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Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Pricing and Upgrades

dlastmango said:
"CS3 Master Collection $2499"

Sign me up for at least 5 of these!!!!

:)
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A wise man indeed.
If you look at what that money buys in terms of what you can create and thus earn it is simply a steal.

Add a nicely speced out Mac a whole load of creativity and a positive attitude.......whamo! instant business!:D

If you can't make it back in a couple of jobs then you don't need these tools in the first place.
 
dlastmango said:
"CS3 Master Collection $2499"

Sign me up for at least 5 of these!!!!

:)
Click to expand...


Very True.
This is not a bad deal. If you are a truly professional you recoup this money very fast, Specially if you add the tax deduction.

The complainers here are amateurs or people who really don't need this and want these tools but don't want to pay for it. My suggestion get an edu discount or buy Photoshop elements or keep CS2 or as final resort pirate it. :eek:
 
Unfortunately none of Adobe's many confusingly-named packages contain the four pieces of software I use daily: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Fireworks. None except the mammoth Master Collection, anyway.

So I can either upgrade to the Web Premium ($499) and then upgrade my InDesign ($199).... upgrade to Design Premium (appx $599) and upgrade Fireworks ($160)... or blow the wad and get the Master Collection for a walloping $1999; I'm guessing most of that cost goes into AfterEffects, which has always been one of Adobe's most expensive programs.

Gotta have my Fireworks, though. One of the finest pieces of software in the bundle, for my money.
 
nungesser said:
Unfortunately none of Adobe's many confusingly-named packages contain the four pieces of software I use daily: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Fireworks. None except the mammoth Master Collection, anyway.

So I can either upgrade to the Web Premium ($499) and then upgrade my InDesign ($199).... upgrade to Design Premium (appx $599) and upgrade Fireworks ($160)... or blow the wad and get the Master Collection for a walloping $1999; I'm guessing most of that cost goes into AfterEffects, which has always been one of Adobe's most expensive programs.

Gotta have my Fireworks, though. One of the finest pieces of software in the bundle, for my money.
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Exactly the same for me plus Dreamweaver.
I'm hoping the Design Premium comes in at $499 plus the $160 Fireworks upgrade....not bad at all.

Like you, I love my Fireworks:)
 
I find it really amusing how much many of you are freaking over the cost of CS3. I assume that most of those complaining are not making a career out of using the software. For those that are, its a necessary tool for the trade. Just as much as the grill would be for the mom and pop bbq shop down the street. I'm sure the grill was a hefty investment for them, but they know they have to buy it. And considering the potential for money to be made... CS3 is a steal of a deal. In the trade, one project alone could easily cover the cost of the suite. And that's even for a small freelancer like myself.

Now, for those that are not making tons of money off of this software. If you are a hobbyist and just like playing around with some photos and making desktop wallpapers, or whatever you do. You have to remember that regardless of how well you may know the application or how accessible it is to you... it is a pro level app and they treat it that way with pricing. If the prices are out of your range, I recommend maybe sitting on CS2. And then when CS4 comes out move up to a used copy of CS3. Or look into some cheaper photo manipulation programs. I haven't used any in years, but I remember PaintShopPro not being too terrible.

So yeah, my point is that CS3 is the best of the best when it comes to the design industry. I'm sure the best of the best grill for whatever restaurant costs sooooo much more than what we pay for CS3. I know the grill is much larger than the box your software comes in, but the potential the box has is far greater than that of the grill imo.
 
It's pretty obvious no one is going to convince the other side here. But having said that, I can't help posting one more time ... (after which I will try to leave it be)

CoreWeb said:
Having users edit actual files seems like a bad idea to me. Instead, allow them to do inline editing - like they would do for blogs. Having them use a computer program seems like a pretty bad idea...
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Dude - you have pretty much described Contribute. :D The whole point of Dreamweaver templates is to limit users to editing blocks of text (blocks of text I define). They can't touch the Navigation or CSS, for example. I can even limit their input to the point of only allowing plain text entry. But I can also give them access to CSS styles I've defined, if I so choose.

When any given content set doesn't change over the course of a day (or a week), having a script front end pulling it from a database on each GET is a significant waste of server resources.

R303blue said:
Westside, You're probably coming from the perspective of a small firm that just needs a site for clients and potential clients. With large internet firms such as the place I work, Dreamweaver and any other program like that are the last thing we would use to publish with. Custom-built publishing systems have been created specifically for our editors (they call them programmers at work) to put up anything they need, and it's all built using modules.
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Well... setting hyperbole aside - if a site was an order of magnitude larger than mine (mine is an edu site that has ~3500 web pages; that's not counting the various mysql databases and various cgi scripts and such because I don't hand that part off to anyone), I don't think the current version of Dreamweaver would scale well. I'm not speaking of the theory/design behind it; just that practically speaking the current DW code base would get bogged down with trying to handle that many pages. However I really doubt most (note: I said "most", not "all") of the people that have been arguing with my posts today are responsible for managing a site larger than mine.

But basically it sounds like you're saying "we'd never use publishing system X, instead we use our own in-house publishing system Y". It seems to me like the original argument - back a few pages - was against using any sort of publishing system at all, which is what I thought was rather silly. I would certainly agree that - if you have the manpower - a custom-built true publishing system would be superior. Heck, the majority of my job is writing custom web tools for our use - custom tools are far superior if well written. But using, say, BBedit/Textmate certainly doesn't qualify as the aforementioned true publishing system.
 
slazareth said:
I find it really amusing how much many of you are freaking over the cost of CS3.
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For me it is not the weight of the cash I am racking in for an item to be over priced. Any millionaire will tell you things are still overpriced even if I can afford that overpriced item. I live a debt free lifestyle and make a living with various Adobe/Macromedia products and plan on doing both for quite a while. :D
 
Westside guy said:
Dude - you have pretty much described Contribute. :D The whole point of Dreamweaver templates is to limit users to editing blocks of text (blocks of text I define). They can't touch the Navigation or CSS, for example. I can even limit their input to the point of only allowing plain text entry. But I can also give them access to CSS styles I've defined, if I so choose.

When any given content set doesn't change over the course of a day (or a week), having a script front end pulling it from a database on each GET is a significant waste of server resources.
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No, I described a web-based CMS. And there is an answer to having a script pull the data from the database: caching. Both in-memory and on-disk. But the back end should be a database so it would be scalable.

Otherwise, if some major formatting change happens, well, you're screwed. With a database-based method, you can store data in fields. Then, you can create templates on how this data is retrieved. If you ever change the templates, all the data is changed instantly. Or rather, the data remains unchanged. All the pages are updated.

Thus, a much more flexible system. Flexibility is key...

Westside guy said:
However I really doubt most (note: I said "most", not "all") of the people that have been arguing with my posts today are responsible for managing a site larger than mine.
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I'm glad you said most, because though you are right that I haven't CREATED a site as large (in the data set, though I've made sites which had a very large feature set)... I've been involved in the maintenance of them. This site desperately NEEDED a database... it was using text files as a back-end...

But I feel a CMS should be stored IN THE WEBSITE CODE. That appears to be our largest disagreement, really. ;) I'm just too big a fan of ALL DATA being accessible as pure data...
 
wongulous said:
I'm sure I'm just going to be flamebait by saying this, but I could never in my wildest dreams afford this. The bundle I'd want cost more than my whole Mac, and several times what I make in a month... I'd have to max out a whole year's worth of student loans to buy it... I'd have to not eat for 3/4 of the year... so I'm really not going to feel bad about downloading it illegally. Even if I had the ability to buy it, I wouldn't, for that price. I make no money from it anyhow, I only use it for pranks and fixing the occasional photo and screwing around with my personal website and home movies and making decent PDFs and such. Adobe, you suck for doing this with the price hikes. (And before anyone says that my attitude is the reason that their prices are so high, you're wrong--their prices are so high because people will pay them and they have no serious competition; as I said, I'm not depriving them of any monies because I would have to make $50k a year more than I do now to justify these costs.)

Maybe the academic price won't be COMPLETELY insane.
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It wont, but I see you are justifying your download already. YOU HAVE NOT EVEN SEEN THE EDU PRICING YET, and already talking about how you plan to sock it to adobe. Once again this software isnt made for you, most designers and firms more than make back the money they use on their TOOLS for their CRAFT.

To you people complaining, the software isnt meant for you..plain and simple. It is an invesment and a tool that people use for their craft.
 
try Corel Painter X

i've noticed a lot of complaints about no competition for photoshop or illustrator. Corel Painter X is a great option for pros & amateurs. its full price is only $400 us. That makes it $250 less than photoshop. Its a great painting product with far more brush creation than photoshop, it supports vector and has a text tool. i'm a professional retoucher and use photoshop, illustrator, indesign, quark, some 3dmax & maya. professionally i use photoshop (and have no problem with adobe pricing compared to 3dmax/maya) i find that with my personal work i am using Corel painter more & more. its a great app. (they also make a 'lite' version but i don't know if it supports vector/text). you can't beat corel for brush textures!

hope this helps those looking for an all in one painting vector/text app.
 
Devils and dues

Love Adobe or hate 'em, you've got to give them their due. They've stood up to (and when it suits them, with) both Microsoft and Apple, absorbed Aldus, conquered Corel and wounded Quark, while taking on every start-up who's tried every combination of price and features against them.

And they charge these prices and they get them.

Not to mention that they've changed the idea of what a GUI is, what photography and drawing are, and have changed society's whole relationship to images, and raised questions about what is real, what is evidence. And have added a new verb to the language in a way that hasn't been seen since we began "xeroxing."

How many true healthy software survivors from the Apple II/MS-DOS heydays are there? Marginalized: WordPerfect, Novell, Quattro Pro, Borland, many others. Gone: Ashton-Tate (dBase), Lotus 1-2-3 (the original gold mine "killer app"), Commodore, Atari and other really sizeable, famous in their day companies. And IBM from IBM-PC software and hardware.

Maybe Electronic Arts is another hugely profitable survivor if they're the old-time company I think they are. Oracle wasn't a PC company, Sun wasn't and is foundering.

But in terms of original PC-era software developers with high public awareness and impact on technology and society it's clearly Apple, Adobe and Microsoft. Any others?

And no low-gross-margin cut-rate companies in that titanic trio.....

Moral: Trying to compete in software as a commodity is a losing game. You've got to be bold, outmarket and/or out-engineer the competition, get market-share and mind-share lock-in and hold it. (Well, it sounds simple....)

I'm just happy that Acrobat has been so thoroughly reverse-engineered. Way too proprietary for a document "standard" you have to pay big bucks to be able to edit. I use Fox-it reader on my PC and Preview on my Mac.
 
Drinks are on me

If my lotto numbers hit, I'm going to buy each and everyone of you bellyachin cheapskate poorhouse cryin' hobo's a copy of CS3 Master edition...lite.
 
they also have all the individual "tour" movies up for each product; i am loving some of the new stuff in indesign. will definetly be buying this (design standard) after its been out a week or two to make sure there are no major bugs.
 
shecky said:
academic pricing is up also:

https://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/index.cfm?store=OLS-EDU

as far as US prices go:

master collection - $999
production premium - $599
web premium - $499
web standard - $399
design premium - $599
design standard - $399
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$600 for Design Premium academic. Ouch! :mad: That prices me out of the market for this product. Either have to try to live without Flash and Dreamweaver and better PS or stick with my old versions (sucky on Intel Mac).
 
Has anyone ever used the adobe upgrade process? If you wanted to upgrade from cs2, do you first have to install cs2 and THEN install cs3? Also in upgrading, does it invalidate your old cs2 serial number?

Thanks!
 
shecky said:
they also have all the individual "tour" movies up for each product; i am loving some of the new stuff in indesign. will definetly be buying this (design standard) after its been out a week or two to make sure there are no major bugs.
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Those movies rock...well, I'm back in (probably wait until summer, though). The new features in Illustrator (which I hadn't heard too much about during the dev. cycle) and Photoshop alone with make the upgrade worth it for me (plus I skipped CS2, so I probably need to take the padlock off the wallet a little more often). :D
 
bigpics said:
Love Adobe or hate 'em, you've got to give them their due. They've stood up to (and when it suits them, with) both Microsoft and Apple, absorbed Aldus, conquered Corel and wounded Quark, while taking on every start-up who's tried every combination of price and features against them.

And they charge these prices and they get them.
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Hey losers. These prices are the same as they've always been for upgrades. The prices of each individual piece of software has come down every year since released. What's your gripe? This stuff is butt cheap. Ridiculously cheap. Dirt cheap. What the hell? You're talking in your face dang cheap as cheap gets. If you don't think so, then you're making minimum wage and need to get your butt off the internet and get a job. That's the bottom line. Or don't complain about the price of stuff you don't need nor have any use for.

(sorry not you specifically BigPics - just used your prices quote as a launching point :)
 
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