Miscellaneous > Applications

Adobe CS4 Released for Mac OSX and Windows

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Lead Head:
http://gizmodo.com/5063930/adobe-creative-suite-4-now-shipping

The price for this piece of software is insane! Anyone using it yet? I'm interested in the GPU acceleration bit that it has.

worker201:
Student discounts make it affordable - you can get the Design Premium for $599.  Interestingly, if you're not quite ready to go with CS4, you can get CS3.3 for the exact same price.

Illustrator CS4 actually looks kinda cool.  They have all these new tools for working with gradients, including adding transparency to gradients.  Student price for it alone is $199.  But I think I'll be okay with CS3 for awhile.

Lead Head:
The student price makes you wonder just how much it really costs them to make this software.

One really neat feature I saw on CS4 was content aware scaling. If you drag the side of an image to make it smaller, it will discard useless information within the picture to keep it in proportion. Really neat.

worker201:
I don't think it works the same way a movie works.  If a movie costs $15 million, and tickets cost $7.50, then you have to sell 2 million tickets to break even, that's the film industry.  Adobe is probably in a position where selling Photoshop by itself for $3000 wouldn't allow them to break even.  But bulk licensing, plugin fees, and becoming more of an industry standard with every sale kinda make up for it.  It's kinda like the Xbox business model - a CS4 suite is a bit of a loss leader.  But not so much on a 10-year development fee scale, like at Sony and Microsoft - it's more like a 6 month balancing act between student prices and business prices and their own stock prices.  Eventually, they'll make it up.

worker201:

--- Quote from: worker201 on 18 October 2008, 09:20 ---Student discounts make it affordable - you can get the Design Premium for $599.  Interestingly, if you're not quite ready to go with CS4, you can get CS3.3 for the exact same price.

--- End quote ---

Just remembered that I bought CS3 Design Standard over Christmas 2007 for $299.  Updates to that package have been provided for free.  CS3.3 Design Standard, which features all the updates I have gotten, costs $499, the same price as CS4 Design Standard.  They've either added $200 worth of packaging, or they are aggressively discouraging conservative upgrading.

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