Adobe today officially announced the launch of Creative Suite 6, the next major update to the company's bundles of popular design applications. The release sees new versions of 14 separate applications, including the flagship Photoshop CS6 that has been offered as a free public beta for the past month.
“Creatives get a ton of innovation across CS6, with milestone releases of all our flagship products,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “With CS6 and Creative Cloud, we’re also introducing new products, new mobile workflows and advanced publishing capabilities that show we are laser-focused on ensuring design, Web and video pros have everything they need for the delivery of high-impact content and apps.”
As with previous editions of Creative Suite, Adobe is offering the CS6 applications individually, as well as in several different bundles targeting print, web, and video design professionals.
Bundle pricing begins at $1299 for the Design Standard collection, which includes Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, and Acrobat X Pro. At an $1899 price point, Adobe offers either the Design & Web Premium collection, which includes Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash Professional, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat X Pro, or the Production Premium collection, which includes Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Flash Professional, Illustrator, Photoshop Extended, Prelude, and SpeedGrade. Finally, Adobe's Master Collection containing all of the CS6 applications is available for $2599.
Adobe today also officially introduced Creative Cloud, a subscription service offering access to all CS6 applications as well as other cloud services to facilitate the integration of desktop Adobe software with the company's growing stable of tablet and smartphone applications.
Creative Cloud is priced at $49.99 per month for an annual membership, or $74.99 per month on a month-to-month basis. The service is also being offered at a special introductory rate of $29.99 per month for current users of Adobe's CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS5.5 software.
All Creative Suite 6 products are available for pre-order now and will begin shipping within 30 days. Adobe will be hosting a streaming launch event at 10:00 AM Pacific Time, highlighting the new developments included in Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud.
Top Rated Comments
<---- purchased 10 copies of cs5 $15k+ only to find that it was full of bugs and adobe charges just to talk to outsourced tech support.
The only thing they have that is worth the money is Lightroom. It's so good I'm convinced Adobe didn't write it nor do they have anything to do with it. (If they did it wouldn't work as well as it does).
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word "scam".
The alternatives aren't nearly comparable, which makes the situation even worse. And Adobe knows it. Adobe is market king and that's a bad thing for their product & customers. They've been taking on "new features" that attempt to make users feel the few competitors aren't worth going to, outside Adobe (such as natural media emulation, which could happily be a separate product category, such as Painter, if not for the marketing need to bloat the existing photoshop), which just makes those competitors even less likely to maintain/gain traction, & less able to spend on the engineering needed to compete with Adobe's products' heavy lifting (ie high-dpi, cmyk, complex layering/masking, massive image support, plug-in support, etc).
The industry is stagnant and Adobe takes advantage of users' limited options by repeat selling the same crap & increasing pricing while offering barely anything of significance other than "the right to keep using the tools." Sound familiar? There are a few other notable companies doing the same.
Subscription licensing is the only way dominant companies can continue *increasing* profits every year & the only companies that can force the market to accept it.
That's why the software is pirated so much. Users (individual & corporate) know they're being abused & no one wants to spend much money on intangible things when tangible things are far more compelling. The best solution is to stop abusing the users with high cost & anti-piracy/user BS. But developers like Adobe won't reverse their direction. It's beyond their corporate culture's ability to comprehend.
Antisocial entities don't get better. There's no immediate incentive to, & instant gratification is all that matters. I don't even know why I'm bothering to say any of this.