P: HEIC Support

HEIF or HEIC is a container. With the flagship Canon camera moving from JPEG, I can see more and more HEIF images coming our way. JPEG is so last century and if Lightroom can open it, it boggles me why Photoshop can't. Right now, I have both so if I need HEIC access with Photoshop, I'll use my mac but it's not ideal.

You can also use: 
https://heic.imobie.com/heic-to-jpg/
Batch Convert HEIC Photos Rapidly without Compromising Quality

I believe you have this backwards. This is an Apple feature that Adobe doesn't support.

I think you are confused. In this case Apple released a feature that Adobe doesn't support. This isn't an Apple problem. This is an Adobe not supporting a new Apple feature problem.

The odd thing is that Lightroom CC and Classic both support HEIC files natively, so clearly some licensing (and code) is already completed on Adobe for Windows.

The only reason I can imagine for Photoshop on Windows to not support it is that Photoshop is more associated with professional use, and maybe there's some additional cost related to that. And, those negotiations are likely subject to a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which is why we don't hear anything about a status.

All supposition, of course, but I can't think of anything else that makes sense.

IMHO, the main reason to avoid converting .heic files to .jpg is that .heic supports 16-bit color, while .jpg maxes out at 8-bit. It's unclear what bit-depth cell phone cameras support, there's seems to be scant information on this point. However, I do see less banding in colors with a .dng from my S20 Ultra than from .jpg, so it looks like maybe 10-12 bits of color on the main sensor there, which is another reason I'm looking forward to .heic in Photoshop.

Oh man this is so bad. Photoshop should be the reference for all that is pixel working.
Adobe, please stand up and rise as you should. 

Sorry - you are right. Saying 'Apple' is, at best, an extremely lazy shorthand. They are MPEG members and are the most prominent evangelists for it but not the actual creators. It's more likely that MS haven't paid for the same sort of blanket developer usage on Windows that Apple have on MacOS... but this is guesswork: it would be nice if Adobe actually explained the situation. It's particularly bizarre to have added support to Lightroom but not Photoshop.

Why does Apple choose a non-standard format that costs everyone more money and hassle?! Apple are isolating themselves more and more. I just heard that LastPass (LogMeIn) can no longer be used on Apple devices because they are shutting down the plugin options for 3rd party password software developers - to be replaced by their own, of course! LastPass are withdrawing from iOS. That would be anti-competitive. Now where have we seen that before? mmm, oh yes: Adobe!

"HEIF itself is a container, and when containing images and image sequences encoded in a particular format (e.g., HEVC or H.264/AVC) its use becomes subject to the licensing of patents on the coding format. ...In Apple's implementation, for single images they have chosen the latter .hei c filename extension (.heic s for image sequence files) as the only one they will produce for photos, which indicates clearly that it went through HEV C  encoding."


HEVC licensing (a.k.a. the H.265 codec) goes through MPEGLA and is a  can of worms, so that could well be what's taking a while for Adobe to sort out with Photoshop.

Apple doesn't own HEIC, it's an MPEG standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_Format