Katie Marsal
One of the largest online retailers has let slip the entire launch strategy for Adobe's Creative Suite 3 and its various individual apps — and revealed that PowerPC-based Macs may soon become second-class citizens in the program designer's eyes.
While the full price list borders on the intimidating, the cost for users varies from as little as $110 Canadian ($95 US) for a Contribute CS3 upgrade to $3,440 ($2,969 US) for the complete Master Collection that bundles Adobe's deluxe artistic and video editing tools.
The CS3 Design and Production Premium suites for artists remain under wraps, though the Web Standard edition will sell for $1,375 ($1,186 US), suggesting a ballpark figure for its Design equal. European prices were revealed on Friday.
Not all of these offerings will be available to every Mac user, however. Amazon has tellingly earmarked each Mac edition with separate "Mac OS X" and "Mac OS X Intel" labels that indicate which of Apple's computers will run Adobe's latest software. Although most users of legacy PowerPC systems can be assured that their existing tools will see new life in the CS3 upgrade, including current CS2 and former Macromedia web apps, the Master Collection is listed as Intel-only — revealing that some or all of the revived Mac video editing components are unlikely to ever receive native PowerPC code.
Those looking to return to Encore, Premiere Pro, or Soundbooth will also have to wait longer than the majority of their fellow users, if published release dates prove to be more than just Amazon's rough shipping estimates. Most of Adobe's new packages will ship as early as April 20th; less than fortunate shoppers hoping to pick up the top-end Master Collection are told to wait until July 1st, however, suggesting that the online store has been fed information directly from Adobe's sell sheets.
With the majority of Adobe's strategy now exposed, Tuesday's announcement needs only to formalize US prices to give customers a complete snapshot of CS3's future.
Update: Amazon's US website now lists Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Web Premium for $1599, Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Master Collection for $2499, Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Production Premium for $1199 and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium for $1599.
Andrew Orr
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47 Comments
Not so good for me and my powerbook.
so many boxes!
Ok this is total BS in my opinion...Adobe has had all the time in the world to convert all their major apps to a uni binary.. why would they alienate a major % of users who are still using PPC macs? I for one am one of them (DCG5 user), and am not going to be upgrading anytime soon to an Intel mac when my machine is barely 2 yrs old. I just don't get it.
A thought here... Adobe's software packaging is utter crap.
Ever since the CS series product came out, it has been very difficult to visually distinguish the apps, and the CS3 stuff looks ten times worse. Holy ----!.
I suppose one could blame it on the current raft of designers out there with only a few years under their belts, but Adobe should take most of the blame for not insisting on something more distinctive... Really awful, awful stuff. I honestly can't tell the difference between any of the packages now, other than by reading the name. If I'm a store-level consumer, there's no way I could relate if I knew of the old Illustrator and Photoshop boxes. Illustrator always had the woman in the clamshell and Photoshop always had a camera lens with an eye.
Adobe... hire someone else with experience if there are any good studios left. I'd be happy to work on retainer as Art Director. I'd even be willing to discuss strategies for a percentage of increased sales with an improved packaging line.
Ok this is total BS in my opinion...Adobe has had all the time in the world to convert all their major apps to a uni binary.. why would they alienate a major % of users who are still using PPC macs? I for one am one of them (DCG5 user), and am not going to be upgrading anytime soon to an Intel mac when my machine is barely 2 yrs old. I just don't get it.
It's a pretty sound business strategy on their part... the people for whom the extra performance of an Intel Mac are worth it are their primary customers, so almost all of them will be on Intel. And it would cost quite a lot to back-port some of the functionality to PowerPC for the packages that weren't in CS2, while porting from Win32 to Carbon is probably a lot easier. So from a return-on-investment standpoint, it's a no-brainer decision.