On the MacOS High Sierra Compatibility Issues

[Pariah Burke]

Before you blame Adobe for these issues you have to understand two things:

First, with free OS updates and under constant criticism of making MacOS a lower priority than iOS, WatchOS, AppleTV, and all the consumer services, Apple rushes its updates out. Yes, they release alpha versions to developers and beta versions to both devs and users, but those pre-releases result in a bunch of bugs that need to be fixed. Fixing those bugs often creates other bugs and conflicts, and the timetable for releases is so short, devs are not given sufficient time to run all the tests AGAIN for every patch before Apple sends the OS down the pipe to users.

Second, there's politics at play. Adobe IS Apple's competitor in Apple's mind. The kumbaya era of cooperation between hardware, OS, and software companies is long gone--Steve Jobs saw to that when he returned to Apple and declared every other tech company a potential threat to Apple's interests. Apple DOES send alpha and beta software to Adobe, and it does communicate with Adobe (and Microsoft and other major software publishers) but it doesn't ZEALOUSLY cooperate. In truth, if Apple causes a conflict with someone's software, that conflict is blamed on the software maker (Adobe, in this case), which weakens the software publisher while, at worst, leaving Apple unscathed and, at best, making Apple look even better in the short term AND later if Apple decides to compete head-to-head with whoever's software is having the problem (Apple often goes head-to-head against the major software people use on Apple hardware).

These incompatibilities are not largely Adobe's fault, and Adobe was as blindsided as its mutual users. Adobe IS working as fast as possible to identify, understand, and resolve the problems created by High Sierra with Adobe software.

[Dov Isaacs]

Pariah,

Please stop perpetuating these myths about some type of Apple / Adobe conflict. Per previous posts, Adobe does fully test current (and often one or two previous) versions of its software with developer builds of both MacOS and Windows. And with both Apple and Microsoft, we submit bug reports when we encounter issues that appear to be OS-related (i.e,, changes to the OS did not maintain existing application compatibility). The vast majority of the time, serious OS compatibility bugs are acknowledged and fixe by the OS vendor prior to the OS release to the public.

Unfortunately, with the cursor bug, Apple acknowledged the bug but didn't get it fixed in time for the public release.

We couldn't warn InDesign users of the bug since unlike Microsoft with Windows, Apple with MacOS does not provide any advanced copy of the final OS release to application vendors. In fact, the actual MacOS 10.13 release was different from the last prerelease we tested with. If we warned our Mac users that there might be issues, we would have been accused of besmirching Apple's good name if the bug was indeed fixed in time for the actual MacOS 10.13 release.

Again, fortunately, Apple did rush out fixes within a few days for not only Adobe applications, but even for some of their own applications (such as Mail).

          - Dov

[Pariah Burke]

Dov,

I was asked to post this by an Adobe employee. Take it up with her if you disagree with what I said.

--Pariah