John Gruber has written an interesting post on the future of Adobe Carbon apps and their lack of 64 bit support because of what seems like time constraints and a whole lot of work:
If Apple had shipped Leopard with the 64-bit Carbon support promised at WWDC 2006, Photoshop CS4 would run in 64-bit mode on the Mac.
The unfortunate coincidence is that WWDC 2006 — when 64-bit Carbon was announced — was right around the time when Adobe was hitting the home stretch on CS3 and planning for CS4. (Photoshop CS4 is currently in beta testing, and so the CS4 suite is probably slated to ship soon-ish.) If Apple had announced then that the only 64-bit path was going to be Cocoa, would it have made a difference? It probably wouldn’t have made a difference for CS4, given that it was only nine months, but it would saved Adobe nine months of wasted time.
This all comes at a time when Photoshop CS4 was announced to support 64-bit in Windows but not Mac OS X. The real interesting though that proves that some companies release stuff just because they can, rather than because they should:
It’s also the case that unlike Leopard, which is a single OS that can simultaneously run both 32- and 64-bit apps natively, Windows Vista comes in wholly separate 32- and 64-bit versions. And as far as I can tell, the vast majority of Windows users use the 32-bit version. (If anyone can find market share information regarding 64-bit Vista, please let me know.)
(Read full article at Daring Fireball.)