Why I Won't Be Upgrading to Adobe CS5

First of all, let me apologize for the lack of updates.  The Linux machine I was using (and writing about) died… the power adapter shorted out… and I just haven’t ordered a new one yet.  I’m writing this on the Mac in my office.

The computer I’m writing this on is an iMac G5.  It’s old, and slow, and a lot of programs are rapidly dropping support for it… both because it’s a Motorola processor, and because it’s running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.  I use the Adobe Creative Suite CS4 on both this machine and my Windows based machines.  I was very happy with the CS4 release, because it finally brought feature parity (at least, as much as possible by stubborn Adobe) between the two platforms.  If this was an Intel Macintosh, I’d have the complete set of Adobe applications, but since it’s not, I only have the design and web applications.  That’s fine, because I’d rather get an enema than try to edit video on this machine (or in Adobe Premiere, for that matter).

What pisses me off is that CS4 wasn’t launched too long ago.  In fact, I remember paying for CS3 very vividly.  CS4 is buggy, bloated, and slow, on Windows and on the Mac.  64-bit Photoshop is a fucking joke, and it’s the only 64-bit app in the CS4 suite.  I really could care less about 64-bit, to be honest, because the applications I use wouldn’t really benefit from it.  Most of the applications I use (like Final Cut Pro and Microsoft Office) haven’t even been ported to 64-bit, although Microsoft Office 2010 on Windows will be.  I’m not sure about Office 2011 on the Mac.

Speaking of which… I doubt I’ll be upgrading to Office 2011.  Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac was an absolutely horrible product.  Office 2004 opened fast, and was stable and reliable, except for a few issues with older PowerBooks that were fixed in a later software update.  Office 2008 is incredibly slow, bloated, and just terrible.  Entourage is an awful program.  Really, aside from the new version of Outlook that’s supposed to come out, there is really nothing that even interests me in Office 2011.  I use Pages and Keynote from Apple (part of the iWork suite) for most of my document creation on the Mac anyway.  The only Office apps I really use on the Mac are Entourage (because Exchange support in 10.5 sucks, and I use Exchange) and Excel (because Numbers just isn’t good enough for me, yet).  If I can just buy Outlook, I won’t buy anything else… and I’ll just learn to like Numbers, or use Excel 2008.

I have the same issue with CS4.  It’s buggy, bloated, and was slower than its predecessor.  It’s really slow on fast, new hardware, like the Intel iMac I have at home, that I just bought this past summer.  CS4 sucks, but Adobe has a near-monopoly on the design market, and really, what can I do?  I have to use Photoshop, have to use Flash, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator.  There just aren’t good enough alternatives yet.  I’m sure some will come around, but I’m not going to put my projects on hold until alternative software exists.  I’ll just get another prescription for Xanax.

CS5 is just bug fixes for CS4.  That’s all it is.  In an era where the most hated software company in the world, Microsoft, is STILL releasing bug fixes and patches, and supporting, a 10 year old piece of software (Windows XP), Adobe ditches their $1,500 software product less than 2 years after they released it, drop support for a lot of good machines that are still in use today, and charge $1,500 more (maybe… maybe more… idk) for CS5, which is essentially what “Adobe Updater” should be doing for free.  Fuck you, Adobe.  I’m not paying for you to be stubborn and not support Apple’s APIs that you’ve had 10 years to do, and even longer to prepare for, and I’m not paying for an product that runs like shit on the platform I love and that gave birth to you, and runs “decent” on Windows which has nowhere near the amount of tools that would help you write a great app as Apple’s OS X and Xcode do.  I’m not paying for bug fixes.  I’m not paying for slick new icons, 140 new fucking folders all over my machine that I can’t rename or delete, and product activation that submits my social security number and the address of the last 5 people I’ve e-mailed to your servers every 30 seconds in the background.  You can suck my dick if you think I’m upgrading to CS5.  Stealing, torrenting… maybe, just to see what the fuss is about, but PAYING… no way.  There is NO WAY I will pay for CS5 unless there is some amazingly killer feature that will just increase my productivity by 100% and provide me with a really hot girl that blows me while I’m waiting 5 minutes for Photoshop to start up.

The only reason I was going to upgrade to CS5 was the Adobe Flash to iPhone development tool… but Apple isn’t going to accept apps that are developed with Adobe Flash or any development software other than Xcode (they said so… iPhone 4 will block it), so now there is absolutely nothing I want in CS5, except THE FUCKING BUG FIXES THAT SHOULD BE RELEASED FOR THE PRODUCT I BOUGHT LESS THAN TWO YEARS AGO FOR FREE.