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beowulfschmidt said:

I'll keep my Atari 800 and Nintendo 64.  Yes, they are still in a box in my basement.

Marvin said:

abriden said:

Adobe Creative Cloud is a relative bargain if one is working professionally, on a full-time basis. However, what happens if one's employment is paused or reduced, either by market forces, family commitments or chronic health issues. In these situations, CC is immediately expensive and yet without it one loses access to much of their work as well as the ability to maintain and update their skill-set should circumstances improve.

Furthermore, it used to be possible to work across different disciplines but with each now subject to subscription-pricing it is almost impossible to ...for example, I spent years invested in Cinema 4D but it was not my core speciality and now it's impossible to sustain that subscription alongside Adobe CC and others.

It is fine incentivising students to use certain tools, but with an uncertain job market, globally, how many of them can afford to maintain the software between graduating and finding the roles for which they studied.

I believe that these developers need to rethink their strategies to serve real-world employment circumstances as they evolve throughout one's lifecycle. 

The combined monthly price of the full Adobe Suite ($60/m) and Cinema 4D ($80/m) is $140 per month.

The standalone purchase price of Cinema 4D used to be around $3600 and Adobe suite was $2600.

Adobe initially kept the standalone option but so many people jumped on the monthly option that it didn't make sense to keep it. Customers drove this trend, not the big companies.

For anyone complaining that they'd struggle to come up with $140/month, they definitely couldn't come up with a $6200 lump sum. This is equivalent to nearly 4 years of subscription revenue.

The subscription model fixes the need for piracy because pretty much everyone has some amount of monthly income. Students can easily come up with the student price $15-20/month. The average student loan in the US is $30k. Subscription software would be 3% of this.

Monthly payments are why the iPhone is so popular. Hardly anyone would pay $700+ outright for a phone but $20/month is negligible.

The arguments about health issues or whatever causing people to not be able to pay their subscription don't make any sense. If people reached that level of poverty, they'd lose access to their accommodation, food, internet, transport too. Software subscriptions would be the least of their worries.

Apple could do the same with Final Cut and Logic, they can sell those for $3-5/month, ideally with yearly options ($36-59/year) and add in some cloud storage for exports so families can edit movies and share them with people.

harry wild said:

Apple is dropping the ball!  Everything is not going well so I sold all my shares!  Pathetic!