Adobe will drop PowerPC-based Mac compatibility with the release of Creative Suite 5 in favor of Intel-only support. Adobe chose to drop support for older Macs because the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.6 will won't support PowerPC Macs as well.
"This decision was based upon Apple's recent announcement that it is withdrawing support for the PowerPC chip set with its new operating systems, beginning with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (V10.6). With Apple's future development focused on Intel Macs, Adobe is aligning its resources accordingly," the company said in a statement.
Adobe plans to continue developing and releasing updates for critical issues in Creative Suite 3 and Creative Suite 4, so owners of older Macs won't be left completely without support. It's clear, though, that Adobe wants customers to have enough lead time to prepare for hardware upgrades if they are still relying on older Macs for design work.
The Adobe Creative Suite includes in part Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Flash, Bridge, and Fireworks. While most creative professionals that rely on Adobe applications have already made the transition to Intel-based Macs, there are still many that use G4 and G5 Macs in their workflow.
Adobe last updated the Creative Suite in September 2008, and the company typically follows an 18-month product release cycle. Unless Adobe plans to extend the release cycle for the Creative Suite 5 update, customers should have about until about March 2010 before the next product launch.
A FAQ with additional information about the Intel-only transition is available at the Adobe Web site.