If you are a student in full time education or work in an educational institution, you should qualify for academic pricing. You do generally have to provide proof though.
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Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Pricing and Upgrades
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Just a note, It seems Adobe Premiere Pro, Encore, and Soundbooth are the only apps that are intel based Macs only. No PPC versions of these apps.
I went to Adobe's website, to their Creative Suite page
Plugged in the stuff that I already own (all four pieces in 'Design Standard'), and Adobe's above "helper" tool told me that my "UPGRADE" was to fork over $1199, and while they called it "Creative Suite 2.3 Premium", this is exactly the price for a full licence (not upgrade) for Design Standard.
Something's fishy in Denmark, since any one of those products would have made me eligible for the upgrade to Design Standard for "only" $899.
Overall, I'm of the opinion that because I already own full licences of each of the four pieces in the Design Standard bundle, I should only have to pay the $399 for the Bundle upgrade.
I hear you. I'm loathe to pay the $500 premium for the upgrade to one of Adobe's bundles for two reasons:
a) I can currently upgrade all 4 of my components for less ($756 vs $899 is roughly $140 cheaper).
b) I got burned by Adobe the first time that I paid extra for a bundle: Adobe promptly discontinued my bundle's name, which was then "orphaned" for bundled upgrades. If they've done it once, they'll do it again.
My plan at present is to do "skip updates". I'll buy 1 CS3 upgrades, then wait until CS4 comes out to do a couple more of my Apps. Its not that the new versions are so compelling all the way across the product line that I can't wait a year or two.
And what I find applicable for at home, I apply to my group at work. As such, Adobe's not missing out on one (1) hobbiest, but 1 hobbiest + the office workgroup that I define & approve software the specifications for. Our current plan is merely to update to Acrobat 8, since we have a business requirement that we have to be compatible to...with a few exceptions, the rest of the stuff isn't yet compelling, so we will wait until our FY08 or FY09 budget and then reevaluate.
-hh
Yeah, but these folks are firing up BitTorrent as we speak, anyway. I suspect the sales impact of this segment of the population is minimal, at best (with the exception of those that do buy it at academic prices).
With that pricing, Adobe will do an even better job than they have in the past of ensuring boundless copies of every CS3 app on warez sites and bit torrent.
But if you DO get the academic discount then you can't use the software for paying jobs, only for personal use.
Question: Does design work pay so poorly that it can't cover a $1,000 piece of software? What's the after tax price of $1,000? Can you put software on a three year schedule? If so it comes right off yor taxable income. So for most people that's a 30% or more discount
If you are a student typically they give you about 50% off but then you have no way to make money with the product or deduct the price off taxes.
If you are willing to break the law or license terms then the cost can approach zero but we're talking legal use here.
uhh, no (to the first part anyway). software licensed legally as academic software (by adobe anyways) can be used for personal profit. Its not guaranteed across the industry (autodesk's maya academic, for instance, cannot be used for personal profit) but with many companies, including adobe, it can.
This is good to know, especially 'round tax time--do you have a link somewhere on Adobe where they state this?
Seems like academic SW should be tax deductible anyway, because it's part of improving your job skills to be learning the SW by using it.
Strange, I posted earlier that the EULA says you cannot produce commercial work with edu software. Now I have found both yea and nay answers on the Adobe site saying you can and can't. Now I only found one reference to Macromedia products and that answer was no. Very strange.
The following paragraphs were copied from the Adobe Education Store FAQs
From Adobe: Note: Education versions of Adobe and Macromedia branded products are intended for instructional and administrative purposes only and may not be used for any commercial purpose. Adobe conducts periodic audits to verify qualification for academic pricing.
What are the restrictions in using education versions of Adobe products?
A customer may only purchase one copy of any product. Education versions of Former Macromedia products only (Studio 8, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) are intended for instructional and administrative purposes only and may not be used for any commercial purpose.
Answer
Good news! You can use Adobe Education software (any title!) to produce commercial/professional paid-for work when you leave school, or even while you are in school. In this regard, Adobe does not limit how student software is used. So students can use it to learn and to make money!
(Of course, students must agree to the terms of the End User Licensing Agreement which appears during installation just as every software customer must do.)
Let's give it up for Monopolies! A big round of applause for corporate mergers and diminished choice! Many thanks to the folks at the federal government that let these deals slide right through with little or no regulation! I can't WAIT for all the phone companies to come together again, without the federal oversight we had back before Ma Bell was broken up. Airlines, too, w00t!
Good thing I don't really use much of this stuff, but the nonprofit I work for does. We're riding fine with CS2 and Dreamweaver 8, and it would appear as if we'll keep doing so as well. The good news to me at least is that the next round of Mac Pros will probably be fast enough to compensate for the performance loss of running the big guys like Photoshop and Illustrator in Rosetta. I'd much rather spend our tech budget on better (and longer lasting) equipment than an overpriced software bundle.
Actually, I said *FY*09.
Our budget submission for FY08 was just done last month, so I'm now only 11 months away from when I'd have to submit my FY09 proposals. If the CS3 upgrade was compelling and reasonably priced, I would finesse a budget line to squeeze it into FY08, but what it really comes down to is that at more than double of $400/node, except for native Intel Mac support, its not particularly compelling. It ends up being Adobe's loss when their product features and pricing structures encourages us to just perform "skip upgrades".
-hh
Wow, great attitude. I've never done secretary work but I wouldn't denigrate it like that.
The problem is that lots of "web developers" out there attempt to integrate Dreamweaver into their CMS or produce pages with DW in that kind of environment which is a nightmare. I've seem it many, many times over.
FYI, I was designing and developing tools that allowed non-technical staff to update content for outlets associated with two of the biggest media companies on the planet so I think I know what I'm talking about. I have no interest in relying on Dreamweaver for how that should work. Anyone assuming the title "web developer" shouldn't either, as far as I'm concerned.
For very large sites with lots of non-static content, Dreamweaver is a bust. End of story. It complicates and already complicated thing. Like I said, it's a fine tool for small-ish sites, but I just don't understand how you'd make something like that work for a large site with its own CMS (although, as I said, I've seen people attempt it on more than one occasion.) It just doesn't work.
Besides, I disagree with earlier comments about DW. Even for casual work, it produces some pretty convoluted code. I just don't see why anyone would want to use it. if you know what you're doing and know how to organize a project, you can hand-write a small site more quickly and more efficiently than with DW.
That's a pain. So I'll have to deactivate and reactivate every time I switch if I use three computers, eh?
Maybe someone'll crack it.
Ugh. They force even the legitamite users to crack their products, not just the pirates.
we covered this already, you ARE ALLOWED to use edu version of adobe stuff to make money with.
there is a difference between a designer making a living at design and someone doing the occasional paid project. 100% of my income comes from design work so its not a problem at all for me. and my experience is that design work pays nicely, or maybe i am just getting lucky. (knocks on wood either way)
The issue with that is InDesign. It's just plain buggy in Rosetta. PS and Ill run fun under Rosetta, without any major crashes, but InDesign does have problems.
Compatibility is the other issue. If you don't trade files with others, then you should be fine.
And finally, speed on large files... you'll see a big difference with PS native with large files. But, if you are just doing web graphics, then not upgrading is fine.
Exactly. GoLive too, really. They are meant for designing with limited php, etc code. I therefore use Eclipse (no WYSIWYG editor, just plain HTML, PHP, etc. Minimalist. Though I do wish opening documents in new windows like GoLive was easy...).
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.
Maybe the academic price won't be COMPLETELY insane.