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One has to wonder if this is going to let QuarkXPress recapture some of the pro market. Quark is still releasing new versions regularly, you can still buy a traditional perpetual license, and their license agreement has no hint of the troublesome, invasive tactics Adobe is adopting. And despite having fallen out of favor for the past 20 years, QuarkXPress is still an actual competitor for InDesign. Affinity Designer and (shudder) Canva just can't cut it for heavy production work.

I've had to keep up with QuarkXPress over the years because of one client still using it, and while it's not as nice to use as InDesign, it is very capable.

neoncat said:

The author of this article I’m sure means well and is good at what they do, but may not realize the headaches they can end up causing people like me, as a creative agency art director that often farms projects to contractors. The eps and pdf files the Serif apps create are hot garbage that often don't pass basic preflight requirements. I should know, I’ve had to fix a bunch of them. Canva’s editable exports are worse and their cheeseball templates are visible a mile away.

Could not agree more -- I work in prepress at an award-winning commercial printer, and Canva and Affinity are absolute garbage from an output perspective. Forget about consistent color management or any kind of proper output control. These apps may be fine for people creating basic websites or office newsletters they'll send to their laser printer, but if you're building important projects that are intended for high-quality output, stick to the professional apps. If you don't want to pay a subscription, you can still buy a perpetual license to QuarkXPress -- it may be a pain to use compared with InDesign, but it's still powerful software built for pros (but that said, just save yourself -- and me -- the hassle and pay Adobe).

To be fair, the iPad's history goes a lot farther back than 2004. It owes a great deal to the Newton. Apple learned an enormous amount from that platform about what works -- and what doesn't -- for a tablet. All jokes about handwriting recognition aside (a problem that was solved, and by NewtonOS 2.0 the handwriting recognition was excellent), the Newton was way, way ahead of its time. Since iPad/iPhone development began only a few years after the Newton's cancellation, Apple was able to leverage a lot of knowledge, improve on what worked well, and avoid making the same mistakes.

rob53 said:

Sounds to me like you're saying (admitting) it's a monopoly. There are other ways to do what Adobe's products do but for whatever reason, they've been able to knock out every other challenger. Now they can charge whatever they want and people/companies/government/etc. will have to pay it. Sounds like what Microsoft was caught doing. 

It's not a monopoly; QuarkXPress is still hanging on in certain segments. But the reason for Adobe's dominance in the market is the fact that no one else has come up with a product that's as good (admittedly, InDesign's takeover of most of the page layout segment also had a lot to do with its being bundled with Illustrator and Photoshop back in the first few versions of Creative Suite -- so when smaller design studios, etc, bought Illustrator and Photoshop, they got InDesign along with it, and therefore felt no great need to keep paying Quark for updates).

At this point Adobe is the 800lb gorilla -- but there's a good reason for it. They've been constantly developing an excellent product that gives professionals from graphic design through prepress the tools they need to get their work done. As of yet, all the challengers I've seen have been unable to match the capabilities of Adobe's products. If Affinity can do it, I applaud them and wish them well -- but I'm skeptical. 

What I have no doubt of, though, is that some more casual users will find the pricing a lot more attractive than Adobe's, and we're going to start receiving files produced by Affinity Publisher and will soon see whether they present issues or not.