£17.50 a month for all that processing power is awesome. Considering the cost of everything else in life I don't think its unreasonable at all. I for one, welcome the move by Adobe.
Also, why does everyone think they are in it for anything other than a dollar or two? Aren't everyone else? Why pick on Adobe? Why do we not see the hate directed at Canon or Nikon for their ridiculous prices?
Baffles me....
To me the thing that is most ridiculous is Adobe's price for the stand alone version of Photoshop, which is one of several reasons why I've chosen never to use it.
You can still buy CS6 from Adobe for a mere £660.51 so you don't
have to sign up to the cloud.
A more realistic way of looking at it is to consider how many years of use of a 'perpetual' version of Photoshop that £17.58 per month would buy you.
A quick calculation says that equates to about 37 months of use of a full price version of CS6 if you are a new user.
As an existing user, the £8.78 per month represents 75 months use, although of course you have already paid the up front cost of buying the program.
The question is, would you replace/upgrade your copy of CS6 with whatever version might be available after three years use?
If you want to keep a stand alone version for more than three years then you are better off buying rather than renting.
It has been pointed out that recent "enhancements" to PS have been small, and that the program is about as developed as it needs to be.
A number of people have said "CS6 does all I need and I'll continue to use it as long as it will run."
Future Photoshop updates are likely to be towards covering raw processing for as yet unreleased cameras, a task that is adequately covered at present by LightRoom, and presumably will continue to be with future updates.
I think Adobe have realised that they cannot sell as many stand alone new versions of PS as they have in the past since it is becoming increasingly difficult to add value to the program, hence their idea to go to rental to keep their revenue up. With a guaranteed monthly income, there becomes less pressure on them to develop the program further.
I wonder if, in two or three years, we are going to hear people saying "I've not had an update for months, what are Adobe doing for their money?"
As I've said, other than trialling a few versions, I'm not a Photoshop user and have no intention of becoming one, neither as a stand alone nor rental version.
There are many other programs that can do everything I need, although I recognise that other users requirements may be different to mine.
At present Lightroom plus some plug-ins serves my needs just fine, and at a fraction of the cost of CS6.
