Thinking about Upgrading to Creative Suite 4? Think Fast.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that Adobe had the most liberal upgrade policy in the industry. Any earlier version, no matter how old, qualified for upgrade pricing.
Those days are long gone and the upgrade eligibility for CS4 is stricter than ever. Only Creative Suite 3 licenses are eligible for the best pricing of $599.00 for Design Premium or $399.00 for Design Standard. If you’re among these that upgraded to CS3.3 the price is $440.00. For any thing earlier than CS3 you’re going to be looking at a $200.00 premium.
The news isn’t all bad, however. In an apparent effort to convince you to upgrade, Adobe will also give preferred pricing to holders of all earlier version of Creative Suite as well as Macromedia Studio 8 and Studio MX2004. But that offer ends on February 28.
And yes, I’m well aware of the non-USA pricing differences so have at it.
Do you think it’s worth it?
No, not in this economy.
Since I’m a beginner with most of the apps and have CS3, I’m waiting until CS5 to upgrade. Thankfully, I’ll still be a student then so…
It’s mad expensive here, but sure I’ll get it anyway. I try not to look at it as a cost but rather as an investment.
And I’m paying €2k to do a course on all the web apps pretty soon, so by gum I best have the apps to justify the cost of the course.
But that’s €4k + just for apps and tuts… as regards InDesign I’ll just have to upgrade that, but if I’ve to get the suite anyway… I just don’t know.
I don’t need the new versions of AI and PS. I do need the web apps though.
So sure I’ll see what I need and what way to go with buying stuff and upgrading.
Fairly miffed about the footnotes not being overhauled and improved and I’ll be harping about that for a while.
Please, if anyone knows or anyone from Adobe is reading this, please take note to overhaul the footnotes, even MS Word has better (ahem!) options.
Yes! It’s an awesome deal. I am able to upgrade from Design Standard to Design Premium (with all those great additional apps) for only an extra $200.
And even though, as you say, the upgrade is evolutionary rather than revolutionary … there are LOTS of great new features. I’m not lucky enough to be included on a Beta list but I can’t wait to try everything!!
Peter
I just upgraded to CS3 for ID, Photoshop, and Illustrator. That was $600 ($199 each). I can’t afford new upgrades every 18 months. If the financial world hasn’t collapsed in the next 18, I’ll probably just wait till 2010 for CS5, the next “evolutionary” minor feature addition version, and so I hope sites like this one won’t abandon talking about CS3 entirely.
I will eventually upgrade in about a year. I very rarely update immediately at released time, I usually wait a few months, but I did a very soon upgrade with CS3 Suite, and I have been very happy.
I always been very satisfied with Adobe upgrades, particularly since CS2 and CS3, because the very tight integration between the Adobe software and with PDF and color management.
The features that David talked about in his CS4 features blog don’t seem to apply to users that do ads and brochures…they would seem to apply to long publications. I’ll wait as long as I can…
short answer; no
Sometimes I read the American replies, and they say how expensive the software is…. please; if only we in Europe could get it for those prices…
Do you know what an upgrade from CS3 to CS4 Design Premium costs in Holland? 1137 dollar! And that is the English version, the very same box you buy in the states!!
Adobe is one of the most active companies against software piracy… why do they do everything to get people to pirate software….? I use official software, I make my living using this software, but it is becoming very difficult to justify these prices. I will be writing to the European Commission… again… Adobe is abusing their overseas customers and profiting from their monopoly on the graphic and designing software market.
Too expensive and too soon after our CS3 upgrade.
There’s no question that Adobe is losing users on price, especially in today’s market where many users are independents. Cutting pricing by 50%, and offering compelling aftermarket benefits to paying users would significantly increase Adobe’s ability to win paying customers.
It’s not that the majority of the industry isn’t already using Adobe products. It’s that the high price and the paucity of good documentation and support benefits compels the majority of users to bootleg the software. They gain little by paying the hefty package price.
We’re a small professional shop - we stay legit by skipping 2 out of 3 upgrades, and this works fine for us. But few of the pros we meet have legit Adobe software (and yet they manage to get lots of work done — hmmm.)
The reality is that, for every pro who can afford $2500 a seat for a CS Master licence, there are hundreds who could afford $1000 plus $150/yr to upgrade.
If Adobe also offered compelling benefits to paying users, they could win over many of the non-paying independent professionals who make up the majority of their user base. As it is, the aftermarket experience with Adobe is pretty unimpressive.
A couple of examples of ways Adobe can change that include:
1) Providing top-notch online documentation. Good documentation gives rapid, authoritative, and complete explanation of all working aspects of the software. Adobe’s current documentation is inadequate and is seriously lacking in context and overall vision. It seems like an afterthought, not an intrinsic part of a great product. For most pros, proper documentation would obviate the need for ever using tech support and would translate into significant dollar value. (And no, busy professionals don’t have time to wallow in user forums — time is money).
2) Providing the above on a well designed web site (and I mean information design, not graphic design). Information design on the current site shows a serious lack of expertise or effort or both. Improving it should be a major focus because it’s currently a huge roadblock to effective customer service and communication.
(BTW - The above steps should be put in the hands of communications professionals, not the marketing department, unless you want something that looks good but doesn’t work).
Adobe didn’t get where they are by accident - they’ve produced some industry-changing products and show no signs of slowing. (We’ve been avid users since Illustrator 88 and continue to confidently recommend their products to our clients). But success seems to have produced some serious growing pains.
A little bit of foresight and focus on customer service would go a long way to increasing Adobe’s conversion of their non-paying customer base to paying, lifetime users.
According to the Adobe upgrade page for CS4 standard, the price is $499 from CS3 and $340 from 3.3.
So far, its worth it to me. I still have CS and I did plan on upgrading in the next six months. Too bad my stimulus package went towards car repair or I would have done it already. What I dont understand (and Im on the line with Adobe right now) is why when I click on any products on their web site, Im referred to the Korean product site. It might be our IP address but its pretty silly. Im in Arizona.
I think it’s a rip-off. 3.3 just came out months ago. 3.3 users should have to pay much less for the upgrade.
Adobe’s pricing policy makes me with there was a cheaper alternative to do the same work.
@Chris: The price is significantly less for CS3.3 to CS4 than it is for CS3 to CS4. $440 for CS3.3 and $599 from CS3.
That pretty much takes into account the cost of the CS3 to CS3.3 upgrade.
Writing to the European Commission sounds like a good idea, because doubling a price sounds out-and-out illegal to me. I wonder if there are some other bodies that can be appealed to as well? The UK has a “monopolies commission”, but I haven’t a clue whether Ireland has one, or whether writing to such a body would be a complete waste of time…
It’s clear that Adobe doesn’t care how annoyed its customers in Europe get over the pricing. They have no choice but to use Adobe software. That’s a monopoly.
@walter Bravenboer: cut the horse dung man! The upgrade from CS3 Design Premium to CS4 Design Premium is € 649 ($955) excluding taxes. That’s only 50 Euros more than the prices in US$ in the US store.
Sure, it’s quite a lot more, but it used to be worse, and most folks seem to forget that everything costs more in Europe including your own butt. We pay more and get paid more, and if you use the software for your work you’ll earn it back in no-time. Heck, if you don’t use it for work you won’t care about the cost anyway as you’d just pirate a copy…
The Adobe US site offers “upgrade from $599″, while Adobe Ireland offers “upgrade from €649″, which at the current exchange rate is $953. That’s a difference of 60%, independent of taxes. If you include taxes, the difference is greater, but fair enough — Adobe don’t set the tax rate!
However, if Adobe set their European prices by saying, “what the hell — everything’s more expensive in Europe!”, then Europeans are entitled to be annoyed about it, and Adobe are obliged to be concerned about that annoyance.
On the Dutch Adobe Store:
upgrade CS4 design premium from CS3: € 772,31 ex VAT
This is $ 1125,-
On the American Adobe Store:
upgrade CS4 design premium from CS3: $ 599,00
This is € 410,-
The difference is € 362,- (or $ 531,-)
I do not think this is a reasonable difference, these are the same boxes, both the english CS4 editions, the Dutch versions are € 200,- more expensive. These are the Dutch prices without taxes (19% VAT).
In 2007, one month after being charged with €1510 for CS2, Adobe offered me an upgrade to the new CS3. Since the company didn’t seem to bother to inform a new customer about an upcoming release, I don’t feel like wanting to deal with Adobe. It’s as simple as that.
As for the Irish prices. I know a guy that works in the printing company that prints the boxes, cd cases, cds themselves and burns the data onto the disk for all the adobe software, right here in Ireland. So there is no shipping cost, just transfer of data over FTP or other means. (I know the printing aspect is correct, as for the disks being burned here I don’t really know, it’s a haphazard guesstimation)
It may be due to the fact that the prices in Ireland for printing are quite high, which could attribute to the high prices.
But wait there’s more. The download of the software is the exact same price. Without any packaging, cds or shipping, just hosting the software on their site and downloading it costs the same as having it shipped with all the boxes and cds.
My industry (Educational Publishing) still hasn’t adopted CS3 on a large scale so I don’t think that we will be investing in CS4 any time soon. We are still calling the few projects that we are working in CS3 on “early adopters.” LOL.
A: Please stop clamoring for government commissions to interfere in the life and work of free men whenever you encounter a product which costs more than you’d “like” to pay. Adobe has a moral obligation to their shareholders to maximize their profits, and if they can sell an acceptable number of boxes in Europe or Asia or on Mars at higher prices than in the US that is also Adobe’s right. (As for they being a “monopoly”, that is also nonsense: in pixel editing, there are at least half a dozen very able apps to choose from, which anyone can use who won’t use Photoshop, in DTP there’s of course Quark, but also other software packages which can do at least semi-able DTP.)
B. Get a friend in the US, order the software from Amazon or a thousand other online vendors and have it shipped to your US friend, who’ll take out the CDs, trash the boxes and manuals, and snailmail you the CDs, mark it as a “Gift” on the customs label and enclose a little card saying “Happy Birthday!” That’s how I’ve bought all my software in the past dozen years. It’s totally legitimate software, and it easily circumvents the high European prices (I live in Oslo, Norway, one of THE most pricey places in all of Europe, so I very well know how this shoe pinches).
Not me. I still don’t see anything that screams CS4 is a must buy. CS3 is, because it now runs natively for Intel Macs and has plenty of goodies in ID and PS.
Would it be possible to use a script (or action, etc) to recognize a shade of gray in an image then put a number in the center of that image based on the gray shade?
(a paint by number only in shades of gray)
Klaus, I’m pretty sure you’re contravening the EULA and US Custom Law by doing what you’re doing.
When a single seller corners a market, no doubt he is a “free man”. It’s the buyers I’m worried about, speaking as a buyer myself! A buyer’s life and work is “interfered with”, to some extent, when he has to pay more than the competition.
Just a quick question: according to Adobe upgrading across ‘territories’ — say from EU-bought CS2 to US-bought CS3 — isn’t possible, but is that true?
The upgrade from CS3 to CS4 in the US Adobe store comes in at €407,25 whereas in Holland we’re expected to pay €649 (@w.m. bravenboer: your supposed excl. VAT price is including VAT. Add a copy to the shopping cart and see for yourself) which is a €241 (a.k.a. 59% of the US price) difference.
I understand Adobe has more costs in Europe, but why does even the download have to be 59% more expensive here than the exact same file(s) in the US?
Perhaps importing the discs, or finding a way to download from the US store isn’t such a bad idea after all. Unless there’s 60% tax on it, making it just as expensive as it’d be if I buy the software here
It’s not about the price of the update you have to be worried.
It’s the plethora of plugins, addons and tools that will make it incredibly expensive!
We have plugins worth about $ 1′000 -2′000. So immagine what the cost will be in addition to the upgrade price.
As for European prices: there are some US Online stores that ship updates in a box to europe.
We saved this way a lot of money for exactly the same product (only in english, obviously).
No, I won’t upgrade or buy CS4. I had an upgrade path to QuarkXpress 8 from an old copy of 7 - $299 or around £175 here in Blighty.
I downloaded Q8 trial, and I was really, really impressed. It loaded quicker, less machine overhead, and just seems smoother.
use Lightroom and Nikon’s NX2 for photos (check my site!)
I DID upgrade Acrobat 9, though..
Uhm Gary, the upgrade for InDesign CS4 from any earlier InDesign CS version is €236,81 (including 19% VAT in Holland) so try comparing apples to apples rather than one program’s upgrade to that of a suite of 8 programs (not counting Version Cue or Device Central).
Very bizarre.
In you buy in Europe the Master Collection on the AdobeStore and choose to make it deliver to your door, it will cost you 25-30 euros less (2,390.80 € instead of 2,418.79 €) than if you choose the download option !
Strange green policy…
That’s it, I’m switching back to MS Paint!
Bob’s original question was “Do you think it’s worth it?”
Yes, it’s worth it. Adobe software puts Quark in the shade.
However, as an impoverished would-be freelance guy who’s still struggling to consolidate his new career, it makes me rather angry.
Adobe think they can simply charge more from Europeans because they’re Europeans. The profit they’ve made is nothing compared to the bad will they’ve generated. That is no way to stop piracy. My advice: just be decent, and honest, and you’ll get much the same from your customers.
Yes - Time is Money. And if improvements in InDesign make page transitions, buttons and hyperlinks easier to create directly in the document instead of later in Acrobat or elsewhere, I’m in for the whole upgrade of my entire suite - I’ll consider everything else an exciting extra.
But I will probably wait a few months to implement the upgrade just in case.
For me, the math is pretty simple. I see enough workflow improvements that I figure I can squeeze in a (very conservative) minimum of one to two extra jobs a month with no drop in design quality or time spent in client interaction. That means the upgrade pays for itself in less than a month.
Without exiting the math department yet, there are the product integration and export features: I can leverage what I know and now offer more to my clients. Figure one extra upsell a month, pure profit.
Documentation: Granted, Adobe’s documentation is about as useful as wings on an anvil — a common trend across the software industry. The Help functionality still has a very long way to go, but has improved a lot in the last two iterations of the suite.
OTOH, there is an entire industry (or “suite of industries”) devoted to getting us up to speed and unraveling the gnarlies. That industry sticks with the latest versions, which means that the up-to-date know-how is about the up-to-date versions. I recently added Action Script 3.0 to my arsenal via lynda.com and a couple other resources, for example. The Adobe site was no help, and the Flash help was worse…
As a single practitioner I have relatively low overhead, so my economics aren’t the same as a large agency, but from my perspective the upgrade is economical and well worth the investment.