Adobe Creative Suite 3.0 bundles and Euro pricing revealed - Page 2

As far as I can see the CS3 standard has the same price tag as before except you get Acrobat Pro for free. (that's nice, isn't it?)

CS3 premium is 200 euros more expensive than before but you got Photoshop Extended, Flash and Dreamweaver.

As you guys know, US prices are much lower for software and hardware than we get here, in the EU. (Before TAX that is)

So expect pricing will be about the same as it was or a little increased for more bundled software.

Can't wait.

We can debate all we want but in the end people will do what they do. If they feel the price is too high, they will obtain pirated copies. Same with music. As soon as ITMS arrived, many people found it to be a fair pricing model and it did well. Wonder what would happen if they raised the price of an album to $25 or a single to $3. Same with the software. Many are right when it comes to big companies, they will absorb the price no problem. But a small design firm or 2-10 people, what do you think they will do? They will maybe, maybe buy one copy and the rest will be borrowed. Morality and fairness don't really play into this for many people. Yes we can all say that sucks, but people will do what they do.

RIP Freehand.

I never really got a chance to play with Freehand (having always used Illustrator), but I did use both GoLive and Dreamweaver. My guess is that with these two sets of programs with direct overlap, we will see the best of both feature sets in the CS3 versions (I can hope at least).

Also, I would just like to say that I'm not unhappy about the new pricing structure. As a CS2.0 Premium owner (which I paid $1099 for at Amazon) I think a small price increase for the addition of Flash is a fair deal. I'm wagering a guess that the upgrade will cost between $399 and $599.

An above post mentioned the lack of Director in the list. First, Director has never been bundled with anything before, so it doesn't make sense to do so now. Second, I hate to break it to you, but Director is on its way out. Flex and Apollo are the future (merging technologies to bring Web 2.0 to the desktop) and Adobe has little vested interest in maintaining such a legacy program (our department is about to make the somewhat painful switch).

Personally, I think the idea of Photoshop "Extended" is stupid. I know I will definitely use the new features, but they should be rolled into Photoshop without making a separate version. I don't believe the new features justify an entirely new product.

Lastly, about Fireworks/Imageready. I would imagine that since Fireworks was more feature complete than Imageready, they will take a "mini photoshop for the web" approach. There isn't much now that you can do in Imageready that you can't do in Photoshop (advanced slicing and even rotoscoping as of CS2), so I don't think you will really need Fireworks if you have the Design Premium bundle.

One more thing...

I'd just like to say how much I hate the new logos. And I'll bet Acrobat will still be using an old logo as usual.

There are many people who pirate Photoshop simply for snob appeal. Adobe is not really loosing sales of PS to these people, since they would never pay $700 for a program of such nature, and dont even know how to use the feature set anyway. However, Photoshop Elements would fit that category very well, and if Adobe educates hobbyists more about how they really dont need any more than what PSE has to offer, they could make quite a killing off of its $99 price tag.

Emerging markets is another topic entirely. Companies is Mexico, South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China, etc. DO pirate these programs and many probably couldn't afford to pay such a premium for software. Im not sure there is any good solution to this dilemma at the moment, but its not a "problem" that will go away soon, or on its own.

An no, putting up roadblocks for real customers is NOT a good solution

Wow, those prices ARE expensve.

None of the studios I work in will pay that, they'll just stick to CS2 - even the ones stupid enough to purchase Intel-based Macs.

speaking of Apollo, I did not see any mention of it in the bundles... the alpha that exists right now is only for Flex users with frameworks in place to implement the Apollo runtime, but how about for designers? will Flash Professional CS3 be the new authoring environment for designers to work in and contain extensions for the Apollo runtime?

I'm giving prices with vat excluded.

mmm - can't wait to get rid of cs 2 - I got 3 intel macs in the studio and there isn't a single app that doesn't crash. CS3 beta was a huge step up but still crashes every now and again. And let's face it, cs 2 was a bitch even on ppc macs and windows. The performance increase of CS3 is huge though and will mean lots of upgrades.

As regards to the individual apps, I find Illustrator bloated and very very unstable and I never even bothered to launch indesign. Freehand is much more stable (something it shares with macromedia's other apps, dreamweaver and fireworks). Freehand though very popular here, is showing its age - key features like proper unicode font support are missing and I'm going to try and get it phased out from the company. Question is what to replace it with?

I hope they have very good and stable demos available and perhaps ones that last longer than 30 days cos to make a decision to shell out that sort of money one has to be sure. I'm thinking our office is goin to have to get to grips with Quark....

Oh, I'd also love to see better mac os ui usage in the apps and give us a proper timeline in flash - one that might make use of scrollwheels too.

With all of the apps that adobe now has in the "cs" family, they really need a build your own option, say pick 3 for $500 or something.

So no new InDesign?!?!? they are shipping the same version of indesign that was in CS2?!?!?!?

If you are an upgrade customer, I expect that $500 to $600 will be the upgrade cost for most of us, excepting the larger product and master's packages that is.

However, I have said elsewhere that they could easily do this if they set it up as an online only option. That way there are no packaging and production costs to offset for all the custom packages. And in this age of broadband internet access I don't see that as an impediment.

Oh well, we can hope.....

Yes there is a new InDesign. Current version, at least on my computer is 4.0.4, so I would bet that would make the next one 5.0

I bet that AppleInsider simply added the 3.0 as a reference to CS 3. There is no way Adobe ships a product from CS 1 in a CS 3 upgrade.

No worries.

That'd be cool. As a web designer/developer I want Photoshop/ImageReady for image work, Dreamweaver for html mockups and Illustrator for logo work. I don't need anything else. Having to spend 1699 Euros to get those three is just nuts. I've no need or desire for Acrobat, Flash, Fireworks or Contribute that also come in the bundle or the extended features in Photoshop Extended.

I suspect this might be the point where I decide that I'll only buy Photoshop, and live with the old versions of Illustrator & Dreamweaver. The latter two only see very rare usage now for me. Inkscape passable for logo work. I hand code proper projects anyway instead of letting Dreamweaver mess with my code.

I hope they've not killed off ImageReady from Photoshop though. I much preferred that to Fireworks' weird interface.

I wonder if there's a downgrade price to downgrade from CS2 to just Photoshop CS3.

Wow, those prices are expensive!

I guess they have no real competition now though, right?

I agree with you on Director being on the way out primarily due to Flash not Flex and Apollo. But you are incorrect about Director never being bundled. There was a Director Studio which included Director 7, xRes, 3D, and some other stuff I can't remember. I just threw away the box a couple months ago.

I had used Director since version 1 when it was only black and white, no color. But now Flash can do 99.9% of what Director could and a whole lot more.

I can't really say that I like either Flex or Apollo very much having worked with both. I hope they catch on and become popular but I have my doubts.

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Ah, I guess I hadn't taken notice to that. But to my knowledge, it has never been bundled with Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash or Freehand, which would be the apps most relation to the ones in the different CS3 bundles.

I agree with you that Flash is now capable of handling many tasks that would have been designated to Director. IE, lets say Im going to create an interactive portfolio, I see Flash as being a much better solution at this point. But for Flash simply can't do many things that are necessary for true multimedia "applications" (not just player files). For instance, if you need note-taking function that will write a file to the users drive while text is written in the application and later be printed out in a preformated fashion, Flash is not for you. Also, true quizzes are more difficult in Flash. Lets say you need to be able to take a quiz and tally scores from multiple chapters (days or weeks worth of reading for the user) all without requiring an active internet connection. Again, not possible with Flash (you could probably do this with Flash using a server to authenticate users and store the information).

So, I guess I could have said both Flash and Flex/Apollo will take over where Director has left off, but Flash's abilities are nothing new (you could have said this same thing 2 or 3 years ago). Flex/Apollo are new, and should be able to pick up where Director left off on the more complex tasks where Flash would not have otherwise been able to replace Director.

All good points. I guess it is hard to let go of the cd-rom based training/testing model with no internet but we abandoned that years ago in favor of Internet based distance learning approach. When I said 99.9% the write file to local file system was the 0.01% part. We tried a hybrid solution for awhile but the security sandbox issues kept getting in the way. Web delivered video is now good enough with broadband that we don't need cd-rom based training any longer.

Seriously some of you guys, GIMP? What are you smoking? Comparing GIMP to Photoshop is just lame as it sounds.

Anybody who calls himself a "designer" and says GIMP is enough for him, is not a designer. We don't need to talk about any features, tools in it, GUI itself, or arguing which one "feels" "more professional".

GIMP just does not have any kind of color management. How the hell I'm supposed to print accuarate pictures in it? How can I preserve color consitency? I thought graphics design is (mostly or at least 50%) about colors.

Anybody working with graphics who completly does not care about CM is not a designer and deservers to be paid no more than $5 a hour. Because of pure ignorance. I didn't even mention tablets support, input/output devices and many, many more. No serious artist or designer can work in GIMP.

So because a user can earn enough to pay for the software with '10 minutes' work Adobe is justified in charging extortionate prices, come on who's been programming you? If it costs so much to develop software how come anyone makes a net profit. Now tell me what would happen if ALL the overpaid professionals AND all the rest of us refused to buy CS3 we might make a difference, unfortunately that would require us to think rationally rather than as sheep!!

Me wants universal elements. Any talk of it coming soon?

It's important to remember that these are the full version prices. Most of us will be upgrading from Photoshop or a previous software version, and thus won't pay anywhere close to these prices.

weird argument. the tools cost what they cost. is adobe supposed to give them away for free? if not, then how do YOU determine what percentage of your billing is fair for the software that enables you to work? you're getting what you pay for when it comes to this software package. just like you can buy cheaper tools to work on cars. if you want quality tools, you pay a quality price and you hope the tool's quality means you're more productive with them.

adobe is going to price their software exactly where they think the sweet spot of price-consciousness is for their clients. they're a corporation, that's what they do. adobe isn't supposed to be some benevolent software vending machine. they're there to maximize their profits.

honestly, if you're in the US as a working designer and you can't afford it, you probably don't need it.

Well you've always got one advantage over us in the states. Your women tend to be less materialistic, better looking and more fit.

The problem with the IT industry was the inflated salaries that skyrocketed so many useless business models into the stratosphere alongside salaries only to plunge back down to earth.

Problem: People got used to these overinflated salaries and the cost of living shot up as well.

Time to conserve.

If you're talking about places like India where companies outsource to, it's generally the parent corporation or the investor group that pays for equipment. There aren't too many solo contractors here in India, and local companies don't make use of high-end design (it's very low-tech here).

However, there are tons of programming and design groups here that are set up by investors who cover all overhead, and then make use of the cheaper workforce. I'd say 99% of the computer industry here caters to more affluent countries, and therefore they get products like the Adobe suite (and usually their computer systems as well), payed for by the investors. So, nobody with a $930 salary needs to pay for CS3, anyway, really....

As an aside, since CS3 will have a life of about 5 years, you're looking at a cost of about $200-560 per year for the main software used by a professional, which is not at all unreasonable, and in fact quite cheap. Basically, with an Adobe suite, Microsoft Word, and a computer of some sort, there's nothing else a designer would need on the computer end to function professionally. Also, the price will of course be cheaper when bought by companies with multiple users.

Just think of the suckers who work(ed) with Avid and spend $20000-30000 more for a system that's only "current" for 2 or 3 years... Or audio professionals who are spending upwards of $100000 for a system that has to be constantly updated with expensive plugins, support for new platforms, etc. etc...

I'd say CS is a bargain for professionals, although expensive for casual users - but that's what things that Lightroom, iWeb, etc. etc. are for... I think a lot of amateurs get too caught up in needing professional-grade apps, and they're really the only ones that get screwed by the price...

I don't understand what it is that you want. I would argue that it is you that isn't thinking rationally. For one, you are using ridiculous hyperbole in an attempt to mock actual industry figures. If you want to call them bizarrely inflated, that's your prerogative, but it's also the reality too, the business charges from many decent creative pros are going to hit that. If you want to complain about inflated wages, there are a lot of other professions that you need to scrutinize. Also, consider that that's generally not the take-home pay, that's what the business charges in order to handle expenses for a lot of overhead (rent, insurance, marketing), the take-home pay after business expenses might only be a third that.

This software is intended for people who make a living using the software, which makes it a very small cost relative to any other expense. The cost is less than the cost of a fast food meal a day for the useful life of the product. It's a small market that demands extremely complex and sophisticated software, which means that the development expenses are distributed over relatively few users. Adobe is making a profit, but it's not the obscene profit that you make it out to be, it's not that big of a market either, even if there's a lot of vocal hyping going on.

Also look at the other expenses that a designer has: a $2000+ computer, most with long warranties and next day on sight service contracts, a ~$700-2000 display, a drawing tablet, other software like MS Office, isp and web host -- hell a decent business class DSL line start at ~$100/Mo here, so in one year, that is $1200 in internet access costs alone!

Suddenly adobes prices don't seem so far fetched for a 2-3 year life cycele, and those are new prices, factor in the upgrades and CS is just a drop in the IT bucket for pro designers.

Oh yea, almost forgot about the $X000 printers and their $Y00 consumables...and the copper lines for voice and fax, and the laptop for road trips, and so many other things that I must be leaving out...running a small business is not cheap, but it can be very profitable.

Adobe CS is just a cost of doing business, it is as much a business app as Excel.

You had to rub it in, didn't you... ;-)

i agree. i love ImageReady

oops. double post