right now. It probably took Apple a decade to chip away at that person's brainwashed Wintel mind-set, marketing through all the cool "Switch" commercials, the Jet iPod campaign, all the billboards, and the noisy Apple retail stores jamming U2 at top volume throughout the malls of America.

If I were that new Mac user, I'd be pretty ticked right about now.

Sure, Adobe makes half its Creative Suite income off Mac users. But because so many copies of Acrobat sell into the enterprise PC world independent of the Creative Suite, the Universal Binary version looks to be a much slimmer piece of the Acrobat pie.

Over the years, it seems that more and more Acrobat features have become Windows-only, or later additions to Mac Acrobat in update releases.

It has been suggested to me by someone I trust within Adobe that Apple is partially to blame for this, by not being forthcoming with answers to Adobe's questions about OS X's inner workings in time to get everything into Acrobat by its ship date.

Another well-known consultant outside Adobe mentioned to me that many among the ranks of the creative designers feel that—at least until the robust rack of prepress diagnostic tools showed up in Acrobat 7—Acrobat had almost completely morphed from the designware it began life as, into an office tool.

The TidBITS folks reported that some in the Mac community had hoped that Universal Binary upgrades from Adobe would be free of charge. Are you kidding me? Mac users should shut up and feel lucky that they're getting a Universal Binary version of Acrobat at all.

It's not Adobe's fault. It's Apple's, causing such turmoil, especially in the same year that Adobe—arguably the most important software developer keeping people on Mac computers—is struggling to integrate its operations and engineering with Macromedia's.

I'm surprised Adobe threw such enthusiasm behind Mactel software and didn't just quietly commit to slipping out upgrades during some unspecified future release after the Macromedia smoke cleared.

It probably wouldn't be too hard to unbolt the important prepress PDF features from Acrobat, build them into InDesign and abandon Mac Acrobat altogether. Considering the terminal case of planned obsolescence built into Mac hardware and software over the last decade, it'd be hard to blame Adobe if it did just that.

Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.

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