If the company goes out of business or closes the server, you lose your work
You can still store information locally.
If Adobe went under tomorrow, Creative Cloud users would still be able access their files for 180 days, after which their copy of the app would no longer function. Unfortunately, Adobe tends to use proprietary file formats. A few other apps advertise the ability to partially read some Photoshop files, but AFAIK, none of them are anywhere near 100% compatibility with even CS3 files yet, much less CS6. I'd imagine the situation is similar (or worse) for their other apps.
So in effect, the GP was right, at least unless somebody buys Adobe out during those six months or until one of those other apps manages to reverse-engineer all the remaining file format bits that you depend on. Pedantically, the work isn't gone—merely inaccessible—but in practical terms, there's really little difference.
Not sure why Adobe thinks that 20 GB of online storage is valuable. Online storage is great in a corporate environment as long as it is on the LAN, but even most small- to medium-sized companies don't have the bandwidth for online storage to be useful when you're shoving around Photoshop files that are hundreds of megs apiece. Upload times are likely to be measured in hours per file.
If it were at least big enough to serve as a useful backup (say 20 TB), it might be moderately interesting, but 20 GB would hold only a couple of hours of HD video, or a handful of large Photoshop projects. At best, it's useful for transferring files from person to person as a workaround for the fact that email messages have very small maximum sizes, but only if you don't already have a much faster, much more usable server on your LAN.
I mean, I'm sure somebody probably has a use for it, but I really have a hard time imagining who.
Where are you getting that number? Amazon's Photoshop CS6 price is over $600. Even the student/teacher version is over $300. That alone would take your 6x cost increase to 3x.
$600 is the full retail price for Photoshop CS6, not the upgrade price. The upgrade price is somewhere around $250–300, depending on whether you have the regular or extended edition, IIRC. Maybe $350. I upgraded a few months ago, so that's from memory.
Don't think of this as Adobe implementing a Photoshop analogy to Google Docs; this isn't PS running in the browser.
I'm aware of what it is. This is a version of Photoshop that is DRM-encumbered, and shuts down if you don't pay for it every month.
Instead, it's a subscription-based version of what people already have that just checks in once a month (and forces in after 6 months). You'll still be able to edit local files.
You'll still be able to edit local files as long as you somehow have a different application to edit them with. Unfortunately, Adobe's file format is proprietary, and no other apps can fully handle Photoshop files beyond about CS2. So in effect, if you don't keep paying, you lose access to your local files. Sure, you still technically have the files, but they're as useful as a condom in a nunnery.
Ah, but the upgrade price is the only one that matters. Apart from companies adding more headcount or new students graduating from college, nobody buys a full version of an Adobe product. If they need it, they almost certainly already own it.
$360 per year for a student price? Is that a joke?
That's an entire semester worth of textbooks or an entire month's room and board. Over four years, that's like buying eighteen student copies of Microsoft Office.
Surely Adobe cannot be that stupid. Then again....
By which time all the small shops will have been pouring money into competing products long enough that Adobe will no longer hold a viable monopoly on the industry, and at that point, you'll see the bigger shops having to maintain both the incompatible Adobe product and the competing product. Within a few years after that, the big companies will ask, "Why are we paying these clowns, again?" and Adobe will be dead and buried shortly thereafter.
Yeah, those numbers are crap. That said, the conclusion isn't wrong, only the numbers. A typical non-corporate user:
Bought Photoshop a decade ago or more.
Buys an upgrade about every 6 years (3 major versions) at $250–300, or to $42–50 per year.
A Creative Cloud user:
Gets almost no discount for those years of buying upgrades—a $360 discount to rent the whole suite versus historically about $1500 off retail price when buying an upgrade.
Pays $240 minimum per year just for Photoshop.
So it's on the order of 6 times as expensive for your typical Photoshop-only user. For a multi-app user, it's $600 per year, so for new users, it is cheaper initially, but unless you are the sort of person who buys an upgrade at least every two years, it ends up being more expensive. Existing users are badly screwed.
But the biggest problem I have with this arrangement is that it leaves me completely dependent upon Adobe's good graces. At any time, they can decide to crank the price to $100 per month, and I can either pay it or I lose access to all my files. They can decide to drop Mac support, and I either buy a Windows box or I lose access to all my files. They can lose so many customers over this idiotic rental plan that they file for Chapter 7, and thirty days later, my files are no longer readable. And so on. It's a lack of permanence that I would have a very hard time swallowing, even as a corporate user, much less as a home user.
In other words, this has all of the problems of a free Google App, only I'd be paying a quarter of a grand per year for the privilege of putting my faith in Adobe. And yet, this is a company whose management has so consistently proven themselves incompetent beyond measure that I have no faith that they will still be around in ten years.
My prediction is that a sizable percentage of users will treat the Creative Cloud a stopgap measure, to allow them to get by until they can fully migrate away from Adobe products to a competing solution. Now would be an excellent time to short Adobe's stock. I fully expect it to go down to somewhere around $15 (just above their book value per share) in short order.
And yet statistically speaking, a hundred years after the last manually driven car comes off the road, we'll probably still have laws on the books that ban texting while in the front left seat.
The ads are already reaching my maximum tolerance now that they started blowing text ads into the middle of my news feed that look like normal posts, but they're not quite annoying enough for me to spend half an hour writing a Safari extension to banish them. But video ads? You get to show me exactly one, Facebook, and then it's worth the half an hour to block all of your ads. All of them.
I'll match your citation with mine. According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, iOS was the top-selling platform in Q4 2012, maintaining 51.2% of the market.
Sales tax is fundamentally regressive by its very nature. The poor spend a dramatically larger percentage of their income on taxable goods than the rich. Therefore, they pay more in sales tax as a percentage of their income. Therefore, anything that increases the percentage of products that are covered by sales tax inherently hurts the poor (or at least the 57% of people living below the poverty line who actually have Internet access) more than the wealthy. It is not as though states are going to start lowering their sales tax rates once their revenue increases....
No, this is a bad law. Sales taxes should not even be allowed to exist. They most hurt the people who can least afford them. The best thing our federal government could do is to outright ban all use taxes. Thus, as the Internet continues to eat away at sales tax revenue, states would be forced to move to a more equitable means of funding their operations. Instead, as the U.S. government is so prone to do, they're propping up states with a failed business model.
It is completely within their control. The biggest reason people buy online because they can search so much more easily. Sitting on a Target red phone for five minutes while you wait for someone to pick up, only to be told that they don't carry the product you're looking for is a terrible experience. Trying to hunt down an employee to ask for help is an equally bad experience, because the employees are never where you are. Doing a search on Amazon is a much better experience.
If stores had search terminals where you could key in the name of a product and it would tell you which aisle to look in, it would be a much better experience. It would be even better if it showed you a video clip showing where to find the product in the aisle.
Stores could also provide shopping assistants who pick and place merchandise into shopping carts. Go to the store's website, choose your local store, order your merchandise, and then pick up your prepaid shopping cart full of groceries (or whatever) a half an hour later. Charge a $1–2 surcharge, depending on the size of the order. This would require significant improvements to many stores' inventory systems, but it would prevent having to drive to two different stores because the grocery was out of something that you need.
But the ultimate service would be a delivery service. It's convenient to have products delivered to you, assuming you can specify appropriate times of day when you'll be home. Yet local businesses got out of that habit a long time ago. This is unfortunate, because delivery services are not only more convenient for the customers, but also more fuel efficient.
One problem is that these laws make online merchants second-class businesses compared with brick-and-mortar shops. If, for example, I'm living in Tennessee (9.75%) and drive across the border to Kentucky (6%), I pay 6% sales tax. Technically, the tax difference is probably owed as a "use tax", but nobody actually pays it. If I mail-order something, I pay the full 9.75% (and shipping on top of that).
The problem with that is that Nashville (Tennessee's second-largest city) is only about a half hour drive from Kentucky. So even ignoring the shipping, if 3.75% of a purchase is more than about $7–8 (the cost of two gallons of gas), you're better off driving across the border and buying it in Kentucky. In fact, I could easily see Franklin, KY setting up a mailbox store that specializes in receiving packages from online merchants to shave almost 4% off your bill....
I was just off by a quarter with my statement. Apple commanded 51.2% of the U.S. smartphone market in the 4Q 2012. In 1Q 2013, Apple was 43.7%, and Android came in at 49.3%. Like I said, they're oscillating back and forth.
its just a lie the reality Appleâ(TM)s global market share is plummeting.
No, it really isn't. Apple's worldwide smartphone percentages this quarter are up 1% from two years previous. You only think sales are plummeting because 2012 was an unusually good year for Apple and the worldwide numbers are down from there.
Either way, whether Apple is or is not regaining the lead is completely beside the point. The point was that Apple's sales are most certainly not collapsing, as was previously claimed. Rather, the phone market is rapidly headed towards a state of equilibrium (and has basically reached that point in the U.S.), as all mature markets eventually do. Neither Android nor Apple is likely to destroy the other at this point. And claims that the iPad is a "dying platform" are completely unsupportable by facts.
BTW, the biggest reason Android growth exceeded iPad growth so much in the past year, to be frank, is that Amazon (at least based on iSuppli's cost estimates) has been dumping their products at or near cost in an effort to sell more eBooks. Eventually, one of two things is likely to happen: Either the U.S. government is going to smack Amazon with antitrust sanctions for dumping, or the other Android makers are going to convince Google to apply pressure to force Amazon to raise their prices back into territory where they actually make a non-negligible profit on their hardware sales.
Either way, though, even without Amazon, the Android hardware market is a race to the bottom in terms of profit margins, because there's basically no other way for phone makers to compete with one another. The feature differences between one Android phone and another are pretty much limited by the state of the art in camera tech, display tech, and battery tech, and none of the phone manufacturers are actually designing that tech, so the only way they have to differentiate themselves from the pack is by undercutting one another.
As a result, although Android is turning over greater sales volume, Apple is making far more money—57% of smartphone profits in Q1 2013—because their hardware and OS are different enough to allow them to compete on more than just price. This is what allows Apple to develop their own OS, rather than relying on Google's charity. In the end, the companies that are making money are the ones who are likely to stick around, not the companies who are selling the most units.
What you're saying is that Apple isn't doing as well as Android on the world stage. What I'm saying is that Apple is solidly regaining its lead in the United States. Both statements are correct.
It's professional in terms of my requirements. It isn't professional in that I don't make money doing it. And that's why $240 per year is a kick in the crotch.
So really, unless I want to keep running CS6 in a VM until the end of time, my choices are to either pay $240 a year to Adobe or pay $240 per year to a kickstarter campaign intent on producing a viable replacement under an open source license. Guess which one is more likely. Hint: It's not the first one.
Printing photos of your kids, mostly. Same as with non-AirPrint printers. That and pictures of your cats. No, wait, that's what Facebook is for. My bad.
You have to question the wisdom of chasing the iPad which has dropped to 40% http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24093213 [idc.com] of the tablet market for 3 quarters (even after launching a smaller tablet) having been overtaken by Android, and growing less than half the overall market (Android is almost doubling growth).
That's only half the story. When Android first came out on phones, they rapidly overtook Apple because there were a bunch of new players jumping into the game. Now that the market has stabilized, the pendulum is swinging back the other way. In the United States, iPhone sales are actually growing again, and now exceed Android phone sales. Worldwide, the numbers are also trending back in that direction. Chances are, the relative mix of sales will oscillate back and forth for a while before hitting some magic point of equilibrium in which a certain percentage of devices are iOS and a certain percentage are Android, and that won't change much until there is some major disruptive innovation. That's generally the way mature markets work.
Similarly, right now, Android is growing much faster in tablets because it's really easy to grow from zero to nonzero. Once that market ceases to gain new players (and eventually, it will pretty much stabilize), there's no reason to believe that we won't see the same pattern emerging.
You can tell Microsoft and Apple want the safe Duopoly back;
You're half right. Microsoft wants their duopoly back. Right now, it's pretty much an Android/Apple duopoly, and Microsoft is just warming up the bench. As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't really care who their competitor is, so long as they have one. Competition drives Apple to provide a better platform, and in the end, that's good for pretty much everyone, whether you're an Apple user or an Android user.
Androids monster growth is not going to stop anytime soon, the iPad is a dying platform.
If you honestly think that iPad is a dying platform, I have a bridge to sell you. Dying platforms don't tell 70+ WWDC tickets per second at $1,599 a pop.
That's the problem. I own Photoshop and use it at least three or four times per month. I need Photoshop because I have to work with all my existing Photoshop files that no other application can open because of the layer effects. I depend on 16-bit-per-channel color to minimize distortion when adjusting the color of photographs as part of complex, multi-layered artwork. I depend on CMYK output because the content I'm producing will eventually go to a print shop that requires CMYK source material. None of the competitors can replace Photoshop at those tasks. Therefore, in spite of the fact that I'm not using it "professionally" by your standards, it is a tool that I cannot readily do without. I'm certain that I am not alone in that regard.
Are you kidding? $240 per year is twice as expensive as the single-product upgrade cycle even if you upgrade every single version. Do the math. The only way the subscriptions are cheaper is if you're a new customer coming in for the first time, but even then, at an average of one update every two years, you reach a break-even point about four years in.
The subscriptions are cheaper for people who use lots of different Adobe apps. For people who only use one or two, they're a scam.
I like it. Unless you skip a version or two, the $50/month for the entire suite is a better price.
What you're missing is that the only reason they're implementing subscription pricing is that too many of their customers do, in fact, skip a version or two. Most of those folks will balk at the notion of moving to subscription pricing because it is much, much more expensive.
And even if you don't skip releases, for single products, it is still much more expensive. For a single product (as I use), the minimum cost is $240 annually ($20 per month). Photoshop upgrades cost IIRC about $250, but they only come out about once every two years. So the subscription model is almost double what I'd be paying even if I bought every version. Since I skipped straight from CS3 to CS6, it's closer to six times what I actually paid to use Photoshop over that time period.
The subscription model is great if you're using the entire suite, which many people do. But for those of us who only care about Photoshop and don't need the latest and greatest version, Adobe deciding to increase our price by a factor of 6 overnight is a very strong incentive to start looking for alternatives.
The problem is that for me, Photoshop was already right at the upper limit for how much I was willing to pay for software ($250 every 6 years). Now, at $240 annually, it's way more than I would ever consider paying for any piece of software even if I had a direct line to their engineering team, so I'm just not going to continue upgrading Photoshop. I'll just run a copy of OS X v10.8 and CS6 in a VM forever and ever, and that will be good enough. By cranking the price so ridiculously high, they've removed any incentive for me to ever give them more money.
As it stands, I fully intend to spend the money I would have spent on Photoshop to support a kickstarter campaign to bring 16-bit color and a full CMYK workflow to Gimp, should such a campaign come into existence. (Hint, hint.)
I own Photoshop CS6, legally. I will not even consider using Photoshop on a subscription basis because although I am using it for things that I will eventually make money on, I already do not make enough money to justify buying a Photoshop upgrade for $250 every five or six years (three versions) as I currently do. I will never in my life make enough money off of Photoshop to justify spending $240 every year (which is the absolute minimum cost of subscriptions for a single product). And if Lightroom goes the same way, they're gone, too. I prefer Lightroom to Aperture, but not enough to be forced into such an overpriced subscription model.
But it's not just the cost. Even if Adobe rented it to me for $20 a year instead of $20 a month, I still would not consider it. Here's why: I regularly work on projects that span many, many years. One of my projects is well over a decade old, and still in progress. With a purchase, I can still use a copy of Photoshop from ten years ago on an old machine, if I have to. Adobe could go out of business tomorrow, and there's no problem.
With a subscription-based app, if Adobe goes away, my copy of the app stops working. Immediately. Given how badly Adobe has screwed up Flash and Acrobat, I truly do not trust Adobe to still be in business in ten years when the last of the major PDF patents start to expire. Therefore, I cannot trust any DRM scheme in which Adobe ceasing to exist can cause me to suddenly and permanently lose access to everything I'm working on.
And even if Adobe is still around in a decade, there's the problem of Adobe's willingness to continue support. In five years, they could decide that OS X support costs too much, and they could become Windows-only or iOS-only, and I'd be SOL. They could decide that they'll only support each version of the app up until the new version comes out, at which point I'm then forced to do a very painful migration experience three times as often as I currently do. And so on. It just isn't worth it.
To make a long story short, CS6 will be the last version of Photoshop that I will use until such time as Adobe gets bought by a company who has more common sense. In the meantime, I look forward to helping the Pixelmator team improve their software so that it will be capable of opening the handful of my existing documents that it cannot yet handle.
Agreed. As long as this kid is rotting in jail for B.S. Facebook bravado while Westboro Baptist Church retains its tax exempt status, it's pretty easy to see what's wrong with the American government. Just saying.
Slashdot Mirror
If Adobe went under tomorrow, Creative Cloud users would still be able access their files for 180 days, after which their copy of the app would no longer function. Unfortunately, Adobe tends to use proprietary file formats. A few other apps advertise the ability to partially read some Photoshop files, but AFAIK, none of them are anywhere near 100% compatibility with even CS3 files yet, much less CS6. I'd imagine the situation is similar (or worse) for their other apps.
So in effect, the GP was right, at least unless somebody buys Adobe out during those six months or until one of those other apps manages to reverse-engineer all the remaining file format bits that you depend on. Pedantically, the work isn't gone—merely inaccessible—but in practical terms, there's really little difference.
Not sure why Adobe thinks that 20 GB of online storage is valuable. Online storage is great in a corporate environment as long as it is on the LAN, but even most small- to medium-sized companies don't have the bandwidth for online storage to be useful when you're shoving around Photoshop files that are hundreds of megs apiece. Upload times are likely to be measured in hours per file.
If it were at least big enough to serve as a useful backup (say 20 TB), it might be moderately interesting, but 20 GB would hold only a couple of hours of HD video, or a handful of large Photoshop projects. At best, it's useful for transferring files from person to person as a workaround for the fact that email messages have very small maximum sizes, but only if you don't already have a much faster, much more usable server on your LAN.
I mean, I'm sure somebody probably has a use for it, but I really have a hard time imagining who.
$600 is the full retail price for Photoshop CS6, not the upgrade price. The upgrade price is somewhere around $250–300, depending on whether you have the regular or extended edition, IIRC. Maybe $350. I upgraded a few months ago, so that's from memory.
I'm aware of what it is. This is a version of Photoshop that is DRM-encumbered, and shuts down if you don't pay for it every month.
You'll still be able to edit local files as long as you somehow have a different application to edit them with. Unfortunately, Adobe's file format is proprietary, and no other apps can fully handle Photoshop files beyond about CS2. So in effect, if you don't keep paying, you lose access to your local files. Sure, you still technically have the files, but they're as useful as a condom in a nunnery.
Ah, but the upgrade price is the only one that matters. Apart from companies adding more headcount or new students graduating from college, nobody buys a full version of an Adobe product. If they need it, they almost certainly already own it.
$360 per year for a student price? Is that a joke?
That's an entire semester worth of textbooks or an entire month's room and board. Over four years, that's like buying eighteen student copies of Microsoft Office.
Surely Adobe cannot be that stupid. Then again....
By which time all the small shops will have been pouring money into competing products long enough that Adobe will no longer hold a viable monopoly on the industry, and at that point, you'll see the bigger shops having to maintain both the incompatible Adobe product and the competing product. Within a few years after that, the big companies will ask, "Why are we paying these clowns, again?" and Adobe will be dead and buried shortly thereafter.
Yeah, those numbers are crap. That said, the conclusion isn't wrong, only the numbers. A typical non-corporate user:
A Creative Cloud user:
So it's on the order of 6 times as expensive for your typical Photoshop-only user. For a multi-app user, it's $600 per year, so for new users, it is cheaper initially, but unless you are the sort of person who buys an upgrade at least every two years, it ends up being more expensive. Existing users are badly screwed.
But the biggest problem I have with this arrangement is that it leaves me completely dependent upon Adobe's good graces. At any time, they can decide to crank the price to $100 per month, and I can either pay it or I lose access to all my files. They can decide to drop Mac support, and I either buy a Windows box or I lose access to all my files. They can lose so many customers over this idiotic rental plan that they file for Chapter 7, and thirty days later, my files are no longer readable. And so on. It's a lack of permanence that I would have a very hard time swallowing, even as a corporate user, much less as a home user.
In other words, this has all of the problems of a free Google App, only I'd be paying a quarter of a grand per year for the privilege of putting my faith in Adobe. And yet, this is a company whose management has so consistently proven themselves incompetent beyond measure that I have no faith that they will still be around in ten years.
My prediction is that a sizable percentage of users will treat the Creative Cloud a stopgap measure, to allow them to get by until they can fully migrate away from Adobe products to a competing solution. Now would be an excellent time to short Adobe's stock. I fully expect it to go down to somewhere around $15 (just above their book value per share) in short order.
And yet statistically speaking, a hundred years after the last manually driven car comes off the road, we'll probably still have laws on the books that ban texting while in the front left seat.
The ads are already reaching my maximum tolerance now that they started blowing text ads into the middle of my news feed that look like normal posts, but they're not quite annoying enough for me to spend half an hour writing a Safari extension to banish them. But video ads? You get to show me exactly one, Facebook, and then it's worth the half an hour to block all of your ads. All of them.
I'll match your citation with mine. According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, iOS was the top-selling platform in Q4 2012, maintaining 51.2% of the market.
So either your data is wrong or mine is.
Sales tax is fundamentally regressive by its very nature. The poor spend a dramatically larger percentage of their income on taxable goods than the rich. Therefore, they pay more in sales tax as a percentage of their income. Therefore, anything that increases the percentage of products that are covered by sales tax inherently hurts the poor (or at least the 57% of people living below the poverty line who actually have Internet access) more than the wealthy. It is not as though states are going to start lowering their sales tax rates once their revenue increases....
No, this is a bad law. Sales taxes should not even be allowed to exist. They most hurt the people who can least afford them. The best thing our federal government could do is to outright ban all use taxes. Thus, as the Internet continues to eat away at sales tax revenue, states would be forced to move to a more equitable means of funding their operations. Instead, as the U.S. government is so prone to do, they're propping up states with a failed business model.
It is completely within their control. The biggest reason people buy online because they can search so much more easily. Sitting on a Target red phone for five minutes while you wait for someone to pick up, only to be told that they don't carry the product you're looking for is a terrible experience. Trying to hunt down an employee to ask for help is an equally bad experience, because the employees are never where you are. Doing a search on Amazon is a much better experience.
If stores had search terminals where you could key in the name of a product and it would tell you which aisle to look in, it would be a much better experience. It would be even better if it showed you a video clip showing where to find the product in the aisle.
Stores could also provide shopping assistants who pick and place merchandise into shopping carts. Go to the store's website, choose your local store, order your merchandise, and then pick up your prepaid shopping cart full of groceries (or whatever) a half an hour later. Charge a $1–2 surcharge, depending on the size of the order. This would require significant improvements to many stores' inventory systems, but it would prevent having to drive to two different stores because the grocery was out of something that you need.
But the ultimate service would be a delivery service. It's convenient to have products delivered to you, assuming you can specify appropriate times of day when you'll be home. Yet local businesses got out of that habit a long time ago. This is unfortunate, because delivery services are not only more convenient for the customers, but also more fuel efficient.
One problem is that these laws make online merchants second-class businesses compared with brick-and-mortar shops. If, for example, I'm living in Tennessee (9.75%) and drive across the border to Kentucky (6%), I pay 6% sales tax. Technically, the tax difference is probably owed as a "use tax", but nobody actually pays it. If I mail-order something, I pay the full 9.75% (and shipping on top of that).
The problem with that is that Nashville (Tennessee's second-largest city) is only about a half hour drive from Kentucky. So even ignoring the shipping, if 3.75% of a purchase is more than about $7–8 (the cost of two gallons of gas), you're better off driving across the border and buying it in Kentucky. In fact, I could easily see Franklin, KY setting up a mailbox store that specializes in receiving packages from online merchants to shave almost 4% off your bill....
I was just off by a quarter with my statement. Apple commanded 51.2% of the U.S. smartphone market in the 4Q 2012. In 1Q 2013, Apple was 43.7%, and Android came in at 49.3%. Like I said, they're oscillating back and forth.
No, it really isn't. Apple's worldwide smartphone percentages this quarter are up 1% from two years previous. You only think sales are plummeting because 2012 was an unusually good year for Apple and the worldwide numbers are down from there.
Either way, whether Apple is or is not regaining the lead is completely beside the point. The point was that Apple's sales are most certainly not collapsing, as was previously claimed. Rather, the phone market is rapidly headed towards a state of equilibrium (and has basically reached that point in the U.S.), as all mature markets eventually do. Neither Android nor Apple is likely to destroy the other at this point. And claims that the iPad is a "dying platform" are completely unsupportable by facts.
BTW, the biggest reason Android growth exceeded iPad growth so much in the past year, to be frank, is that Amazon (at least based on iSuppli's cost estimates) has been dumping their products at or near cost in an effort to sell more eBooks. Eventually, one of two things is likely to happen: Either the U.S. government is going to smack Amazon with antitrust sanctions for dumping, or the other Android makers are going to convince Google to apply pressure to force Amazon to raise their prices back into territory where they actually make a non-negligible profit on their hardware sales.
Either way, though, even without Amazon, the Android hardware market is a race to the bottom in terms of profit margins, because there's basically no other way for phone makers to compete with one another. The feature differences between one Android phone and another are pretty much limited by the state of the art in camera tech, display tech, and battery tech, and none of the phone manufacturers are actually designing that tech, so the only way they have to differentiate themselves from the pack is by undercutting one another.
As a result, although Android is turning over greater sales volume, Apple is making far more money—57% of smartphone profits in Q1 2013—because their hardware and OS are different enough to allow them to compete on more than just price. This is what allows Apple to develop their own OS, rather than relying on Google's charity. In the end, the companies that are making money are the ones who are likely to stick around, not the companies who are selling the most units.
What you're saying is that Apple isn't doing as well as Android on the world stage. What I'm saying is that Apple is solidly regaining its lead in the United States. Both statements are correct.
It's professional in terms of my requirements. It isn't professional in that I don't make money doing it. And that's why $240 per year is a kick in the crotch.
So really, unless I want to keep running CS6 in a VM until the end of time, my choices are to either pay $240 a year to Adobe or pay $240 per year to a kickstarter campaign intent on producing a viable replacement under an open source license. Guess which one is more likely. Hint: It's not the first one.
Printing photos of your kids, mostly. Same as with non-AirPrint printers. That and pictures of your cats. No, wait, that's what Facebook is for. My bad.
That's only half the story. When Android first came out on phones, they rapidly overtook Apple because there were a bunch of new players jumping into the game. Now that the market has stabilized, the pendulum is swinging back the other way. In the United States, iPhone sales are actually growing again, and now exceed Android phone sales. Worldwide, the numbers are also trending back in that direction. Chances are, the relative mix of sales will oscillate back and forth for a while before hitting some magic point of equilibrium in which a certain percentage of devices are iOS and a certain percentage are Android, and that won't change much until there is some major disruptive innovation. That's generally the way mature markets work.
Similarly, right now, Android is growing much faster in tablets because it's really easy to grow from zero to nonzero. Once that market ceases to gain new players (and eventually, it will pretty much stabilize), there's no reason to believe that we won't see the same pattern emerging.
You're half right. Microsoft wants their duopoly back. Right now, it's pretty much an Android/Apple duopoly, and Microsoft is just warming up the bench. As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't really care who their competitor is, so long as they have one. Competition drives Apple to provide a better platform, and in the end, that's good for pretty much everyone, whether you're an Apple user or an Android user.
If you honestly think that iPad is a dying platform, I have a bridge to sell you. Dying platforms don't tell 70+ WWDC tickets per second at $1,599 a pop.
That's the problem. I own Photoshop and use it at least three or four times per month. I need Photoshop because I have to work with all my existing Photoshop files that no other application can open because of the layer effects. I depend on 16-bit-per-channel color to minimize distortion when adjusting the color of photographs as part of complex, multi-layered artwork. I depend on CMYK output because the content I'm producing will eventually go to a print shop that requires CMYK source material. None of the competitors can replace Photoshop at those tasks. Therefore, in spite of the fact that I'm not using it "professionally" by your standards, it is a tool that I cannot readily do without. I'm certain that I am not alone in that regard.
Are you kidding? $240 per year is twice as expensive as the single-product upgrade cycle even if you upgrade every single version. Do the math. The only way the subscriptions are cheaper is if you're a new customer coming in for the first time, but even then, at an average of one update every two years, you reach a break-even point about four years in.
The subscriptions are cheaper for people who use lots of different Adobe apps. For people who only use one or two, they're a scam.
What you're missing is that the only reason they're implementing subscription pricing is that too many of their customers do, in fact, skip a version or two. Most of those folks will balk at the notion of moving to subscription pricing because it is much, much more expensive.
And even if you don't skip releases, for single products, it is still much more expensive. For a single product (as I use), the minimum cost is $240 annually ($20 per month). Photoshop upgrades cost IIRC about $250, but they only come out about once every two years. So the subscription model is almost double what I'd be paying even if I bought every version. Since I skipped straight from CS3 to CS6, it's closer to six times what I actually paid to use Photoshop over that time period.
The subscription model is great if you're using the entire suite, which many people do. But for those of us who only care about Photoshop and don't need the latest and greatest version, Adobe deciding to increase our price by a factor of 6 overnight is a very strong incentive to start looking for alternatives.
The problem is that for me, Photoshop was already right at the upper limit for how much I was willing to pay for software ($250 every 6 years). Now, at $240 annually, it's way more than I would ever consider paying for any piece of software even if I had a direct line to their engineering team, so I'm just not going to continue upgrading Photoshop. I'll just run a copy of OS X v10.8 and CS6 in a VM forever and ever, and that will be good enough. By cranking the price so ridiculously high, they've removed any incentive for me to ever give them more money.
As it stands, I fully intend to spend the money I would have spent on Photoshop to support a kickstarter campaign to bring 16-bit color and a full CMYK workflow to Gimp, should such a campaign come into existence. (Hint, hint.)
Kickstarter opportunity. Many $10 bills make all bugs shallow.
I own Photoshop CS6, legally. I will not even consider using Photoshop on a subscription basis because although I am using it for things that I will eventually make money on, I already do not make enough money to justify buying a Photoshop upgrade for $250 every five or six years (three versions) as I currently do. I will never in my life make enough money off of Photoshop to justify spending $240 every year (which is the absolute minimum cost of subscriptions for a single product). And if Lightroom goes the same way, they're gone, too. I prefer Lightroom to Aperture, but not enough to be forced into such an overpriced subscription model.
But it's not just the cost. Even if Adobe rented it to me for $20 a year instead of $20 a month, I still would not consider it. Here's why: I regularly work on projects that span many, many years. One of my projects is well over a decade old, and still in progress. With a purchase, I can still use a copy of Photoshop from ten years ago on an old machine, if I have to. Adobe could go out of business tomorrow, and there's no problem.
With a subscription-based app, if Adobe goes away, my copy of the app stops working. Immediately. Given how badly Adobe has screwed up Flash and Acrobat, I truly do not trust Adobe to still be in business in ten years when the last of the major PDF patents start to expire. Therefore, I cannot trust any DRM scheme in which Adobe ceasing to exist can cause me to suddenly and permanently lose access to everything I'm working on.
And even if Adobe is still around in a decade, there's the problem of Adobe's willingness to continue support. In five years, they could decide that OS X support costs too much, and they could become Windows-only or iOS-only, and I'd be SOL. They could decide that they'll only support each version of the app up until the new version comes out, at which point I'm then forced to do a very painful migration experience three times as often as I currently do. And so on. It just isn't worth it.
To make a long story short, CS6 will be the last version of Photoshop that I will use until such time as Adobe gets bought by a company who has more common sense. In the meantime, I look forward to helping the Pixelmator team improve their software so that it will be capable of opening the handful of my existing documents that it cannot yet handle.
Giant pandas are, in fact, considered bears (though that was not always the case). Red pandas, however, are still more closely related to raccoons..
Agreed. As long as this kid is rotting in jail for B.S. Facebook bravado while Westboro Baptist Church retains its tax exempt status, it's pretty easy to see what's wrong with the American government. Just saying.