This discussion has had one false premiss, which is that there are no alternatives for Photoshop and Illustrator, and that the CC bundle therefore has no serious competition - at least as far as the print designers' trio of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator are concerned. However, there is now also the option of Affinity Designer (instead of Illustrator), and Affinity Photo (instead of Photoshop). I must admit that I have not myself used these applications yet, but they have been very favourably received as ‘serious contenders’. Still using CS6, I have been waiting for Affinity to bring out it's long heralded Publisher page layout application, and this does, admittedly, seem to be well behind schedule, though beta in 2017 is still announced (it remains to be seen whether that will materialise). It is for this reason that I am, at a reasonable price, renewing my QuarkXpress licence for the 2017 upgrade, and that, coupled with the Affinity applications, all on permanent licences, will be my fall back when CS6, now beginning to look shaky, finally falls of its perch. It is still there, blinking, not quite yet an ex-parrot, but I get the feeling it won't be long. Adobe have some time ago withdrawn technical support for CS6, and it isn't designed to run on newer Mac OS versions. Since installing CS6 nonetheless on my new iMac, Indesign CS6, long my main workhorse, has remained more or less usable, but it is crashing more often, and its type rendering on the HD screen is poor - far poorer than even Microsofts Office's. I was among the many Mac-based designers who 15 years or more ago, infuriated by Quark's sudden manifestation of neglect and arrogance (after a dozen years of using Mac Quark as an unmatched page layout application), turned gratefully to Adobe's Creative Suite, and really felt warmly towards Adobe, particularly for its development of InDesign, which proved to be a truly excellent application that I have very seldom had any reason to gripe about. The same was already true of Photoshop – a fantastically good tool. The same cannot be said of Illustrator, which, as others here have pointed out, was in many respects far inferior to Freehand, which Adobe unaccountably killed off without adopting its good features into Illustrator. Adobe has done absolutely nothing good with Freehand since (by all accounts not even in CC), and the ludicrous and indefensible absurdities of Illustrator's data charting features alone stand as a damning indictment of Adobe's neglect. That was the beginning of my growing disaffection with Adobe; long before any question of CC or the subscription model. It is easy to see the advantages to Adobe of the subscription model, and I don't doubt that it has facilitated a quicker response to the OS changes that Apple has made. Bigger design practices no doubt can easily enough afford the subscriptions, and perhaps don’t care about being able to access their archived projects for some lean years after their approaching retirement. For small companies and individual freelancers, not necessarily working with big budget clients, however, the additional cost of the CC subscription is a real issue, when the workable alternative for all of us who wish to stay legal (there are surely plenty who don’t bother), has been to buy an permanent licence upgrade, at a favourable price (as I am now doing with Quark) every 3 years or so. It isn't ideal, but that is the best compromise between continuing to function and taking too much out of one's modest revenue. It is simply not a fair accusation that us small fry, being too slow to upgrade, are 'the reason' Adobe has turned to the subscription model (neither Quark, Microsoft nor Affinity have found it necessary to withdraw the permanent licence option). Small fry are evidently neither a positive or negative consideration for Adobe - they obviously couldn't care less about us, and that arrogance is exactly what reminds many of us of Quark 15 years ago. Well, I’m glad Quark understood what had happened, and have survived. It would be nice to be able to say the same of Adobe in 15 years time - and of Apple for that matter. I’m not sure either will be around, as Huawei, or Chinese or Indian outfits we haven’t yet heard of may well have driven them out of existence with far cheaper products. Meanwhile, to those contributors to this exchange who echo some of Adobe’s barking arrogance in their ‘Get real’ comments, let me say that, while I will do what I can to keep working with the dying parrot of CS6 for as many days as it has left in this world, my way of getting real is to prepare for an afterlife with QuarkXpress and Affinity, not with CC.
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