Meanwhile, topping the list of long-awaited products that won't ship in January is none other than-- insert trumpet fanfare here-- the Carbonized version of Photoshop. While the web has been abuzz with reports by both beta testers and (cough) "beta testers" that the latest prerelease version of the software is both rock-solid and extremely lickable under Mac OS X, we've also heard that the product is still no further along than mid-beta, and as such, it's not shipping in three weeks, no way, no how. That's disappointing, to be sure, but heck, reality so often is. And if you don't believe us about Photoshop for Mac OS X still being a ways off, perhaps you'll believe Adobe's own CEO.

Yup, faithful viewer Stewart Woods noticed that CNET just quoted Bruce Chizen as saying that his company intends to release Photoshop 7.0 (the first Mac OS X-native version) "in the second quarter of next year." Ouch. So unless Adobe's developers suddenly go "whoops, we accidentally finished the whole project three to six months ahead of time," it sounds like we won't be tooling around with an Aquatic Photoshop until April, May, or June. On the plus side, MacMinute is saying "April," so maybe we won't be waiting for a full six months as CNET implies. In the meantime, loyal Photoshoppers will continue to boot into Mac OS 9 or brave the thorny brambles of Classic for their image-editing needs.

The only thing that gives us pause about this Q2 scenario is the recent rumor (recent as in "two scenes up") that Mac OS X will be shipping standard and default on all Macs come January 7th; if that's true, then graphic designers are going to have to make a trip to the Startup Disk panel after buying their new rigs before they can get down and dirty with the likes of Photoshop, not to mention Quark Xpress. That's not inconceivable, but it does sound a little wonky. And as for the Photoshop release date, well, we've certainly got no reason to doubt Chizen's word-- the guy runs the frickin' company, after all.

Our Conspiracy Sense is tingling; could the Adobe-Apple rift be in full effect, with Adobe continuing to drag its porting feet on purpose (being miffed over Final Cut Pro nuking Premiere sales and the rumored introduction of iPhoto) just as Apple tries to force Adobe's hand by making Mac OS X the standard ahead of schedule? Okay, so it's not all that likely... but it sure gets the blood pumpin' on a chilly December day.