I’ve done some more research into the history of Adobe’s work with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). I can’t speak for product teams besides Photoshop, and in the interests of time, I’m sharing what I’ve found out so far.
It turns out that the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard.
Apple and the Photoshop team worked together closely during the development of Snow Leopard, as we do during the development of every OS revision. The Photoshop QE team reported a couple of dozen problems to Apple, and I’m happy to say that Apple has fixed all the significant issues we found. Here are the remaining open issues we know about:
- The blue highlight ring around PS windows displayed by ExposƩ is too heavy.
- When using arrow keys to nudge the values in text fields up and down, the values now change more slowly on a Japanese OS.
So, why didn’t we say all this from the beginning? Read on for details.
It has always been Adobe’s policy not to go backwards and do dot releases on software that is no longer shipping. This isn’t some kind of ploy to force people to upgrade; rather, it’s a recognition that resources are not infinite, and we need to focus our efforts on current and future technology*. When we say that we officially support a specific OS, you can trust that we’ve done very extensive testing on that platform. If we haven’t done that level of testing, then we simply won’t say that we support it. That’s why the FAQ reads as it does.
That said, none of us like to inconvenience customers, so the reality is that we *do* actually perform some amount of testing on older product if we believe that there are a significant number of customers using it. So does Apple.
As I say, we have reason to expect that all meaningful issues of running Photoshop CS3 under Snow Leopard have been resolved. However, because we have not done the level of testing that true certification demands, we need to stand by our statement that we don’t officially support CS3 on Snow Leopard.
Hope that makes sense,
J.
* For what it’s worth, Mac users are especially familiar with these trade-offs. Apple has been among the most aggressive companies when it comes to dropping support for old tech in order to move forward. Remember the furor about the iMac having no floppy drive? I could cite many more examples (dropping Classic, PowerPC support, etc.), but you get the idea.
I’m using Creative Suite 2 and it runs fine for me on Leopard. Any idea if it works on Snow Leopard with Rosetta installed? I know it’s older than CS2, but it’d be nice to know if it works or not.
If it doesn’t then I just need to wait on installing Snow Leopard and order a copy of CS4 first.
Sounds great! Just wish you could of supplied us with this information sooner.
Thanks anyway š
What about Version Cue?
There is one quirk if you use Photoshop droplets on Snow Leopard: You will need to install Rosetta (Because Rosetta is an optional install for Snow Leopard). If you try and run a Photoshop droplet on Snow Leopard, it will tell you that you need Rosetta and ask if it should install it. Pretty straight-forward.
I’ve read that Photoshop Elements 6 isn’t supported either. True? That would be unfortunate for us casual users who need something simpler and more affordable.
So the issues related to Spaces, and the crashing from dragging layers in the layers pallet have been fixed?
What about the dialog “a program error has occurred” when a user is afk for a few hours?
Thanks, John. This is much more valuable information for your customers than what you provided in the last post.
I do think frustration was a valid response to your last post, though clearly, the name-callers and the I’m-gonna-pirate-it crowd were not being reasonable. However, this post _greatly_ improves on the uninformative nature of the last one for CS3 users.
The one major suggestion I would make is to create a location, such as a knowledge base article or forum thread, to gather the known/suspected CS3/Snow Leopard issues along with workarounds. I understand that Adobe won’t be spending many man-hours doing thorough, formal testing — but having somebody keep an eye on issues that come up repeatedly and at least put them in a list seems, at least to this customer, like a worthwhile investment.
[Good suggestions, Dan, and I expect we’ll do just that. –J.]
Ok, this kind of settles things then. CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard except for some obscure, really minor bugs that will not be fixed, at least not in the near future. Right? …Then we have to start spreading the word.
OK let’s hope..
Anyway: This “Apple is also dropping old software”-thing:
Apple released the last update for Tiger, 10.4.11 in November 2007. That’s 2.5 years after it’s first release.And they fixed bugs in between.
If there’s a bug in a Adobe software, the support is like: “Go buy our next release”
Also: Max OS X realeases cost under 150ā¬.
If the Creative Suite would be in the same price range, ok. But it’s not. It costs several thousand Euro.
That’s a BIG difference. I expect premium support for a premium priced product.
So please don’t be like this. Apple drops the support after a decent timespan.
I still run the now 7 year old Freehand every day as a PowerPC program on my MacBook Pro.
(Also a nice example how Apple fixes Adobe’s incapability of writing a decent and easy to use vector illustration program)
Adobe cuts the support not one year after a product is taken out of the shops.
Sad..
Over the past 15 years I’ve spent a lot of hard-earned dollars on Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. I’m here to tell you: Adobe comes out of this looking arrogant to me. It’s as if Adobe is trying *not* to retain the loyalty of a customer like me.
I urge Adobe to rethink its policy for supporting recent versions of its software. Premium prices should be accompanied by premium respect for the customer.
If that means Adobe needs to do a “point” update to the previous version, in order to make sure it works 100% with the new OS, well then … do the point update.
It’s dangerous to cite Apple’s “aggressive” (your word) abandonment of tech as justification for Adobe’s wrongheaded policy. Consider this: Apple kept issuing software updates Tiger long after it was replaced by Leopard
[Not according to Wikipedia. –J.]
are you ready to say that Adobe will do the same and continue to issue updates for CS3 even though it has been replaced by CS4?
Nobody is asking for Photoshop 7 support in Snow Leopard. But the CS3 that I bought a year ago? Yes. That’s what I expect. In fact, that’s what I paid for: I paid for confidence that I was getting the best. If Adobe doesn’t deliver the best, then what am I paying for?
Think about that. Thank you.
Perhaps Adobe isn’t charging enough for their software…? After all, they don’t seem to have enough resources to be testing and patching as updated OSes come out.
I respectfully submit that other companies seem to handle this just fine. OS updates are a fact of life. Software makers need to keep up. Especially those that charge an arm and a leg for their products.
I’ve thought about this a lot today. I’ve seen the updates that CS3 was tested. This is just trying to put a spin on things.
Unless Adobe properly supports this one-version-old super-duper-expensive software, I seriously will not give Adobe another dime.
How about get your &*^% together and treat your well-paying customers as you should.
I think I’m not alone here. I’ve never heard of a premium software product manufacturer treat its customers as I’ve seen today. Two days before we all upgrade to SL.
FAIL FAIL FAIL
I do not normally get into these types of discussions… but… this is definitely a slap in the face of your clients. I too am in the CS3 crowd that would like you to take it a little more seriously. Having lived a former life as a software tester I know what it is that I am asking. We used to run daily full regression tests (using both manual and automated methods) against builds with more complex features than most of the CS3 applications and with a team of a dozen testers.
But the choices I think a lot of us would like to see are true support (and not just a casual we loaded it and it opens up kinda test) and documentation of what the known issues are or a 1 time cheaper upgrade to our licenses. Your products are very pricey for most shops and to ignore the price/no support equation is where the anger is coming from. Apple is releasing SL for $29 but the upgrade to CS4 is 600$ or more. Not saying it has to be less than 100$ but significant savings would probably go a long way with this group.
Please don’t ignore this… what am I saying… this has unleashed a PR nightmare… how can you ignore it…
John,
re your response to me, “not according to wikipedia” …
How flippant of you.
[The guy (?) hiding behind a pseudonym & fake email address is calling me flippant? –J.]
As recently as April 2009, Apple issued security updates to Tiger. Here is the direct link. That’s what I call respect for the customer.
I urge you to read my previous post again. And please, this time, instead of being defensive, consider my simple point: I urge Adobe to fully support its previous-generation software, just as you yourself cite Apple for doing.
Your response to my previous post is dismaying. It’s not worthy of your position.
John, please stop with the tired “the bugs are AppleĀ“s not ours” and “but Apple also did that”.
You may not know whether the engineers had or not the thing tested in the new OS (which sounds incredibly messy and out of control, but so are huge corporations with little competition). But the defensive rhetoric just erode AdobeĀ“s reputation as a purveyor of innovative software.
Design professionals in my part or the world are increasingly dissatisfied with AdobeĀ“s quality control, not to mention its pricing strategy, completely out of touch with the market reality.
Too many people avoided upgrading to CS4 altogether. Anything that Adobe does now to boost late migration to CS4 will be seen as cheap tactics and abuse from monopolist executives, be that fair or not.
So, be careful. We will be watching closely AdobeĀ“s stance regarding the upcoming Windows 7 and contrast it with that toward AppleĀ“s OS X.
What is all this nonsense about Adobe not supporting software?
Adobe didn’t write Snow Leopard. If CS3 doesn’t work with Snow Leopard, it’s not necessarily due to a bug in CS3 (it might be, but it’s more likely a change to the underlying architecture). Apple gave us Snow Leopard. Don’t blame someone else if older software doesn’t work on the newer operating system.
Windows 7 has just been released to manufacturing and still be available retail soon. Do you see anyone complaining that CS3 won’t work under Windows 7? MS provide backward compatability within the operating system (you can run programs in compatability mode) if required (as it happens, it runs just fine in my experience, but the option is there in the OS if there are problems).
So why is it Adobe’s job to spend resources to get something old to work on something new? No one is forcing anyone to upgrade to Snow Leopard and the option to upgrade to CS4 is always there.
As it happens, some testing has been done and it all seems good.
Seriously, get a grip, folks. John provided what he knew at the time and has since provided more information. He could have easily said nothing and all this dribble wouldn’t have happened. Relax!
gah!
Write back to that email address. I’ll gladly use my real name (if that’s what really matters). I’m sure you can appreciate the fact that, like many people in the 21st century, I don’t use my “main” email for something like this because there’s no way of knowing if it will lead to spam or something.
Sincerely, Jesse (and yes a guy)
Phil, the basis for your entire argument is unfounded.
It is fundamentally the responsibility of the software provider to ensure support for their software. The provider can choose how long they will support previous versions, but while they still support them, it is expected that they will issue updates to maintain them. The issue here is that Adobe seems to be telling me and everyone else who uses CS3, a very recent version of the Creative Suite, that they will not continue to support the software that we paid handsomely for only one year ago (I bought CS3 in July 2008).
This is an unacceptable support time-frame. The reliability of Adobe’s software should persist through platform (OS) updates well more than a year after they stop selling them.
You claimed that it’s not Adobe’s fault if CS3 doesn’t work after Apple updates OS X. That is irrelevant. Whether a bug is in a CS3 app, or in Snow Leopard, Adobe must support their reasonably recent software by fixing their bugs (or updating parts of CS3 that must be modified to maintain compatibility with Snow Leopard), and by reporting Snow Leopard bugs to Apple.
If Apple screws over developers and breaks all their software every 6 months, that is between the developers and Apple. The developer/software provider still has the same responsibility to support their software ā especially when it they are professional creative applications!
Bottom line: Adobe is dropping users of year-old software on their asses.
I just hope it turns out that all CS3 apps work perfectly on Snow Leopard and all this griping was for nothing.
Sorry for the two consecutive comments, but I just came across something I had to point out here.
Here are two statements from Adobe’s Creative Suite FAQ:
“Creative Suite customers benefit from working on the latest hardware and operating systems.”
“Adobe recognizes the investment customers have in our software and believes in giving fair notice of any changes regarding the operating systems and hardware that our solutions support.”
(http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq/)
These statements, together, conflict entirely with Adobe’s apparent decision not to support CS3 on Snow Leopard. Are they insane? How can they say they recognize the value we customers have in their software and believe in giving us fair notice of changes in OS support, and then say they cannot spare the resources to make sure CS3, software many of us bought only a year ago, works on Snow Leopard.
It will be a lot easier to swallow the “CS3 not supported” stance if you actually *had* Photoshop CS4/CS5 for Mac.
I understand the costs of supporting old software, but if you aren’t going to keep up, you will lose customers.
I love Photosop, but I can promise, given the choice of replacing it or replacing my Mac, Adobe loses.
John, just wanted to say I appreciate your responsiveness. I’m a windows CS4 user so this whole discussion isn’t that relevant to me, but I think you’re doing an amazing job, honest and fair!
lior
Hi John:
Thanks for the update. I’m betting if you’d known what a can of worms you were opening you might not have even mentioned it. Sigh.
I’m not sure what kind of redirects you’re getting, but I suspect most of them came through a secondary source via slashdot. Their editors aren’t necessarily the most diligent when it comes to checking a story — especially if it’s likely to tick people off. And… if the editors can’t be bothered to investigate a story, certainly the readers can’t be bothered with clicking a few links and reading the story for themselves. (Sigh #2)
So… here comes the complaint. Since you’ve had enough of them for one year, you might want to skip ahead (I’ll end on a positive note) or just toss this baby into /dev/null with the rest of the ingrates.
————-
<complaint>
I’m a bit frustrated with the long lead time on Cocoa support and I suspect that a similar frustration on the part of others is bleeding over into this outburst. I’m a long time developer and I’ve ported things into Cocoa (sometimes quite unsuccessfully, I might add). I feel your pain. Especially on the size of codebase I’m imagining you have to deal with. I could probably google up some numbers, but I’ll WAG several million LOCs, not including licensed libraries that you’re likely using. All of which, themselves, have to be coded in ways that support multiple architectures and platforms. Not to mention the unique GUI APIs that likely need to be maintained (although I would imagine Adobe has adopted some type of cross-platform abstraction). And yet I’m still frustrated. I’m betting that people with less of an appreciation for the enormous complexity and man-hour effort involved in porting this (plus the added maintenance costs for two radically different code branches) are going to be even more frustrated.
To be honest, if this were a $200 app, I’d probably cut a bit more slack. But we’re talking about a $700 app. And OS X in official, stable release — which I call 10.1 — has been out nearly 8 years. I’m just finding it difficult to view this as anything but neglect by Adobe management in regard to the Mac platform. Granted, I have perceived a definite cooling in the lovefest that was once Adobe+Apple. And I could easily assign enough blame to go around both companies — it doesn’t look like a one-sided problem to me. But if I put on my user hat (it’s got an Apple logo on it… sorry about that), I end up feeling screwed by Adobe — wrongly or not. I honestly felt very abandoned by Adobe. It was as if they had given up on the Mac platform and decided that, since the real money was in Windows, then to hell with the Apple fanbois. I’m not saying that’s what really went on — but that’s definitely how it felt for me.
</complaint>
—————
Okay, so since there’s nothing anyone can do about the past, then that’s a bygone. Thanks for finally making the push to do the brutal work necessary to do a Cocoa port. It will be interesting to see what things you’re able to take advantage of. I personally love CoreGraphics conceptually, although not quite implementationally [sic]. I’m very much looking forward to seeing PS on the Mac in a form that doesn’t make me think I’m still using OS 9 and under. I’m hoping that we see an immense speedup, but given the amount of “OS” type work that Photoshop has had to do for itself in the past, I’m not completely convinced that all of this work will be able to be handed off to OS X. But then I’m not knowledgeable enough about the core architecture to make a reasoned judgement in that regard.
Thanks for all the work you’ve done so far. And my apologies for both myself and my fellow curmudgeons. I’m sure the bulk of them read that last sentence and thought “Who the hell are you to apologize for us, you jackass!” Which is somewhat in our nature. š
Cheers
konohitowa
Good news that Photoshop CS3 is pretty well supported in Snow Leopard.
Is there any information available on how well the other CS3 programs are doing? After Effects, Illustrator, Flash,…
I agree with what most of the comments here that Adobe should support CS3 on Snow Leopard.
CS3 is not ‘old’ – it’s not like we’re asking Adobe to keep supporting PS 7 or even CS1. If the cost to upgrade to CS4 is not that expensive, I’m sure we all would happily upgrade. But at $600 now, a lot of people (like me) simply just can’t afford it – especially with current slump in the economy.
I paid a premium price for my CS3 and expect it to be usable for at least a few years. Usable means keeping updated as OSes are being improved.
There are still a lot of CS3 users out there – they are as much Adobe customers as CS4 users are. Please don’t betray us.
I’m so impressed that Adobe have such a prominent fall guy. Most other companies just have some drone answering comments.
CS definitely is overpriced but hey at least my work pays for it.
Keep the faith John I’m sure the battering will die down as soon as people stop bitching and start trying it out on SL
please don’t complain about the big price tag for adobe products:
list price CS4 design premium: $1.800
list price CS4 design premium in germany: 2615 euros,
that’s 2200 euros excluding tax,
equals $3130
that’s a $1330 premium just for the translation!
to be fair, we all get a lot of functionality for the money and want to work with adobe products by choice. but paying 174% for a translation hardly seems fair …
I wanted to upgrade to CS4 Design Premium from CS3 Design Premium. I rang up as well as chatting to Adobe guys at trade shows. The price was ridiculous. I only really use Photoshop, but got the whole CS3 suite as I thought I might spend some time learning the other packages. No fear, next time its Photoshop and Photoshop alone. I’m not giving up guys a dime more than I have to.
There are no features in CS4 that I can’t live without. There were no compelling reasons to upgrade. I’m going to wait until CS5 so that I can get 64 bit support on the Mac.
Also, when the Pound (UKP) was at over $2, the price of CS3 in the UK was over double the US price. Amazon US wouldn’t ship to the UK because Adobe had asked them not to!
In the time being, how about you sort out the upgrade pricing from CS3 to CS4 huh? It should cost no more than 50% of the sticker price imho. There are those of us who have been buying and upgrading for years. The pirates out there get it for free and use the latest editions with impunity, your loyal supporters avoid upgrading because we feel that you’re fleecing us.
I’m hoping that a decent alternative comes along to give you guys what you need… a good kick in the balls.
Thank you for this additional information, but it doesn’t ameliorate all of my concerns about Adobe as a company.
Over the past 8 years I’ve bought the Adobe “suite” three times – the 9.0 series, CS1, and CS3. It’s great software, but very expensive. I’ve always planned to buy every other release (I’m waiting for CS5) and, so far, that’s worked out very well for me.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know what Adobe should do . . . support their loyal customers and reinforce their market share. They may be desperate to boost sales of CS4, but they’re turning off a LOT of longtime (and formally loyal) users. Glad I stuck with Quark so Adobe doesn’t have a complete monopoly over my business.
I’ve just looked for an upgrade price for CS3 Design Premium to CS4 Design Premium, and it appears that it’s now available for just under Ā£600+VAT. Not great, but not as bad as it appeared previously.
I’ll be putting in a request for an upgrade at work once I’ve got Snow Leopard up and running.
“…Anyway: This “Apple is also dropping old software”-thing: Apple released the last update for Tiger, 10.4.11 in November 2007. That’s 2.5 years after it’s first release.And they fixed bugs in between.
If there’s a bug in a Adobe software, the support is like: “Go buy our next release”…”
But then, as soon as Apple releases a new major version of its OS, at most what you get is some security patch for older ones: no Java updates, no newer APIs, no “feature” corrections that happen to arrive on the newer OS. I don’t think comparing an OS to an app suite is quite right: I guess it would be fairer to compare CS3/4 with Final Cut Studio.
(The distance between Tiger and Leopard was an anomaly due to iPhone development)
I can see both sides here, but as a CS3 user I too am disappointed with Adobe’s stance on this. To be honest, what I’d like to see are hard facts. I use CS3 for my business and have Snow Leopard heading its way to me in the post as I type. I’d like to know, for certain, what problems are likely to happen if I upgrade my OS and continue to use CS3. At least then I could choose whether or not to go ahead and upgrade the OS.
I feel that this is Adobe’s responsibility. Apple are releasing a new OS and Adobe should check at least one version back on all their releases and advise their customers (who have spent lots of pounds, dollars, euros or whatever) exactly what does and doesn’t work so that they can make an informed decision.
This level of customer service should be the least we can expect from a giant like Adobe.
Not amused.
You say one thing and then almost the contrary.
Unbelievable!!! And unacceptable. This unprofessional procedure reminds me of the worst “services” provided in my own country: France.
It confirms what I think about Adobe: fascinating and useful products but commercial policy and habits with clients below what is acceptable.
If really CS3 (which I bought 14 months ago… a century!!) is not compatible with Snow Leopard, then:
1Ā° I will not update my Macs from 10.5 to 10.6;
2Ā° I will not buy an Adobe product anymore.
At any rate I will postpone as long as possible buying anything new from Adobe. Their arrogant marketing policy forcing people to spend more than 1.000 dollars every year is beyond imagination.
Most other software makers update regularly their products to adjust both to Microsoft and Apple before they ask for an in-depth change to be paid for.
This time Adobe has gone beyond what is tolerable.
Best regards.
Ariel Alexandre
Firstly, I think John deserves a great deal of credit for having the balls to deal with this subject directly rather than letting PR deal with it.
For me, the issue is simply the price of Adobe software. If you pay for a first class ticket then you expect everything to be perfect and feel more entitled to complain (than if you had bought a budget seat) if something is not. By charging so much, I think Adobe opens itself up for this sort of criticism because customers demand perfection.
PS: I’m a student and get about 80% off and I still find Adobe products to be extremely expensive (especially since there is not upgrade price from educational versions of CS3 to CS4).
I’d also like to tell an old story that fits in here well:
When Leopard was launched, InDesign CS3 was the recent version as far as I remember.
It showed a major bug and reproduceable bug: When I tried to use Spotlight in a dialogue box, ID would crash.
When I asked Adobe if they’d deliver a patch, they replied aggressively: “All Apple’s fault! They have to patch!”
Great. I always thought, Apple would give Adobe the betas.
The bug was gone in OSX 10.5.5 – Apple actually fixed it.
Adobe did not deliver a single bug fix during these months.
Sorry guys, but your customer relations are going down the drain. Faster and faster.
By the way: Yes, I’d absolutely expect CS3 to run on Windows 7. It would be the same shame as with Snow Leopard if it did not.
Hi, obviously this is a bit of a hot issue as apparent from all the heated comments!
I can kind of understand Adobe’s perspective on the updates, however, the main thing I would like to see are more frequent updates between the major releases. Although updates do come out for the apps these do not really add new features or support, they are security updates and bug fixes overall.
That would be the main difference between Adobe’s and Apple’s updating process between versions. Apple actively improves and adds incremental features with their OS updates with typically about 8 – 10 point updates throughout the life of a particular OS version.
If Adobe did more incremental updates between versions then perhaps this would make supporting future OS versions more achievable as the interim development work and support of the app between version could cover testing on the pre-release versions of OSX (and Windows for that matter).
John,
I recently upgraded a machine from Tiger to Leopard (consolidated two Macs onto this machine, significantly boosted the Hard Disk, and also updated so that I could upgrade to Snow Leopard). Tiger has been receiving updates such as this one in May, 2009 ( http://support.apple.com/downloads/Security_Update_2009_002__Tiger_Intel_ ) and this one in June, 2009 ( http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac_OS_X_10_4__Release_9 ). These updates are even available in PowerPC flavors.
Now, these aren’t new feature updates (and no one here is clamoring for CS3 feature updates) but security and COMPATIBILITY updates (all we are asking from Adobe for CS3).
As per your link to Wikipedia, Tiger first sold in late April of 2005 and the last major version update (what you are alluding to) was in November of 2007. Even though Apple isn’t compelled to create point releases for Tiger after late 2007, 1-1/2 years later, Apple is still updating Tiger as recently as 2 months ago (if you are keeping score, that is 4 year old software that precedes CS3 by 1-1/2 years)!
Why can’t Adobe create a last compatibility roundup for CS3 on Snow Leopard and then say that’s all folks?
gladly that im using CS4. fuh.
In David Pogue’s review of Snow Leopard in today’s NY Times, he says:
“I experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3…”
Any idea what frustrating glitches he may have experienced in Photoshop CS3? It sounds like the two bugs you wrote about would hardly be considered frustrating.
I’m not trying to stir anything up, just wondering if Adobe knows what he’s talking about. Is Pogue really running into glitches other people might experience, or is he just considering Adobe’s non-support as a frustrating glitch?
Do you have any info on whether Elements 6 has been tested on Snow Leopard? As this is the most current Mac version of Elements I’d assume it will still be supported? I’ve ordered SL but I use Elements on a daily basis so if it’s not compatible I’ll not be able to upgrade, would appreciate any info.
Hi John,
Just like to point out that in my CS4 testing, the adobe pdf print distiller wouldn’t work on SL. It would go through all the motions but wouldn’t actually output a file anywhere.
I doubt many people have noticed this as 95% would use the PDF export function in programs like Indesign, but I need to get “printer spreads” on a booklet we were doing and rather than move the pages around the easiest was was to print a booket via the PDF distiller – works fine on Leopard of course – so thought it might be worth pointing out incase you were not aware of the bug.
I am a freelancer. I got CS3 Design Premius for over $1000 recently. I hoped that I can use it for a year or two at least. Does it mean that I am stuck without Snow Leopard due to Adobe’s decision not to fix bugs in their software that prevent this software from working in modern OSes? Damn.
Does anybody know better alternatives to Adobe software? I need something that I can trust.
Thank you for at least providing more info on CS3. I hope you will continue to blog on this a bit more.
If possible, please respond to the following:
Above says that CS3 (all apps) is designed to run on Windows XP, Vista, etc. and surely it will run on Windows 7.
Why then is Adobe persecuting CS3 users on the Mac who want to run Snow Leopard and just want Adobe to stand behind CS3 at least for another year?
[“Persecuting” is exactly the right word to describe a feeling that a vocal minority of Mac users like to cherish. Look, I’ll put my Mac-loving bona fides up against anyone. I *volunteered* back in ’96 to drive Apple promotional literature around to stores in order to fight the good fight, and that was easily the lowest of low points in Mac history. Things have improved radically since then, yet some people just can’t move on. They’re looking for some Mac-and-truth-and-justice-hating conspiracy around every corner.
To your specific point: Mac users are being treated in no way differently than Windows users. I don’t expect any different policy towards Windows 7. –J.]
Some CS3 purchasers just bought it a year ago!
As Snow Leopard is not a radical change from Leopard, why can’t Adobe get in gear here and officially provide some support? CS3 was not an inexpensive product and CS4 is largely derivative of CS3.
Adobe has not been doing that well financially recently
[It hasn’t? In the latest “terrible” quarter, Adobe made a couple of million dollars in profit every day. But of course saying that will just cause people to make a counter-argument that Adobe is greedy/lazy for not doing whatever they specify (in this case, testing CS3 on Snow Leopard). –J.]
and this will not help. Adobe is opening the door to other competitors who charge less and are willing to update apps for Snow Leopard.
[You may be right. I also know that diverting resources away from current development efforts would weaken those efforts, thus making it easier for competitors to come after Adobe apps. See what I mean about a zero-sum game? –J.]
Final question: Why wasn’t CS2, CS3, or CS4 written using standard Cocoa on the Mac?
[How, specifically, would Cocoa make things better? Beyond that, I’m afraid I don’t have time to address these questions again, as I’ve done so many times here already. (See my posts & comments about 64-bit.) –J.]
Or were some of those suites, in part, written using Cocoa? Maybe the answer is that Adobe has a better cross-platform framework that is used internally at Adobe to bring PC/Mac products to market with same features? A lot of us developers have always been curious of cross-platform developers like Adobe and maybe you could shed some light without giving away secrets.
Thank You!
I don’t mean any snark, but can you name the major professional Application developer that does major test and support, on Mac OS with their apps on no the current app they’re working on, not the one that’s shipping, but the one before that? Does Apple do it with Final Cut Pro or iWork 07? Does Microsoft for Office 2004?
Adobe seems to be getting attacked by a few, because customers expect more from them than any other vendor. Which is fine, if they’re at least honest about it.
Like I said, the new information in this post has resolved my frustration about the specific CS3/Snow Leopard issue. But I still want to address the philosophical issue raised here:
Apple has been among the most aggressive companies when it comes to dropping support for old tech in order to move forward. Remember the furor about the iMac having no floppy drive?
Once again, price matters, and the time frames matter.
USB floppy drives were readily available for around $50. A CS4 upgrade is $599 or $899.
My Mac Pro cost only $200 more, bought refurbished, than CS3 Design Premium did. If the release cycle is 18 months, and the upgrade price remains $599, then the initial cost of CS + one upgrade over 36 months is $67/mo. That’s pretty much the same TCO for Creative Suite as for the Mac Pro, assuming I put $2000 of upgrades into the computer in its lifetime. Users with an iMac may be spending substantially more with Adobe than they are with Apple, even if they _don’t_ buy every release.
And on time frames: Classic support ended with Leopard’s release in October 2007, but development of OS 9 had ceased in 2002 (there was a eulogy and everything). So five years of legacy support. PowerPC support: more than four years since the Intel transition announcement, and roughly three years since the last Power Mac G5s were sold. Again, not one year. (I’m counting from when the new product replaced the old, not the day the old product was released, and applying the same counting method to Apple and Adobe.)
While I understand your complaint, Adobe isn’t unique in this (at all). It seems that regulations, exchange rates, taxes and other things drive most hardware and software vendors to do the same. (Have you compared iPhone prices, or what an American car costs over here versus there). I think if you have problems with the cost of American goods in Europe, you might want complain to your governments and some of their policies.
I find Adobe’s attitude with respect to CS3 deplorable. Even Microsoft (grudgingly) support WinXP to this day with security and bug fixes.
CS3 is relatively new and I just bought it less than 2 years ago. Not supporting “officially” just because CS4 is shipping is poor regard for customers who have paid a premium price for the CS3 package. I don’t need more than what CS3 offers me.
Adobe should be more pro-active in CS3 support. (Likewise for raw support for newer cameras).
I’m the QA Manager for Photoshop and intermittently during Snow Leopard development I have run Photoshop CS and CS2 on Snow Leopard. I’ve got them both running right now in fact. While I haven’t extensively tested them, they do install, launch, and open/save files. If anyone runs into issues with those older versions after Friday’s Snow Leopard release, I’d be interested in hearing about them. While I can’t promise fixes for any things that are found, I can try, or at least see if there are workarounds.
Andy,
Absolutely right, John should be applauded for taking the initiative to respond to the concerns people have been expressing; it’s good business and is much more forthcoming than having PR address the issue.
Having graduated in May, I contacted Adobe and inquired whether or not my Student discount was still valid (It’s not) despite the fact that the verification mechanism (My ID) does not expire until October. It would have been nice if I was able to upgrade one last time to CS4 at the Student price, but, alas, that is not going to happen. Even if the testing doesn’t happen at Adobe, it should be pointed out that at times, Apple has issued fixes because some update caused applications like Photoshop and others to crash.
That said, the company is not really acknowledging those customers who bought one version of a previous product and want to move to a different version when a new product comes out (Design Premium to Web Premium for me).
This may be a rare case, but I still think it might cause some to hold off. More likely I’ll wait until CS5 if I can before buying again. Despite the cost, I’ve tried other tools and they don’t quite match up if you want (or need) to work with design and code at the same time. The only exception I can think of is BBEdit, but even with that I would still want to have Dreamweaver to work with design elements and do the coding elsewhere.
Any word on PSE 6? Can I assume that if CS3 works that it will? If not any word on an update? 8?
I fail to see the issue here.
*It looks like PSCS3 will run on 10.6
*No-one is forcing you to upgrade to Snow Leopard…
My Photoshop 6 wouldn’t run on OSX, so I upgraded to CS2. So?
I currently use OSX 10.4.11 with PSCS2 and PSCS4.
I purchased Photoshop CS3 less than a year ago (Sept. 9). The fact that you are not continuing compatibility support for even a year on such an expensive product is ludicrous. If this isn’t fixed, I will of course consider it a lesson and learned, and avoid trusting Adobe for future software purchases.
I can’t understand why Adobe would choose to be so unprofessional regarding such a high end professional product. Why should I trust you for future purchases when you drop support for OS updates less than a year after selling a product?
I suspect that Apple tested iLife 08 on Snow Leopard.
[Do you actually have info about that, or are you just automatically giving Apple the benefit of the doubt? –J.]
Besides that, Adobe sells their apps at a premium price. They can well afford to provide updates and patches on a one-version-old package.
I expect nothing less. If their answer is to tell me to fork out another arm and my other leg, then it won’t be to them.
Yeah, Apple has been getting worse and worse about admitting to or fixing their bugs. They ship new OS versions loaded with bugs and then get around to fixing the worst ones on the 10th dot release.
Thank you so much Jack!
I do not develop software but I do work in an environment where resources are limited, so we are forced to limit our focus. That said, I also accept that a “resources are limited” argument is sometimes woefully inadequate and unacceptable.
You’re previous posting about CS3 was vague and confusing. Thank you for taking the time to respond to the reasonable people here by doing it right this time. CS3 users deserve more, and not everyone can or need to upgrade to CS4.
And please, ignore the flammers and whiners here who can’t articulate themselves.
[Thanks, Alex. Glad you found the additional info useful. –J.]
Hi David,
Can you comment on Elements 6?
[I’m looking for more info from the Elements team but haven’t gotten details yet. –J.]
Adobe has really acted short sightedly with this… I think you should reconsider your price point with this set of programs to something in the 200.00 dollar range so that we can afford to live in your compatability arrogant world. Im glad there are no big issues with CS3 as I wont be updating to CS4…
I have to admit, while I may not agree with Adobe on some things. And lately I’ve been really enjoying Pixelmator over Photoshop where the features overlap. (Photoshop still has better layers, Masks, actually has Channels, vector shapes etc);
You really have to give John credit. Not everyone can stand up and tell you the ugly truth and stand patiently with good posture as Tomatoes are thrown at the stage. John likely could’ve said nothing and his reputation would likely be no worse for wear.
Honestly, some of the misconceptions sicken me. There isn’t a magic switch that makes Carbon apps Cocoa. And the vast majority of us aren’t going to miss the ‘magic’ 64 bit computing. My iMac upgrades to 2.5 Gigs of Ram ‘can’ use the 64 bit processing. But really can’t make enough use of it to make it worth anything.
Besides, what are we rioting about yet? Most of us don’t have 10.6 yet, and therefore haven’t seen first hand what performance losses are in Snow Leopard vs 10.5; if they’re even noticeable.
And lets try to figure out here what we’re really upset about here.
We want CS3 to be supported.
We want CS4 to be supported.
We want CS5 to be in Cocoa.
We want CS5 to be 64bit.
We want CS5 to be GPU powered.
We want CS5 Mac match CS5 Windows (As always)
Honestly, CS5 is a really ambitious project on Adobe’s part on the Mac end. I’m particularly excited about utilizing the GPU. I personally feel that’ll be the first major performance boost since sliced bread. Pixelmator is wow fast with all the CoreImage magic; With that as my comparison, CS5 should be the start of something amazing. And with the transition to Cocoa, I’m hopping for better support for the Apple ColorPicker.
ok, let’s see how other companies handle this:
final cut studio 3
US $999 vs. GERMANY euro 999
that’s euro 839 before tax
equals $1196, so ist 120% of the US price.
windows 7 ultimate
US $320 vs. GERMANY euro 320
that’s 269 before tax
equals $384, again 120% of the US price.
the sims 3: $49 vs. euro 49
ALL of these products have translated documentation and translated software.
how about hardware?
playstation 3 120GB: $299 vs. euro 299
iPod nano 8GB: $149 vs. euro 149
shall i go on?
it is customary to get the same number for the price in US dollars and euros. the 20% plus in value seems to cover all the extra translation, shipping and custom.
so now let’s look at this again:
CS4 design premium: $1800 vs. euro 2615 (174%)
i do NOT have a problem with the price of american goods. and this is NOT a problem of the german government. (how ridiculous)
i do not know of any other big software company than adobe having such an unfair price strategy.
so PLEASE do not tell me this is usual in the business!
all prices: amazon US vs. germany, apple store US vs. germany
Are some of us disoriented by the whiplash of rapid development from Apple and making absurd requests for free updates to the CS? You’ve got to pay a premium to keep the apps chasing those cats. I assume we’re all artists here and would laugh at a client who’d want us to produce another portrait at no charge because the client has since shaved off his beard and wants a more up-to-date image. Software development is no different.
And seriously, who is holding a gun to our heads so that we must upgrade to 10.6? If we are so desperate to be cutting edge, why aren’t we using CS4?
John Nack and David Howe,
I have spent most of my life supporting your products for a variety of companies and have usually been very pleased with Adobe. That started to change shortly after the purchase of Macromedia, Adobe’s last real competitor, though really the change might be attributed to when Adobe rebranded their products as Creative Suite.
A huge problem for the entire software industry, though it is showing more at Adobe, is that products are released on a scheduled basis to better predict earnings and plan for the company’s financial outlook. We understand the business nature of the software industry, but maybe the software industry should take a cue from Apple, much like Adobe already makes claim, and start accounting for their products on a subscription basis. My recommendation would be 36 months.
Follow my reasoning here. Over the past several release of Creative Suite, the time between releases has reduced significantly from more than two years, two about eighteen months. As many before me haves stated the cost of Creative Suite is a barrier for many buyers and as such they may want to purchase every other release to manage costs. Be honest with yourselves there is rarely a revolutionary new feature every release of your products. By moving to a subscription based accounting plan you can more easily justify to your shareholders the expense of supporting software that was barely released 26 months ago. If Adobe wanted to simply support the current generation and the previous generation that would fit nicely into what seems to be Adobe’s new 18-month development cycle between releases.
As many others have stated both Microsoft and Apple support their previous releases. Apple recently released security updates to Tiger as did Microsoft with Office 2004. Both of these products are far older than CS3 and both are still used extensively.
Accept your responsibilities before your customers find suitable replacements, though I’m sure Adobe would just buy them. Maybe it’s time for a little DoJ antitrust investigation, there really isn’t much competition left in the professional graphics industry.
On another note, I want to thank David Howe for recognizing the need to at least spend a few minutes looking at older releases on the current OS. It’s too bad none of the other QA managers at Adobe have taken the time or responsibility to do this. Really, you shouldn’t have to do this on your own time. This should be the standard operating procedure for your organization.
And just so you know, I’m not a developer, but I did get my degree in Computer Science and do understand the issues Adobe faces. It is really one of the reasons I am more disappointed in Adobe’s behavior. Seems more like the Microsoft of old.
Thanks for reply John Nack
I thank you for your replies but I felt your words were a little harsh to me.
1. Are your responses here sanctioned by Adobe?
2. If layoffs at Adobe mean that Adobe is doing great then please explain? Also please explain how it is that more customers are willing to shell out $1000s for Adobe software in this economy amidst rampant pirating of Adobe software? Maybe you do not set the prices, but can you agree that CS4 functions beyond CS3 are minimal and not critical to most users?
3. I am not a Mac zealot. What does handing out Apple flyers in 1996 have to do with anything?
4. As for the alleged Adobe Q&A respondent in the comments, is he going to order patches for CS3 apps that do not behave well in Snow Leopard?
5. Bottom line: If Adobe is going to charge as much as it does for software and is happy to have a few customers paying out the a** instead of many more customers who would be willing to buy the software if they could afford it, and by doing so if they are going to literally keep people out of the creative community by price gouging (yes, many would like to work in graphics but can not afford the software), then Adobe should at least support CS3 in Snow Leopard for those poor saps that can not afford (another) upgrade to CS4 when they just bought CS3 last year.
p.s. nobody is attacking you, we would just like some info and more perspective, these are important issues and you, sir, are in charge of some of the most empowering software ever created in the history of mankind and that is no exaggeration
One final question (yes, I read your 64-bit blogs regarding Cocoa, etc.): If Adobe already had PS and Illustrator (and maybe others, NeXt heads speak up?) written for NeXt and NeXtStep, which was basically today’s Cocoa, why didn’t Adobe bring CS3 or even CS4 to market as Cocoa apps?
I want to point out that all the PS “hand optimized” C code or any C++ code can easily be made part of a Cocoa project. The advantage to using Cocoa is better OS compatibility to avoid this entire debacle in the first place. Cocoa is not a “buzzword” – it is a very well tested framework with low level support in the OS. I can see why Carbon was used for CS2. But why CS3? And amazingly, why CS4? That seems to boggle the mind – all those programmers and still using Carbon for CS4? Why? That is why I asked if Adobe has an internal cross-platform framework that was used for CS3/CS4 that was not well designed to work with Cocoa on the Mac. That is the only good business reason I can think of – but even then, why not rewrite the cross-platform tool to make use of Cocoa on the Mac? Heck, Adobe could build a Cocoa compatibility layer to build the Windows apps too.
Since it seems to be common courtesy around here, I too will thank you for the information.
This said, I’m sorry but this is a major, major letdown on Adobe’s part.
As you correctly stated with a somewhat irritating attitude while replying to a comment, Adobe’s been making a couple of million dollars in profit A DAY last quarter. Which in itself makes your “limited resources” lame excuse a joke and really shows how poorly your company considers its own customers.
[The funny thing is that people can read a single piece of info–Adobe made X dollars over Y period of time–and then manage to say *BOTH* “Adobe is on the ropes; serves ’em right!” and “Adobe is making a fortune; greedy bastards!” You can make whatever argument you want, but it’s more convincing when you pick a side. –J.]
Please note that I’m not saying Adobe does not deserve its profit, but rather that such a good profit should be partly redirected to addressing an issue which is not only fundamental to the customers (i.e. ensuring compatibility of such a recent product over an OS upgrade), but functional to the delivery of the product you sell (i.e. a product that’s broken after one year.. and yes, not being compatible with a platform update makes a product broken, since we’re talking about cutting edge and expensive software).
This is your product, you must ensure compatibility. Period. I don’t see why you’re pulling Apple in this as it is blatantly a cheap way to decline responsibility over the matter, which I don’t even think is worth discussing at all.
Obviously, I do not endorse piracy and do not support those who threaten to pirate your products, as the arrogant attitude of your company does not make stealing any more legitimate.
Still, do not be surprised by the heated comments.
[I’m not. When Adobe introduced new software for the Mac (Soundbooth), you know what Mac users said? Not, “Great! Glad to see Adobe putting more resources than ever into Mac software development. They said, “What, no PowerPC support?? Bastards!!” I’m never surprised when people choose to accentuate the negative. –J.]
And please, for the love of god, do not ignore the whiners (as an enlightened fanboy of yours was suggesting above).
Those whiners are exactly those who put you in a position to comment how much money your wonderful limited-resourced company has been making in profit last quarter.
Enjoy the monopoly. While it lasts. But at least find better excuses next time you try to shove upgrades down your customers’ throats.
Oh and yeah, Office 2004 is broken too.
[Let’s say Windows 7 comes out and breaks iTunes. Let’s say Apple wrote iTunes according to all the MSFT developer specs, and then MSFT went and changed or removed functionality, thus breaking the Apple software. That would be Microsoft’s fault, right?
But when the shoe’s on the other foot, and when changes in Apple’s OS break Microsoft applications, it’s… Microsoft’s fault. *That’s* the kind of attitude I think sucks. –J.]
That and CS3.
[Based on what do you say CS3 is broken? Are you a developer with a pre-release seed who’s been testing the software? –J.]
Should give you a good idea of the kind of companies we are talking about.
Best.
Yes, and Microsoft has ensured backward compatability by providing tools in the OS to ensure that it will run.
Microsoft even provides the ability to run software designed for Windows 95.
If Apple wants to upgrade their OS as a point release (which is what Snow Leopard is, basically on par with a Service Pack for Windows with a little extra in there – certainly worth the price over a free Service Pack) then they need to make sure that they don’t break anything or provide a means by which to continue running old software.
And, you know what, as far as I can tell, Apple hasn’t broken anything. If John hadn’t said anything, people would have upgraded and run CS3 just fine. Instead, he gave some honest information that full, formal testing hadn’t been done and for being honest he’s being attacked. That’s unacceptable.
On my test MacBook, running the final Snow Leopard release version, Photoshop CS crashes every 5-10 minutes–just exits and loses all changes.
–Pogue
(Sorry… that’s “Photoshop CS3 crashes every 5-10 minutes.”
–Pogue)
Was your reference to the OS X Wikipedia page a mistake or purposely disingenuous? Either way, it reads pretty smug and cocky.
[Sorry, but I don’t see how it’s smug, cocky, or inaccurate. Fixing critical security vulnerabilities is a different matter than continuing to fix bugs or upgrade features. The previous commenter suggested that Apple continued to do the latter for Tiger long after they shipped Leopard. That isn’t the case, and that’s what I pointed out.
If you find my replies curt, I apologize. I received nearly 300 comments on this subject yesterday, and I’m trying to reply to them as best I can. Obviously I can’t spend a huge amount of time on each. –J.]
As the public face of one of the biggest Mac developers, I would assume you’d know about very recent (non-point) security updates/patches pushed out to Tiger users. Or Apple’s significant updates for Tiger users to Quicktime and Safari that actually add quite a bit of functionality?
Your analogy to Apple dropping support for Classic and PowerPC is faulty as well. Classic ended with Leopard and PowerPC ends tomorrow with Snow Leopard. However, Apple is still supporting both of those by supporting Tiger, many years (in the case of Classic, a decade) after they stopped shipping those products.
Your usual candor on this blog is a good thing. There’s no need to muddy the water in defense of Adobe’s bad decision not to fully support products it was still shipping less than a year ago. Your unusual defensiveness makes it seem as if you’re stuck defending/spinning a decision you know is wrong, which sucks, but if you’re going to use another company as an excuse for your decisions, at least get the facts right.
Hey John. If Adobe is doing so well quit whining about lack of resources to look back – you obviously have the guts to speak forthrighly with us so go tell your bosses to put some of the millions from last quarter into supporting cs3 on sl and if needed w7.
And please, ignore the flammers and whiners here who can’t articulate themselves.
Being unable to articulate themselves is unfortunate, but I’m not sure ignore is the right approach. Maybe, try to address the content and be forgiving about the tone. Inarticulate flamers can, sometimes, be paying customers with good points, too.
(This is directed at AlexL, who made that comment. John, I think you’re mostly doing okay at this already.)
NOT ABOUT THIS
Ethan,
Thanks for a reasoned response, although I disagree – let me expand.
You are right that it is fundamentall the responsibilty of the software developer/vendor to support their software. No doubt. But CS3 was released with a particular OS environment in existence. It would have been impossible to determine how to ensure compatability with an OS to be released more than 12 months later.
As such, Adobe’s responsibility is to ensure that current products work with current or immediately imminent OS releases. This is being done.
Discontinued releases should be fixed where security or critical bugs arise in relation to the original paradigm for which they were designed and engineered.
Recent updates from Apple and Microsoft were security updates and I have no doubt that Adobe would release security updates if required for CS3, CS2 and further back if appropriate.
No one is forcing us to use Snow Leopard. The choice is ours. If CS3 doesn’t work with it, then you have a choice – don’t use Snow Leopard or upgrade to CS4 or go some other route. Sure, Adobe could spend resources – that’s an option, but instead they’re looking to improve the product with the resources they have.
People are arguing that it’s OK to spend a few dollars for an OS upgrade (one that really is a little more than free Service Pack from MS – although I wouldn’t hesitate to pay the price, I think it’s quite fair) but not OK to spend a lot more for a complete upgrade for CS. That’s their choice. Dollars are tight, but for any business, an expenditure of (in very round numbers) $1,000- in an 18-24 month window (or even 12 months) is hardly a killer amount. If it is, then you’re not really in business. And remember, there’s always the option of not upgrading to Snow Leopard and spending even less money.
The main problem is that some Mac users (a minority) seem to feel that every little thing released from Apple is a must-have, no matter what, immediately or else! That’s not an appropriate mindset to run a business.
For those who are using the CS products other than for business, then that’s a personal choice – they chose to invest in a business level product.
Adobe has not said they won’t support software. You can still get technical help in using CS3, for example. What they’ve said is that they’re not spending as much time and effort on making it compatible with operating systems that didn’t exist when it was released.
And, again, Microsoft has taken the correct approach with this (and has since XP) in providing OS tools to enable backward compatability. They’ve gone to lengths to help to maintain that compatability. Apple hasn’t. Such is life.
You seem to be absolving Apple of any repsonsibility – saying even if they changed it every 6 months it would be Adobe’s problem, but that’s just ridiculous. That’s like saying that if the government mandated a change from gasoline to margarine for running cars, and then every 6 months came up with something different, it would be up to Ford and General Motors to keep giving you engine upgrades.
The information that we have is that CS3 does work, so this is a lot of hotair (and spam into John’s inbox) over very little, really.
At least folks like yourself are presenting intelligent and reasonable comments and not making personal attacks on one of the few blokes in the industry who is prepared to stand in public and speak honestly.
Thank you for your response, however, the previous commenter did not say that Apple had continued to upgrade features, just that they continued to support it with software updates, which they have. And as I pointed out, even though Apple has been working on Leopard and Snow Leopard, they have continued to support Tiger with the latest versions of their apps. The broader point being that, despite your assertion that Mac users are “especially familiar” with this behavior, Apple does indeed regularly support their software years after they have stopped shipping, while Adobe apparently does not. And in fairness to the commenter above, the most recent Java update linked to did actually provide updates to reliability and compatibility, and not solely security. In other words, “continuing to fix bugs or upgrade features”.
“Java for Mac OS X 10.4, Release 9 delivers improved reliability, security and compatibility for J2SE 5.0 and J2SE 1.4.2 on Mac OS X 10.4.11 and later.”
Regardless, nobody in this thread is asking for upgraded features, just compatibility with Snow Leopard. Given that most applications – and apparently PS CS3 – work (mostly) fine with Snow Leopard, I wouldn’t think it’s a herculean task for Adobe to ensure compatibility of a product they were shipping less than a year ago with a current OS. I think it’s safe to assume that a substantial chunk of Adobe’s active user base is currently using CS3 and would like to upgrade to Snow Leopard. With CS’s increased pricing and faster revision schedule, it’s very hard not to feel that this is not, at least in part, a business decision to force some in that segment to upgrade to CS4 before they’re ready.
You said, “When we say that we officially support a specific OS, you can trust that we’ve done very extensive testing on that platform.”
If this is true, why does CS3 (still) not work correctly with Spaces under Leopard?
[Maybe because Spaces is buggy? (I know, I’m never, ever supposed to suggest that Apple software has limitations, but it is what it is.) Maybe because Apple isn’t going to put resources into making Spaces work well with Carbon-based apps?
But no, *of course* it’s all Adobe’s (and Microsoft’s) fault–always, and without question. I’ve been a Mac user for 25 years, and that kind of unthinking, incurious partisanship makes me sad. –J.]
The CS3 apps are the only programs I have problems with – and the problems are significant enough that they pretty much defeat the workflow efficiencies of Spaces.
One other item. You state “It has always been Adobe’s policy not to go backwards and do dot releases on software that is no longer shipping.”
That may apply to “dot releases” but Adobe has certainly gone back and released updates to software that’s no longer shipping. I kept thinking even with CS3, I kept getting updates after CS4 came out. So I did a little searching and found an update to Photoshop 7 which came out about a year after Adobe released CS.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/12615/adobe-photoshop-g5-processor-plug-in
[Sorry, but you’re mistaken. We released the G5 plug-in for PS 7 in August or September 2003. We released PS CS (PS 8) a month or two later.
I’m glad you cited that example, though. The easy move there–the smart move, if you’re a purely dollars-and-sense-driven company–would have been simply to withhold that update, saying that customers buying G5’s had to upgrade to CS to get support. We didn’t do that, though.
We took what would have been a slam-dunk upgrade feature and gave it away, because we thought it was the right thing to do. That’s the same approach the Photoshop team took with PS 2.51, updating to enable it for PowerPC. (Quark, meanwhile, charged not for a new version, but just for PPC support.) –J.]
And specifically in this example, Adobe updated an older version of the software to support a newer version of an Apple product. In this example, it was hardware.
Well, I guess I’m a sycophantic fanboy fo Adobe, because I am always ready to upgrade when a new version of Photoshop comes out. They have never disappointed me with ways to make me more productive.
I’ve done a bit of software development, and I now do curriculum development full time now, which actually has a lot of similarities with software development. And I can completely understand why Adobe can’t go back and fix problems in CS3.
I really get tired of the whining and complaining that goes on and on about Adobe, Microsoft, Apple. The sackcloth and ashes gets old real fast.
You don’t want to upgrade to CS4? Don’t upgrade to Snow Leopard! Or deal with the minor bugs that have been noted when running CS3.
All I can say, is considering the way things have gone for Photoshop over the past few years (dropping of 64 Bit Carbon, Intel transition, etc.) I’m very happy with Adobe being able to stick tot heir 18-24 month cycle of updates. Keep up the good work. Can’t wait to run CS5 on my 2008 Mac Pro.
[Thanks, Eric. –J.]
It’s a fool’s errand to try to explain (defend) anything John (or Adobe) says in this sort of venue, but I’ll give it a shot…
Software is a different “product” than hardwareāwhich is what Apple is in the business of sellingāmake absolutely no mistake on that….they may “sell” you a $29 update to their OS, but what they are selling are CPU’s to run it on…
When Apple announces and releases what some might argue is a “dot” release (10.5 vs 10.6) and drops G5 and G4 PPC support at the same time, it’s just a bit disingenuous to condemn Adobe for supporting a software version they haven’t shipped (sold) for almost 11 months (CS4 shipped Oct 2008).
People who bought CS3 are, arguable “former” customers of Adobe, not “current” customers of Adobe.
Sorry to be blunt, but I’m personally glad (and gratified) that my investment in CS4 will be protected going forward…the fact that I’m a “current” customer of Adobe as apposed to a former customer should not be lost on the commenters here on John’s blog…
You should ask the big question “what have you done for me lately?”, if you bought CS4 you should be glad you did…if you were, uh, ill-informed enough to have bought CS3 in the last 12 months (what were you thinking buying at the END of the product cycle?) then what did you really expect?
Adobe is a publicly traded company…if you are interested in Adobe’s outlook and future, you can buy some stock (in terms of full disclosure, I have Adobe stock)…if you buy enough, you can even go to a stock holder’s meeting and make your voices heard….personally, as both a CS4 owner and an Adobe stock holder I must say that Adobe’s long standing policy (since the late 1980’s I might add) of supporting only the currently shipping products is a reasonable (if somewhat unpopular in this venue) policy…
But look at what Adobe (and John Nack) is toleratingācrap being thrown in their faces the likes of which Apple would _NEVER_ tolerate…
Are you kidding?
If this thread had started on some sort of Apple forum of some sort (let along the fact they would string up ANY employee that voices an opinion) you think this would have played out over 3-4 days? The whole friggin’ enterprise would have been torn down by the Apple “Gestapo”…
Look the gift horse in the mouth all ya want, but in reality Adobe bends over backwards (far more flexile at the waist that I would be) to try to be fair to there customersātheir CURRENT customers I should say. And what does John have to absorb? A bunch of body blows that are completely undeserved….compared to the well deserved blows Apple should be receiving (but doesn’t cause the media “loves’ Apple).
Look, if ya want to upgrade to Snow Leopard, it would serve ya well to upgrade to CS4. Not only will you get the bennies of SL but you get CS4 as well.
“if you bought CS4 you should be glad you did…if you were, uh, ill-informed enough to have bought CS3 in the last 12 months (what were you thinking buying at the END of the product cycle?) then what did you really expect?”
Brutal. Some of us can’t plan our software purchases around Adobe’s release schedule. We often buy software when we hire a new employee or need to give people access to the specific features that a piece of software offers.
The cost of the Adobe Creative Suite is not insignificant, especially if you have a number of employees using the product. I would expect that Adobe would stand behind the product for at least 24 months or for one previous version. I don’t see this as being unreasonable. For many of us it is just not economical (or does not make good business sense) to upgrade to a new version of CS every time for every employee. I don’t see much benefit in upgrading everyone to CS4 at the present time, but Snow Leopard does make business sense for the organization right now due to its better Exchange integration (a steal at $29). Ideally I shouldn’t have to choose one or the other.
“Adobe is a publicly traded company…if you are interested in Adobe’s outlook and future, you can buy some stock (in terms of full disclosure, I have Adobe stock)…if you buy enough, you can even go to a stock holder’s meeting and make your voices heard….personally, as both a CS4 owner and an Adobe stock holder I must say that Adobe’s long standing policy (since the late 1980’s I might add) of supporting only the currently shipping products is a reasonable (if somewhat unpopular in this venue) policy…”
Sounds good until a customer-friendly company comes along with a product that is better, or simply good-enough. As a shareholder in any company I tend to think long-term, not short-term.
John —
Thanks for posting such clear information. Two requests for you, or Adobe generally:
1) Post official compatibility of all CS3 apps on Snow Leopard. If they work, great. If not, surely your users would like to know what’s broken before upgrading to SL. Even a smoke test or anecdotes are better than nothing.
2) Offer an upgrade to SN-compatible version of CS3. My situation is probably like many: I bought CS3 about 2 years ago. Upgrading to CS4 solely for SN compatibility is not an option at $600, because I am not a designer and use the suite infrequently. However, you could easily juice me out of $75. Take a cue from Apple and charge less for an upgrade that’s easy for Adobe to produce. But make it available for a reasonable price.
Agree 100% with the distinction between current customers and past customers. But another important distinction is that between past/present customers and future customers. One might plausibly make the argument that someone who purchased software 11 months ago would be a good candidate to upgrade to CS4 or CS5, and therefore has some future value as a prospect in a future product cycle. You’re saying that if you weren’t savvy enough to know Adobe’s release cycle calendar before buying, you should pay $600 for OS compatibility testing. Fair enough, that’s their choice. But why would I buy from such a vendor again in the future? Fool me once…
Of course it’s entirely possible that Adobe’s plan is to maintain the minimize near-term costs by all means, while ignoring the longer term. This is in fact textbook monopoly behavior, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the software arena for once. (Microsoft is not engaging in monopoly behavior — see the enormous sums it spends even now on WinXP development, and OS development in general.)
Ok, great, CS3 seems to work just fine. However, I agree with others about dropping support for a product that was still being sold only a year ago. That is a poor decision. I know of working pros that were still using CS2 the day CS4 came out, loyal customers that are not going out and pirating the newest version.
While CS3 works, the fact still remains that is it not officially supported. That is just wrong. Adobe is not some little shop with only a few employees (who can justify this action); they are a huge company selling high-end software at a premium price. They owe it to their customers to at least support one version back.
Yes, Apple supported Tiger until shortly after Leopard came out. You make it out like the initial release of CS3 was the final one. NO WAY! Adobe was updating it throughout it’s life-cycle, just as Apple with Tiger and Leopard.
“I expect premium support for a premium priced product.” I totally agree with you there! It is wrong for Adobe to screw their customers by telling them, “Sorry, you’re out of luck. Go spend another grand if you want to use the latest $30 OS.” This is hopefully going to bite them down the road, then they will be forced to change their policy. Granted, CS3 works, but that does not change the fact that it is not supported when it was still selling only a year ago.
I’m still not impressed that you do not intend to support CS3. It essentially states that you are not concerned about customers who shelled out a huge amount of money for your software less than a year ago. I understand your ‘not going back’ policy and you cited Apple doing the same thing. However, not supporting software that costs under $100 is vastly different to not supporting software that cost $3,000 for some of us. Considering that CS3 was still being sold last October and telling people to shell out a few grand more in less than a year is a very difficult pill to swallow.
I would suggest the Adobe rethinks its policy on it’s very expensive software, or I shall be joining the ranks of those who will switch to other software vendors and boycott your software.
John thanks for commenting on my reply.
Still, when you talk about Adobe’s profitability (Adobe is on the rope versus Adobe is making a fortune) I believe you misunderstood my point.
I am personally not that attached to any company to really care about its financial fortunes or misfortunes. I normally tend to wish good results to a company that delivers a product I am using, so that it can ensure further development. That is exactly my attitude towards both Adobe and Apple for that matter.
I was saying, though, that if the company does so well financially, the limited resources reason for not fulfilling a widespread expectation of its customer base does not sound reasonable at all. It might if the company was going down the drain, but it was you who highlighted the company is far from that.
In terms of your reference to Microsoft and Apple, even if, as I mentioned, I believe this should not be the point of discussion between the customer and the seller at hand (i.e. those who comment on here and Adobe), I see your point but do not quite get it.
If Windows 7 was to break iTunes, my personal expectation (and I can only speak for myself of course) would be for Apple to say something like “ok, those bastards at MS broke our software once again: we’ll try our best to test it and ensure compatibility though and see what we can do”.
I do not expect Adobe to go back do developing CS3, but I do expect a reasonable amount of support throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Other commenters have provided very reasonable suggestions (such as knowledge base articles, workarounds to known issues, etc.). I do not think anybody is asking for Adobe to go rewrite from scratch CS3 so it can work under SL. But frankly, anything beyond “it’s your problem, we don’t have enough resources to even look at it” would work.
And I’m not even mentioning the fact that iTunes is a free software (with an obvious business strategy behind it, but still free), while yours is a top class software (and as repeatedly stated by other commenters, it was on the shelves up until less than a year ago), which I paid top euros for.
I would assume a top software at a top price would demand top support from the company selling it. Which I am sure Adobe would provide, were it not in a monopoly situation.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s the logic of business. Economy 101 will teach you what a monopolist can and will do in its market to maximize profit and I do not find it unnatural.
I just believe it really compromises the relationship between the monopolist and the customer base, as the reactions to Adobe’s stance on this matter are clearly demonstrating.
Finally, no, I’m not a developer. I’m just reading on the matter and go by what reports say.
If all is going to be fine eventually, will Adobe’s attitude be seen differently anyway? Personally I don’t think so. It’s the attitude towards customers and product support that I am not in agreement with.
I will not be upgrading to SL, or CS4 for that matter. But it does leave a sour taste in my mouth.
Thanks for your time, though. Your blog is a good read and a valuable place for discussion.
Best.
Alex
hello, this is “disappointed” here again (the person whose earlier comment elicited the wikipedia reference):
Scott’s right: In my earlier comment I explicitly was *not* asking for new features, but simply for support of the product. In buying Photoshop — in buying the best — I willingly paid top dollar. Part of what I believe I’m paying for is confidence: The confidence that it will “just work.” (To borrow an Apple slogan.) Please, Adobe, give me the assurance that CS3, which in my case is barely a year old, will “just work” for a reasonable period of time. Say these four words: “I’ve got your back.” Thanks.
I recently received an e-mail from David Pogue of the New York Times. He has been testing Snow Leopared and has this to say about CS3:
“* Photoshop CS3. Crashes every 5-10 minutes–just exits and loses all
changes. I asked Apple about it, and they told me that there are “known
issues,” but that there would be no fix. Adobe suggests only that you
upgrade to CS4.”
This is more than a couple irritating minor bugs with workarounds – this is potential lost work and lost time.
Adobe: FIX CS3. It is not old, decrepit, marginally used software. It is a premium priced tool that many of us depend on. Most of us don’t _need_ to upgrade to CS4 for any new functionality. We just want our $600 (PS CS3) to stretch further.
To those of you who are justifying Adobe’s position, please, we’re not all pros, we’re not all sitting in CS3 all day long – we’ve paid a premium for the best and expect it to last for a few years.
I picked up SN, but likely will not install it until I see just what damage is caused not only to PSCS3, but to the current PSCS4 and LR 2.4. When Leopard came out there were a host of issues with Adobe applications, so I’m not totally confident on any front yet, current or past versions of products. Despite its smaller footprint, SL is a fairly different beast than Leopard, so I expect there to be incompatibilities. THAT SAID, most Apple based applications from various vendors DO NOT force you to a new “priced” version with an OS upgrade. Like it or not, the OS is the base that Software Vendors must ride on. How they treat customers when OS updates occur is a matter of their own support policy, but most vendors support current and current -1 on the platforms they live on. The fact the(according to the OP) Apple and Adobe did do testing is laudable and appreciated. It is that final salvo in that post that is the problem, where the “we have not choice but” remarks are made with regard to any future support of CS3 on SL. As for whether they ironed out most CS3 bugs, the forums will tell us that quickly as it will for the current versions as well.
Last point. Adobe and Apple are a somewhat unique environment. When it comes to Artistic endeavors (while there are other options) on the Mac, Adobe is clearly the leader and preferred choice, and that is likely to remain for some time. That being the case, I would hope that Adobe AND Apple would work together to provide a level of support within older OS’s (to a reasonable standard) as well as within Application Versions (to the same reasonable standard). Saying you have to reversion your application for this OS upgrade does not seem to fit that category.
I should have mentioned that the $75 upgrade I was envisioning is not to CS4. That would be ridiculous, since CS4 is a totally different product. But some folks don’t need or want CS4 (I’m not a designer; the upgraded features are not relevant to me).
The $75 upgrade would be to go from CS3 to CS3 certified on SL. Call it CS3.1 or CS3 Snow Leopard Insurance if you like. If Photoshop and the rest of the suite basically work now, then an upgrade like this should be free money for Adobe.
While Adobe may not have done full, rigorous compatibility testing of CS3 with Snow Leopard, I would be very surprised if there were not engineers there who know whether or not there are likely to be major issues. SL has been in development for some time, and I expect CS4 shares considerable code base with CS3.
It is the uncertainty more than anything else which is so annoying. And puzzling, given what appears to be a substantial user base still running CS3. It’s not as if there were only 42 people left who had not upgraded to CS4! Even if the answer is “you will likely experience significant issues with some CS3 apps due to changes Apple made in SL. It is not technically feasible to patch the CS3 apps, but all the issues have been addressed in CS4,” then at least you know where you stand.
No one can reasonably expect legacy code to be supported in perpetuity, but it’s difficult to perceive CS3 as superannuated, obsolete, legacy code, especially when there is still a large user base. It just seems a poor decision on Adobe’s part not to have been ready with some compatibility information when SL was released.
John, I have been a Photoshop user since it first came out, but just became aware of your blog today while I was trying to find out whether CS3 and Snow Leopard are compatible.
A couple of comments on what has been discussed here. Although, being more of a designer than a software geek, I was unaware of Adobeās policy on not doing dot releases on software no longer shipping. Having said that, I think that Adobe has every right to adopt such a policy, even if it doesnāt seem to me to be a good long-term business model for a premium software company. As an architect, if I adopted such a policy of not supporting my work after it was completed and I had moved on to other projects, even if such support creates a strain on resources, I frankly wouldnāt get much repeat business. I have asked all of the folks I know using Adobe products if they knew of this policy, and to a person, none of them did. I suspect that because of the premium pricing that many of them (and myself) will take that into consideration on future purchases.
What I am really interested in however, and what you have for some reason not yet addressed, is the apparent disconnect between what you are saying and what David Pogue has said here.
[Briefly (as I’m juggling a bunch of things today and can’t respond to all points): I’m trading emails with David, trying to get some specifics (e.g. what kind of machine is he running?). Hopefully these are isolated, uncharacteristic problems. –J.]
You mentioned only a couple of what I consider to be relatively inconsequential glitches as the only remaining open issues you know about, whereas David says, āOn my test MacBook, running the final Snow Leopard release version, Photoshop CS3 crashes every 5-10 minutes–just exits and loses all changes.ā That is to me a major issue, and being a long time follower of Mr. Pogues work, I have come to trust what he says. Can you please shed some light on this?
Thank you, and I apologize for not using my name and primary e-mail address, but that has always been my policy on public forums which are often dangerous places to disclose that information.
John, I’m not mistaken at all, take a look at my link. You’ll notice it’s an update to that plugin. Yes, it was originally released in 2003, but the update was issued about a year later – nearly a year after CS started shipping.
[No, it wasn’t. I don’t know why the MacUpdate page lists a modification date in 2004, but that’s different than the creation date. Notice that the comments on the page date back to Aug 20, 2003–which is just what I said. –J.]
I think most people have come to expect this sort of update, especially when they’ve been told CS3 wouldn’t be working properly until Apple made some fixes. Which apparently they did, in 10.6.
I’m just frustrated because it’s been years since Photoshop worked as advertised on OS X. I really don’t care who’s fault it is. You guys have been finger pointing for years, but that doesn’t do anything for me as a customer.
Maybe Adobe products should be advertised as “Mostly compatible with Mac OS X” and add an extra blurb that says “We’re waiting on fixes from Apple, then it will be fully compatible.” Put that on your box. Then right below that put “If you want to help convince Apple to fix things more quickly, call Steve Jobs on his cell phone” then put his mobile number š
Seriously though, what’s it going to take? People are sick of this. So you point fingers and Apple doesn’t do anything for years. What else can you guys do that will motivate Apple? What if when Photoshop crashes from something that’s an OS X issue, the resulting crash report provides a direct link to Apple’s feedback page so people can let them know as well?
I don’t really know what the solution is, but the story of “we’re waiting on Apple” has been worn out.
Apple has been among the most aggressive companies when it comes to dropping support for old tech in order to move forward. Remember the furor about the iMac having no floppy drive?
Yes but there was 3rd party support that filled the vaccuum – Apple did not shut down the abilty to connect a floppy drive to your computer. If you want to release the source code to CS3 to developers then this argument makes sense but otherwise it keeps you believing in your own little Adobe reality bubble.
John, thanks for the quick reply. I realize youāre probably quite busy right now, but I hope that sometime soon you have time to update the information regarding David Pogueās issue.
I would like to upgrade my companyās OS to Snow Leopard, but frankly, Photoshop (as well as Illustrator ā but there seem to be no SL issues with that) is more important to us, and in the current economy I am unwilling to commit resources to CS4, when CS3 is perfectly adequate for our purposes since that might mean having to lay someone off.
We’re working with David Pogue to try and determine the cause of his issue. So far, the majority of reports on Photoshop CS3 and CS4 on Snow Leopard have been positive.
twitter.com/jtranber
twitter.com/dhowe
There are some isolated reports of issues and we’re trying to track those down.
John, it was indeed updated. Look at the comments again, notice a few from 2004?
[Yes, because once something happens, people can continue to remark on it having happened. If I say now that JFK died in 1963, that doesn’t mean he actually died in 2009. –J.]
Look at the Adobe site: http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=2595
“This plug-in update was originally posted in August 2003. The plug-in installer has subsequently been updated to support the Dual G5 2.5GHz model.”
[Ah, now I see the source of confusion. I had forgotten that the installer–and not the plug-in–required an update. Good catch. But it still doesn’t mean that we revised the plug-in, or that we revised software (Photoshop 7) that had stopped shipping. –J.]
Even according to the Adobe site the installer was updated for the Dual 2.5GHz G5. What was the release date of that? June 2004.
And if the verbiage on the Adobe site isn’t enough for you, download the file, and look at the date created stamp on the installer – August 17 2004.
Not only did Adobe release an update for software that was no longer shipping, but the update came to address new Apple hardware which came out well after Adobe had stopped shipping the product.
[Adobe didn’t update PS7 after CS (PS8) shipped. We did, as you point out (and as I’d forgotten), re-wrap the last update to PS7 (the G5 plug-in) in a new installer. It’s equivalent to writing a book, zipping the Word doc, realizing the ZIP is corrupt, and re-zipping/re-posting. That doesn’t mean you’ve rewritten the book itself.
Listen, we’ve already spent a portion of our Friday evenings debating the semantics here. Let’s not throw good time after bad. None of this matters relative to the point many people have made, which boils down to, “You guys charge an arm and a leg for your software, and no matter who’s responsible for breaking it, you’re responsible for fixing it.” That may be something worth discussing, but this isn’t. Therefore this is the last I’m going to say in this particular thread about the G5 update. –J.]
The only other software company that compares in size to Adobe is Microsoft. In my almost 10 years of IT experience, Microsoft has maintained support for the current version through 2 legacy versions. They also have a longer life cycle. I realize that the product lines are not exactly apples to oranges, but the business sense of this strategy has paid off impressively for them.
I hate to say it, but here Adobe could learn something from Microsoft. You don’t even have to adopt both ends of it – but either increase the life cycle or support more than one version and you will find a substantial increase in customer retention.
That’s just the basics of business…especially in the current trending economy when people are trying to stretch their dollars further and further.
As a member of NAPP – whom I know you work closely with, many of us have adopted the strategy of upgrading every other version simply because of the cost. Do you really want to start alienating this user base (which is probably among the most faithful)?
The problem is that adobe has no competition. Who is competing with Photoshop today? Flash? no serious competition. Adobe products has old interfaces and follow vintage workflows of doing stuff. Google’s Picasa, a free software, is light-years ahead of bridge. Lightroom smashed bridge on the first version. Lightroom showed a innovative interface to deal with images. We are still using that windows 1.0 interface with adobe products.
Gonna see something Jurassik, go to Filter, Blur and choose Gaussian Blur… the window you will see is being used since Photoshop 1. And what about the preview window inside the gaussian blur? 150×150 pixels? and why filters cannot be adjustment layers?
I am about to switch to the first application that shows a serious alternative to adobe.
I know this is late in the comment-game, but I wanted to mention one thing that strikes me. I think the best metric we can apply is cost versus release rate. For instance, in general, Apple tends to release 1x per year at $129 or $129/year.
CS2 was 4/2005 and CS3 was 3/2007 and CS4 was 9/2008. Taking something close to average at 1.5 years we see that the cost of the master collection (that I have) is $799 so it is $533/year.
For over 4 times the cost we expect at LEAST 2 times the support, not “Sorry, buy the newest one for $800 that will be outdated again in 1 year.”
Thanks for the opportunity to express my concerns.
I’ve been on hold to support for almost an hour – great music (not). Still can’t get Photoshop CS3 to boot under a fresh install of Snow Leopard, so we shall see. Of course I’m a goofball and did all this when I have a project deadline.
Feet, meet fire, fire, these are my feet.
Look, I’m also in the software product business, though in quite a different part of the ecosystem (cloud application platforms).
In any case, if I told one of our customers (and we have a bunch) that something they bought 1 year ago (I bought my copy of PS CS3 on 8/16/08!) was de-supported and they were on their own, I’d be shredded, plain and simple.
While you guys are selling client software, it’s definitely at the high end of that range, and as you know for many of your customers is the single biggest computing investment they make.
To say it’s only good for a year is just nuts.
If you’re going to do that, lower the price point and go to a subscription. But at this price point, to just “sorry, hope it works out for you” ONE YEAR after purchase is pretty lame.
There have been several comments here to the effect “With the current economic climate what it is I simply can’t afford to upgrade to CS4.” I think that is very understandable and in many cases quite a wise decision but does it not also occur to you that the necessary corollary to that would be that Adobe, with fewer people currently paying for upgrades, would likewise have fewer resources to devote to non-primary development? Adobe has to adjust their spending to the current climate as well. They do not exist in a bubble.
John and Jeff, Please keep us updated on David Pogueās issues. In addition now Tony seems to be unable to start PS/CS3 under Snow Leopard. Another not-inconsequential issue.
Whalt, in principle I agree with your line of reasoning, but in the real world, in my profession (Architecture) in my area, unemployment is running at between 30% and 40%, and most firms are losing money even after massive layoffs. Adobe on the other hand, had its best year ever in terms of earnings per share in 2008, and Wall Street estimates for 2009 indicate either their 2nd or 3rd best year. Not as good as the previous year, but they donāt seem to be exactly hurting compared to the rest of us. Their EPS growth rate for the next 3-5 years is estimated at between 18% and 19%. Again not too shabby compared with many sectors of the economy, especially since theyāre starting from good positive earnings, whereas other areas might show either no growth or possibly good growth estimates simply because they are starting from a negative or very depressed position. As Jason mentioned earlier, I have for the past 15 years taken the approach of upgrading both my company and personal software no more than every other upgrade on most software. To me, creating a support-only CS3 upgrade to āCS3/supportedā for under $100 would seem to make good business sense in order to protect Adobeās future earnings. As I said before, Adobe has the right to do whatever they want. Itās just that it might not be the smartest long-term position. Just my opinion.
I just wanted to confirm (hard to find among all the flames) that CS2 WILL run on Snow Leopard. It runs fine on Leopard. Better than on Tiger actually š
Christoph is right! I’m also annoyed with adobe price policy. It is a shame how expensive the same software is outside USA (Germany in my case). I would prefer to work with an US-language version of CS4, just to safe money. It would be no prblem for me. But Adobe doesn’t allows it to buy US-Versions outside the USA. Why? Greed?
Other Software Companies definitly don’t behave like this. I con give you a lot of examples. Stefan, Germany
We’ve narrowed down some of the instability issues some folks were seeing to a new font added to 10.6 called Menlo. Remove the Menlo font from HD\System\Library\Fonts folder (Admin password required). We’ll provide more guidance as we gather more info.
We’ve tracked down at least one issue with the font Menlo which was added to 10.6. Details on my twitter page:
http://twitter.com/jtranber
Hi, SL has been out there in the wild for a few days now and how did it go for CS3? I’m trying to scan the web for user reports but have not found any comments to talk about; someone had a crash when changing fonts and Pogue at NYT had some undisclosed problems…is this it? What does it mean, nobody have tried CS3 on SL? Everything works just fine, no problems to report?
Its so silent after the “uproar” last week its almost scary:)
If you or anybody else know where to read up on user experiences please let me know.
PhotoshopCS3 seems to run faster on snow leopard, however I’d doubt it is because of anything adobe has done.
[Well, right, as Adobe hasn’t touched anything in CS3 since SL shipped. –J.]
I have found a few bugs, like select multiple files, drag to the CS3 icon but only one opens. Actually a major bummer.
It is my opinion that a 1.5 year old software bought for 200 or so dollars should really have a longer life. I notice there is only 10.0.1 – hardly a fair effort to supporting what was a forced upgrade to start with from ps7.
Forcing another upgrade on me is going too far – It would be much appreciated if Adobe hear the obvious outcry from customers who like it or not have to use Adobe photoshop – it is good but does cost a lot more than competing products. cheers.
I am not amused by this kind of policy. Up till now I can say that CS3 does not work fine under SL and I can’t just go out an upgrade because in my work environment no one works with CS4. Should I tell them to upgrade? Mmh? Sure.
And another thing that really upsets me: Now, all new Macs will be shipping with this superduper Snow Leopard, meaning no Leopard, and most programs won’t run. Like CS3.
This is not acceptable. Not from Apple, not from Adobe.
Try Coda. Nice alternative to Dreamweaver, with a nicer UI, and much cheaper price. Better support, too.
If you’re looking for a good alternative, check out Pixelmator, Iris, Acorn, or Pixel. They all offer different options, and many support the PSD format.
This is not an alternative, sorry. I work professionally.
On one hand there is no need updating existing hardware, thats true, but as a I said, future mac products will only ship, and work, with SL. And this is a stupid policy. I thought Apple was a hardware, not only a software vendor. Why should they care, if I put a Leopard System on my newly bought Mac Pro? They get my money. So what gives? That I can’t run Tiger on a new Nvidia System I take for granted. No problem.
Right now, if my Mac broke down in about three weeks, I would be in real trouble finding a machine capable of running my software.
Some of my old postscript fonts don’t activate anymore. Not under Font Explorer. Not under Font Book.
Indesign crashes constantly if you open a document which has to activate fonts (that won’t work anymore). It can’t cope with that (might be the font explorer plugin).
If you try installing a update to Acrobat Pro (to 8.1.6) the installer just quits.
So, this situation is not very pleasant.
I wonder what the developer testbase consists of. Well, it can’t be that many pro designers.
I would really suggest a little system compatibility upgrade. I’d even pay for it. But CS4 is not a option. Not now. Even given it to me for free. I have numerous Indesign files that would lose compatibility with CS3 users in my network.
I too have been worried about buying new hardware or upgrading to SL in fear of not being able to use my old Adobe software. As my 2.5 year old MBP is starting to make unusual beeps, I feel I may be forced to get new hardware if it crashes. I do believe, however, that it would not be a violation of Apple’s EULA if I formatted my old MBP’s hard-drive and used the Leopard install disc on new hardware to ensure my old software would be compatible. At some point when I had either upgraded to CS4 or compatibility issues have been addressed, I could then use the SL install disc that comes with the new hardware to perform a safe and worry-free OS upgrade. Someone let me know if my logic is flawed and this would in fact violate Apple’s EULA. My thinking is that I’m only using one copy of the software at a time, and I’m using it on authentic Apple hardware (which are the most important aspects in the EULA). Thanks.
Of course you can use it on any Mac you like, as long it’s one Mac. But, if you buy a new MBP that comes with SL preinstalled, you won’t be able to install Leopard on it, because the System is locked for other install discs. And this is very problematic right now.
My suggestion for Apple would be not to lock the machines for leopard and let people install it for the time being.
They proclaim that SL is just a upgrade anyway.
Nobody would get in trouble with new hardware that needs to run in a business environment which runs fine on Leopard.
SL is beta. And different. And thats a fact.
And also Adobe needs to realize that even a very good upgrade package doesn’t solve business needs. You just can’t flip your whole business setup to CS4 with just the toss of a coin. Doesn’t work that way. Only if you start by scratch. And then you have to evaluate what your printers work with.
I know numerous agencies that still run on panther because they just can’t spare time to upgrade. It would a huge amount of money. And then? The printer runs amok because he can’t open CS4 InDesign files on their CS3 machines.
You have put compatibility of Photoshop and Illustrator files in your software. Why not InDesign? Just because Quark those the same? Who cares about them?? I don’t. Their program is way behind.
John,
I know your schedule is busy, but please try to keep us updated on issues and fixes. Thanks.
In reading more about SL, it is apparent that this is not just some minor upgrade, but a major revision ā enough to get a different species name ā although most of the changes and improvements have been behind the scenes. It occurs to me that Apple must have spent substantial resources in developing this new system, yet is able to sell it for $30 to those who have two year old machines and OSās in order to support their user base. You say that Adobe canāt divert resources to even do testing on SL to support those who bought CS3 a year ago. I really, truly, honestly donāt understand this dichotomy from a business perspective.
I cant’ agree more: translations costs are just bogus reasons since here in Belgium I still have to pay 2249 euros for design premium (that’s still $3208 us dollars!!) for exact the same piece of software, in hte same language…
John,
Except for Buzzword and a Jurassic version of PageMaker (7, I think), I am hardly an Adobe product user, so I have no personal investment in this discussion, one way or the other. With that out of the way, I would like, first of all, to join the slim ranks of those who have congratulated you for having the guts to personally get into this discussion instead of leaving it to the PR drones.
[Thanks. I came to this job by virtue of being an Adobe customer (and one, it happens, pissed-off enough about various products that I had to try to make them better). –J.]
However, I would like to point out to you that engaging in this discussion is only useful as a matter of principle. I see here a whole legion of angry and unhappy Adobe customers (some of them repeat, loyal customers), who have also paid hefty sums for their Adobe products and have certain expectations (not completely unfounded, I might add) of getting their money’s worth.
Whether they are right or wrong as a matter of principle is completely pointless from a business perspective: these are potentially lost customers. And, if Adobe continue treating their faithful base in such high-handed way, that potential loss will undoubtedly expand.
IMHO, Adobe should eat some humble pie and appease them,
[Here’s what’s funny: Adobe folks have gone back and have done more testing with CS3, as I posted last night. I got 300+ comments screaming that Adobe should do so. Now when I post this news, I’ve gotten one comment so far. One. What do you make of that? –J.]
if they want to continue making those handsome profits you have pointedly bragged about.
[I didn’t brag about anything, pointedly or otherwise. I said that simultaneously saying “Adobe is making too little money–shows they’re evil” and saying “Adobe is making too much money–shows they’re evil” based on the same set of numbers is stupid and unconvincing. –J.]
It is immaterial whether they should upgrade to SL or put it off, or whether costly software purchased from the manufacturer barely a year ago should be left to rot with barely a shrug.
Customers, John, are always right, as the old adage puts it. And right now, they are pissed as hell.
[Yes, but when we do what they ask, they go silent. There’s no, “Hey, glad you were listening. Thanks for doing what we said was the right thing.” No one links to the news. If the news shows Adobe and Apple working together, well, that doesn’t play into manufactured soap operas or conspiracy theories, does it? If it doesn’t bleed… –J.]
Hi John ::
Thanks for this info. It’s good to know the detail behind what the actual flaws seem to be.
CS 3 Dreamweaver is also supposed to have “Minor bugs in Photoshop and Dreamweaver” according to the snowleopard wikidot article.
Is there someone at Adobe who can offer similar info about what āspecificallyā is off kilter in the Snow Leopard+DW CS3 combination?
Is there a blog like yours that hovers more closely around web development issues and Adobe tools?
Cheers
Hi John ::
Thanks for this info. It’s good to know the detail behind what the actual flaws seem to be.
CS 3 Dreamweaver is also supposed to have “Minor bugs in Photoshop and Dreamweaver” according to the snowleopard wikidot article.
Is there someone at Adobe who can offer similar info about what āspecificallyā is off kilter in the Snow Leopard+DW CS3 combination?
Is there a blog like yours that hovers more closely around web development issues and Adobe tools?
Cheers
Answered my own question in part…
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/512/cpsid_51215.html
What about the file saving issue. It makes it impossible to use cs3 photoshop. I am only able to save a file about 25% of the time, I wouldn’t call this a minor bug!
[You’re right, and it isn’t. I don’t know why it didn’t show up in testing. In any case, a fix is in development. –J.]
Agreed with Mario Amaya. Another reason I didn’t upgrade to CS4 b/c of this: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
[I’m not sure whether you’re interested in providing useful, constructive feedback that might actually get something done; if so, please know that this isn’t it. Just saying, “Bleh, everything you do sucks!” doesn’t provide anything actionable for us to consider. If you don’t like something in particular, please say so, and please say how you’d like it made better. –J.]
Too bad adobegripes doesn’t have a reply function where people could correct all his mistakes. I don’t think this guy ever RT’d his FM.
And I love the rants against bugs in his OS, but blaming Adobe. Classic!
[Here’s what’s funny: Adobe folks have gone back and have done more testing with CS3, as I posted last night. I got 300+ comments screaming that Adobe should do so. Now when I post this news, I’ve gotten one comment so far. One. What do you make of that? –J.]
John, where is this posted? I canāt find it.
Thanks.
[Here you go. –J.]
I’ve tried clean installs of CS3 on 3 machines running Leopard, and Illustrator would crash on “Save” on each. I upgraded to SL hoping for a fix. My CS3 Photoshop runs fine on Snow Leopard; but Illustrator still crashes, and I can’t find documentation anywhere on this being a known issue. I’m not about to spend the $599 on the upgrade after just purchasing CS3 a year ago only to find it won’t work.
Ok, forgive me if this was covered in an earlier blog post. Didn’t have time to read them all. There is a real issue with CS3 and printing. Dark prints with red shift at least with most Epson pro printers. Not a driver issue. Only fix is reversion to 10.5 or upgrade to CS4. Good news is that CS4 is worth the price of admission.
When I did a “find” on all these posts in the thread I did not see this CS3 issue: When scanning into Acrobat 8, you have the opportunity to choose a scanner. The only choice for my HP Officejet L7780 scanner is the TWAIN driver HP Scan Pro. HP says that driver no longer works in Snow Leopard, because it’s been replaced by drivers integral to Snow Leopard that are used in Apple’s appllications such as Image Capture and Preview. Unfortunately, when I try Scan to PDF from the menu, the HP Scan Pro is the only choice offered, even though it’s been deleted from applications and the computer restarted. HP has done their part and told me how to scan, but this functionality in Acrobat is gone, along with the OCR (unless I figure out a workaround scanning a file prepared by a different scan program).
We are a small advertising agency who has always been loyal to Adbe products, but that might be about to change.
As the new Snow Leopard can’t run on G5 processors (which we currently used), and we only had one MacBookPro to test on, we went ahead and upated the MacBookPro with SnowLeopard, ran the PhotoShop CS3 on it, and tested, and it worked out fine.
Then we went out and bought 9 brand new Macs all with Intel processors, bought the new SnowLeopard and installed it on the macs.
Then we installed the CS3, as we now knew that it ran on SnowLeopard, but what happens?? “This product is not siupportedā¦”.
WTF???!!!??? It ran fine on the MacBookPro?
Then we went ahead and tested a little further and found out, that as long as you do the UPGRADE on an older machine running 10.5.x to 10.6, there is no problem, but as soon as you go on and clean install the 10.6 on a machine, the CS3 stops working.
At first we didn’t belive it, but then we borrowed another MacBookPro that still had 10.5.7 on it, and installed the CS3 – updated to 10.6, still no problem – un-installed the CS3 and installed it yet again to see – still no problem.
Then we totally formated the MacBookPro and installed 10.6 on it from the ground up, and installed CS3.
“This product is notā¦”, Yeah right.
What is Adobe thinking?
One should think that Adobe has no idea what it costs to put their products on 9 machines, since they obviously has no intention on having focus on 2.5 yo software, as they state on the page before this one.
We will now not purchase that new CS4, as we had put into our budget for 2010, but instead have a look around for alternatives, as this is a complete disgrace to the graphics community.
Not only have Apple kicked us in the head by not making 10.6 run on our PowerMac G5s due to the PPC-structure, which means we have to purchase new computers. One might say that was about time, but no one said that you’d have to put into the budget that you’d have to get new software from Adobe as well.
So, the idea might be to go back to the G5s and run 10.5.x on them and keep the CS3 for now, but one thing is for certain: It’s been the last Adobe-product to enter this firm.
Claus Frandsen
p!pdk inc.
I reverted my MacBook back to Tiger, put on UNO for the unified window style, which is way better then the brushed metal look, reinstalled everything and ā voila ā it’s much better then Leo or Snow Leo. It’s also “snappier” š
For people running production machines: DO NOT UPGRADE!!! Wait about 1 year. Because thats how long Apple needed to get 10.5 to work with CS3. Let all the involuntary betatesters file their bug reports back home.
Snow Leo is really beta. And I am disappointed a lot. I really believed it would just be a modification to Leopard, meaning, that it would leave everything intact, but optimizing here and there. But now it’s the same like last time, as when CS2 couldn’t print PDF’s on Leo.
This problem now that a) Snow Leo is in reality a big beta mess and b) Adobe jumps the wagon by making a software (which in Europe costs 3000 Dollars compared to the U.S. with 1100 Dollars) not really compatible for the huge user base of CS3 users. If you had brought out CS5 with 64Bit support and argued that couldn’t support CS3 anymore, it would have been understandable. But you didn’t.
My advice: Make CS3 compatible and then we will happily shell out money for the upgrade to CS5! Trust me on that. You made a big mistake with CS4. It came out way to early, and you knew that Apple was working on Snow Leopard.
It’s give and take, Adobe.
How to fix the following issue?
Licensing for this product has stopped working.
You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2245297
The KB article for this error does not work (none of the 4 solutions!)
H F did you by chance use TimeMachine to restore stuff on your Mac? We’ve heard a few reports of permissions getting changed after SL updates/restores. Try removing (keep it somewhere safe just in case) the āFLEXnet Publisherā folder from /Library/Preferences/FLEXnet Publisher and relaunch Photoshop. Photoshop should create a new folder. If that doesn’t work, email me @ jtranber @t adobe dot com and I can have customer service contact you.
So I have had CS3 for right at a year now. Just a couple months later CS4 was released and had I known I would have waited to buy CS3. Today I was working in Photoshop and after an hour of use it began crashing. After shutting down and reopening the program, it crashed almost immediately on multiple occasions. I upgraded to Snow Leopard last week prior to hearing about any compatibility issues with CS3 and have a feeling there is a connection. I’m simply getting a “program error” message. What do I do?
@Chris: Revert back to Leopard. There is no other solution.
It’s the same mess like with Leopard. You have to wait about 6 month or so until the OS is stable. And due to the new 64 bit structure, which I believe was falsely advertised as āa minor upgrade”, things might not be as smooth as it got with Leopard version 10.5.7 ā or super smooth as on Tiger. Tiger is megastable but of course for new Mac Book unavail.
I just got done experiencing crash after crash of PS-CS3 trying to export my slices for a web development project.
This is the first time I’ve been at a ‘windows’ frustration level with Apple and now after doing some research on it, Adobe as well.
Nice choices Apple and Adobe give us – UPGRADE OR DON’T WORK.
It’s this type of frustration that lead me to migrate to using an Apple and it’s this kind of frustration that will lead me to do mostly programming and not graphics, where I can use VIM on a Linux box. Letting my copy of CS3 fade into the distance where I don’t even use Adobe products anymore.
It was fun.
– Don Stefani
I guess I’m lucky I bought PS-CS4 recently so I have a decent chance to run it on SL. However – to correct a few views: While Windows 7 should be considered to be Vista.5 as it merely fixes the stuff implemented the wrong way before, Snow Leopard just looks the same as Leopard on the surface. Under the hood a lot more has changed between 10.5 and 10.6, in terms of leaving native support for PPC CPUs behind and republishing core services and applications in 64bit where possible. Bottom line is: Win7 should be cheaper, SL could be more expensive. Coming back to the topic: I’m actually scared that CS4 is “optimized for” (reads as “crappily programmed for”) Leo and will produce unexpected flaws as soon as I upgrade my production iMac to SnowLeo – let alone all you CS3 guys. I really am with the theory that premium prices should pay for premium support for at least CS3 and 4. … BTW, my Tiger box installed a big fat security update just yesterday. Adobe – don’t tell me you wouldn’t fix anything else but security related bugs. Unlike Apple’s Mac OS X your CS is not so much a core operating system but a suite of applications. Don’t fix security, fix your application for changed running environments.
I am using CS4 products and since Snow Leopard, things have begun going wrong. The main thing is when you close any Adobe program via CMD+Q, this will give you a message saying the APP crashed etc. I have not seen any more problems but i guess i need test the programs with some heavy raw files etc. I guess the most frustrating thing is that i did not expect this with mac , plus i do not see any response from mac or Adobe to say they are fixing problems.
Message to Adobe Executives: The fuel company has just improved the gas for all your company cars to make it greener and more efficient. Your company cars which are in year 2 of a 4 year lease, now need replacement engines. The new engines retail at US$699 each. That’s for ALL your company cars. How would you like to pay? PS: direction indicators do not work if you use the new fuel without paying, and we don’t support any cars if anything goes wrong, ever. What a business model. Pathetic.
Crooks, as a loyal, legal customer of both Apple and Adobe all these years this is the worst scam at the worst time imaginable. I say it’s collective lawsuit time.
After upgrading to Snow Leopard 10.6.1 the UNDERLYING tools in Photoshop CS3 are no longer accessible. I can only access the ones seen on the screen / upper layer. When I clcik or hold on the REALLY TINY, EEENSEY WEENSEY, WAY TOO SMALL triangle in the lower right corner (hint, hint) nothing happens. The tools worked fine in Snow Leopard 10.6.
I need a fix ASAP, this is a MAJOR issue as I need Photoshop for my work.
Anyone else experiencing this? Any advice meanwhile?
I get an error message 8800 about the feature not being supported when I attempt the automatic merge using Snow Leopard and CS3. Is this an incompatibility problem or do I have some other problem?
I too cannot for the life of me save a CS3 Photoshop or Illustrator file to another format after upgrading to Snow Leopard. This is NOT a minor bug, and needs to be fixed ASAP.
When I’m running PhotoshopCS3 and try to start up IllustratorCS3 about half of the times it crashes. Don’t know why but I wish Adobe could fix it to work better with Snow Leopard.
i have experienced the same. all of my menu functions are greyed out, like “open recent files” or all of the layer options are all greyed out.
i can save.
i cannot close without having to do a force quit. im running 10.6.1 on PSCS3.
is there a fix?
has anyone else experienced this? do i need to uninstall, reinstall CS3??
Menus being messed up is usually a problem with a third party plugin. Several plugin makers had to update their plugins for Snow Leopard. Check for updates to third party plugins.
We are still waiting for Apple to release bug fixes, just like you are.
If you need fixes to Snow Leopard sooner, please let Apple know.
Add me to the list of upset people. Switching layers now takes 3-4 seconds, and really kills my productivity.
Adobe can issue any explanation they want, but a solution is the only thing that’ll make me feel better.
The current response makes me less likely to upgrade, because I feel that I can’t trust Adobe, no matter how much I pay.
Denying the issue and transferring blame only makes people more aggravated. Doing the hard work of fixing these problems would be a good investment towards earning back customer loyalty.
I say this with the utmost respect, understanding of your situation, and constructive intent… ultimately, you have to look at it from the point of view of your customers.
If you can’t issue Snow Leopard compatibility for free, maybe it’s time to get creative and charge a low price for it.
i just upgraded my mac book pro to snow leopard and photoshop wouldnt open, and the adobe uninstallers silently quite every tine i tried to uninstall, so i mannually uninstalled (draged recomended items to the trash and deleted) but when i put my CS3 isc in and go to setup, it quits the same the the adobe uninstaller did, is there any solution for this? as i need to get this running ASAPto get CS# back runnin
@Zach Jacobs:
You have to Clean Install SL, not upgrade. Then everything works.
I had the same issues.
BTW: You shouldn’t have upgraded anyway. It’s way to early for SL. And Leopard is solid. There is no big difference anyway.
oh ok, thanks heaps, so how do i go from snow leopard back to leopard?
Well, for me the most important thing ist to keep files for each password (email-accounts, serials, etc.) that you need. Second to backup your emails in SL , you can export them into complete packages via Ā»Mailbox/Archive MailboxĀ« and later reimport them in L. Works like a charm.
Then copy everything from your harddrive to a backup harddrive. Make sure you have all system files, every userfile etc. saved because you can also copy program preferences saved in Ā»User/{yourprofile}/Library/preferencesĀ« over to L to get back your program settings for Photoshop. But do that after your installed CS onto your harddrive.
do a clean L install.
then update your system from apple update service to 10.5.8 first and also all other updates that apple offers. I ususally keep all updates saved on a harddrive but if you have a fast connection you can do this the other way. My web connection here in germany is very slow that why I backup updates.
run disk utility to check for broken preferences. I also use Ā»leopard cache cleanerĀ« to force the machine to optimize files (aka defragmentation) to reorganize the file structure, to optimize my broadband connection etc.
install your programs, setup your mail accounts, import your mail backups, you’ll see your old mail in a new folder in mail, from there you can pull all your mail back into the mailaccount that you have resetup.
Then you can reinstall DivX or Flip4Mac. If Movies don’t show, reinstall Quicktime after you installed those plugins.
All this will take some time. But you will have a fresh and fast system after that.
write to Ā»mail { at } fkh-design { dot } comĀ« if you have problems or questions.
I upgraded to Snow Leopard recently. It broke a few apps, such as Dreamweaver, but Photoshop (CS3), seemed to be ok. But today I tried to use the type tool, and found that when I type text, nothing at all shows up on screen. Nada. Tried many different fonts and sizes, but nothing works, the type tool is dead.
Anyone else experience this?
Not supporting a single-rev back program is unheard of. If Microsoft were to consider something like this the lawsuits would start flying. Perhaps we should consider the same.
Maintaining an operating system up-to-date is a sound business practice and should be encouraged by a software company.
Their refusal to support a single-rev back software that costs the end-user thousands of dollars is certainly actionable since they potentially endanger the livelihoods of creative professionals across the US.
I hate to join the angry mob, but in all honesty: just over a year isn’t long enough to drop support for most software products in the $200 range if you poke around… I understand the “no one’s forcing you to go to SL” sentiment, but let’s not forget that CS3 is NOT the only app we’re running!
What if: Less than a year after buying CS3 someone’s mac dies (and their new one comes with SL?) Sure it’s hypothetical – but would this person not deserve to have their software work?
There’s many great reasons to upgrade to SL, so if Adobe apps are supposed to be worth what they cost it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for a quick stability patch for SL. It doesn’t look like too many people are demanding new functionality in the year-old product; just the same old functionality they had paid for already.
I just upgraded to SL and all of my adobe cs3 programs are crashing left and right. HOW do I make this stop? Other programs are having the same problem and apple says to contact each supplier separately. HUH? Seems like there might be issues they aren’t talking about here.
I have been writing systems software for 45 years, know all about resources, trade-offs, blah, blah, blah. I understand that Adobe has so many resources and has to allocate them in the best way they see fit to make money. BUT, IMHO, Adobe’s position on CS3 and Snow Leopard is unconscionable and really inexcusable.
The icing on the cake is that if you happen to have a “Suite”, instead of a single program (i.e. CS3 Web Suite vs just Photoshop CS3), Adobe WILL NOT LET YOU UPGRADE JUST PHOTOSHOP TO CS4. YOU MUST UPGRADE THE WHOLE SUITE! I originally had just Photoshop and Dreamweaver (from Macromedia) as well as Freehand – never liked illustrator. After Adobe bought Macromedia somewhere along the way there was some kind of deal, around about CS2 I think, that made it somewhat attractive to upgrade to the Web Suite as opposed to just upgrading Photoshop, which I did. At this point in time, I really don’t use anything but Photoshop. But Adobe won’t let me upgrade just Photoshop – I have to upgrade the whole suite for $600. Now that is the definition of chutzpah.
I have installed Snow Leopard, and CS3 does seem to work without any problems, so far. I installed SL on an external drive and booted from there to test all my software before doing the upgrade on my MacBook Pro itself. So, for the moment, I’m Okay.
However, I also use Aperture and find that Aperture and NIK plugins suffice for the most part for my photography work. While they certainly don’t do everything that Photoshop does, the missing things I can live without if I have to.
So unless Adobe offers some kind of economical upgrade path to Photoshop CS4, or the whole suite for that matter, and changes their current business model of absolute disdain for their customer base, it’s good bye Adobe for me as far as any more upgrades are concerned.
DUMB, DUMB, DUMB Adobe. You are no longer the only choice around.
Just bought a brand new MacBook Pro, used time machine to upload everything from my old G4. Everything worked except Photshop CS3, I have spent hours with Adobe on the phone, too no avail, they have no clue!! I have Uninstalled, from the DVD, I have ditched everything Photoshop, Adobe etc. NOTHING Still tells me my licence has stopped working? WTF??? CS3 Will NOT WORK WHAT SO EVER!! NUDDA!!! Biggest complaint I have is the Tech Support with Adobe is India, and their english is really bad!! They still don’t know how to fix my problem, that was 10 days ago.
I am running PS CS3 and my clone tool is causing me problems. It is on 0 hardness and acting as if I am set to 100% hardness. I have also had PS crash on me several times. Anyone else?
I was using Tiger but my hard drive crashed after two years. The Apple store kindly replaced my hard drive & upgraded me to 10.6.2 at no charge. After reinstalling PS CS3, I can’t even get it to open up! I didn’t know there were all these issues & 3 calls to Adobe haven’t helped. I use PS every day. What should I do…reinstall Tiger? Has anyone figured out what to do who had the same issue?
Okay let me stir up a whole new kettle of fish WINDOWS 7 VS CS3 PHOTOSHOP.
I have Windows 7 Ultimate Edition 64bit. I am running (or trying) CS3 Master suite. Most all progams function except Photoshop. I try to load it and I get “Adobe Photoshop CS3 has stopped working” and then there is no fix and no help. Photoshop ran on Vista 64bit just fine.
I’m curious if anyone else is having this same issue? If so have you found any clue as to the issue?
I’m not about to hand Adobe or Microsoft more money for upgrades or new versions. I will install CS3 on some junk box with a lower OS if I need to.
Any fixes?
Dear Adobe, I would suggest you fix the CS3 problems on Snow Leopard or their won’t be a) a new Mac for a long time b) No CS4 or CS5 upgrade.
I need CS3 because a lot of my clients use it. I can’t install e.G. Indesign CS4 and resave the docs as CS3.
Think about it.
P.S. I am tired of your policy. SL came out in September 09. Now we almost have January 2010 and their has been NO UPDATE for CS3.
Are you guys insane? Do you really believe that this is the way professional workflow operates? That we update, upgrade, buy and spend?
I’m not interested in details. All I know is that I just recently upgraded to Photoshop CS3, and I did choose CS3 and not CS4 (which was imminent) because I knew it would have been unusable on my 9-year old G4 (in fact I continued to use Photoshop 7, but I upgraded just not to loose the upgrade possibility).
Now that I have bought a new Xeon640 Mac Pro, and I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.2, I happily discovered:
– I have to run Photoshop with Rosetta, otherwise the Epson plug-ins for my scanner are not even seen by the software;
– After a few days using the application, I have experienced various instances where the program refuses to open files, either when launched from the desktop or dragged to the program icon;
– after this unpleasant behaviour the option to “quit” from the main menu appears grayed out, and some feature of the program no longer works (I tried to duplicate some layers with no avail).
I am totally disappointed because I bought the new machine mostly to do effectively big scans and to work with Photoshop. And now, after paying over 600 Euros for an upgrade, I should buy a new upgrade at a few months distance, when I have never used this one as well?
I think this is totally unserious. As another user have said: “So unless Adobe offers some kind of economical upgrade path to Photoshop CS4, or the whole suite for that matter, and changes their current business model of absolute disdain for their customer base, it’s good bye Adobe for me as far as any more upgrades are concerned.”
Claudio (Modena, Italy)
I bought the new Mac Book with Snow Leopard and my photoshop 7.0 crashes before it starts up. I tried the “JavaApplicationStub” into the “Contents” subfolder “MacOS” and it didn’t help
We users of CS3 are professionals, we depend on are software for a living.
we pay a premium price for a premium product and premium support.
This is not about apple or other companies, its about us the customers and adobe, if adobe is not happy with apple you can drop photoshop for macintosh and only develop for windows, but this is not the topic the topic is that CS3 needs updating.
while you do develop for macintosh you are expected to support your software on OSX.
This is not a computer game or a silly app this is a professional pice of software aimed at professional’s.
we need this software for are livings by not fixing this your making it hard for us to actually work, this is going to do a lot of damage to your reputation.
if i buy CS4 will you drop support as soon as you can?
will we have this problem in a year or two’s time?
I intend to wait till CS5 with the fabled support for more than 1-2 CPU’s, that will relay make a difference to me.
I just had a look on amazon.co.uk and CS3 is still for sale, from ‘Adobe Systems Inc.’
how can you still sell the software, or allow people to sell it if it is not shipping and supported, it is not even mentioned that it is not OSX10.6 compatible in the ‘system requirements’
It seems Adobe is driven by forces they no longer understand themselvesā¦
EXTREMELY frustrated. Just upgraded to Snow Leopard and can no longer use InDesign CS3 (80% of what I use..)
I have an educational version of CS3 that cannot be upgraded.
I will have to revert to OS 10.5.
Did the same.
Just upgraded to Snow Leopard and can no longer use InDesign CS3 Illustrator CS3 and Photoshop CS3.
I cant ewen see icons of files in finder, (orange, blue and red they all became white)
What a disgrace. My problem is with using RAW images in Photoshop. All the pix (thousands) taken by my Canon 40D and 50D cameras will now not open. Installing new plugins failed. (This workaround succeeded in Tiger on my older MacBook.) I can’t select updates in Help because it is greyed out. My lousy options are to use DNG conversion – a long an tedious process, or upgrade to CS4 … just when CS5 is on the horizon. I don’t care how “reasonable” Adobe is being – this is just spin, albeit by a high ranking Adobe spokesman. It is an unethical situation, pure and simple. Shame on
Adobe. I have spent thousands over the years on Adobe products and I feel cheated.
What a disgrace. My problem is with using RAW images in Photoshop. All the pix (thousands) taken by my Canon 40D and 50D cameras will now not open. Installing new plugins failed. (This workaround succeeded in Tiger on my older MacBook.) I can’t select updates in Help because it is greyed out. My lousy options are to use DNG conversion – a long an tedious process, or upgrade to CS4 … just when CS5 is on the horizon. I don’t care how “reasonable” Adobe is being – this is just spin, albeit by a high ranking Adobe spokesman. It is an unethical situation, pure and simple. Shame on
Adobe. I have spent thousands over the years on Adobe products and I feel cheated.
Sorry … I should have made it clear that I’ve just bought a new 27″ IMac, not just upgraded to Snow Leopard!
I can’t see how so many people say Snow Leopard works well with PS CS3. I have so many problems inc between 10-20 crashes a day (yes a day) Not only have I been back to apple’s “Genius’s” but have tried so many diff fixes that “Finding fixes, and reinstalling” now form a major part of my CV, as that is what I mainly do. Now looking for a replacement for all my Adobe software.
what about CS3 and 10.6.3…?
there seems to be many new issues for some Apple configurations with the new OS X update…?
We’re looking into the issue that some users are seeing after the 10.6.3 update. You can follow @dhowe or myself @jtranber on twitter for more info.
Hi Michael,
I’ve just installed CS2 on Snow Leopard, and it seems to work fine. Activation might be tricky if you’ve already used up your activations without releasing them from your old computers, but Rosetta and CS2 are chugging along here.
Since CS5 is out, does this mean a definite no to CS3 fixes? I am very surprised at the fact that Adobe states they love their 3 million developers and multiple platforms, when they clearly do not. Since cs3 and cs4 have all these issues, would it not be nice/logical to have an upgrade incentive and move people into CS5 with comfort and lack of resentment. Instead we have a higher price for CS3 owners to upgrade to CS5 than we do for CS4.
I truly do not understand the logic here. Isn’t the point of good business to take care of your customers and keep them for the long run?
Just some thoughts,
Thanks Everyone.
[I’m afraid we can’t go back and work around whatever Apple has broken in older releases. (For what it’s worth, they don’t go back to fix what they broke in their their own older apps–e.g. older versions of Final Cut and Aperture.) It’s not that companies don’t want to make things right. It’s that the cost relative to doing other things you want (improving the app for the future) is very high. –J.]
logic here? I guess that you don’t mean you. You foolishly upgraded ONLY part of your software, the OS, without thinking if Apple supported, yes APPLE, older things?
And who does updates for software 2 generations old? you? LOL
and the good news is that Apple has announced that they are trying to fix the 10.6 screwups with respect to CS3 in their next patch: 10.6.4
Question for Adobe users here:
Do Adobe CS3 apps work perfectly fine in OS X Tiger or Leopard?
The Reason I’m asking, is that I’m thinking of getting one of the CS3 suites and sticking with OS X 10.4 Tiger on my G5 and installing it on my MacBook Pro, and then just installing CS3 apps on that machine. Would that work? avoid all of the bugs that you are experiencing by installing CS3 on Snow Leopard?
Like to hear your feedback.
Thanks.
Hi everybody
I am working on iMac 27″ with Snow Leopard. Because of an older Scanner LIDE from Canon I had to install Photoshop CS3 launched with Rosetta.
PS CS 3 worked on Rosetta fine and also the old scanner worked till the last OSX upgrate from Apple.Since than CS 3 does not open anymore with Rosetta. If I start it without Rosetta it opens normal and I can work on it. But without Rosertta the plug-ins for the old scanner will not open.
Did somebody have the same problem and did you find a solution??
Thanks for help. Hansdiego
Hi everybody
I am working on iMac 27″ with Snow Leopard. Because of an older Scanner LIDE from Canon I had to install Photoshop CS3 launched with Rosetta.
PS CS 3 worked on Rosetta fine and also the old scanner worked till the last OSX upgrate from Apple.Since than CS 3 does not open anymore with Rosetta. If I start it without Rosetta it opens normal and I can work on it. But without Rosertta the plug-ins for the old scanner will not open.
Did somebody have the same problem and did you find a solution??
Thanks for help. Hansdiego
Hi everybody
I am working on iMac 27″ with Snow Leopard. Because of an older Scanner LIDE from Canon I had to install Photoshop CS3 launched with Rosetta.
PS CS 3 worked on Rosetta fine and also the old scanner worked till the last OSX upgrate from Apple.Since than CS 3 does not open anymore with Rosetta. If I start it without Rosetta it opens normal and I can work on it. But without Rosertta the plug-ins for the old scanner will not open.
Did somebody have the same problem and did you find a solution??
Thanks for help. Hansdiego
The OSX upgrade released today claims to fix some CS3 problems.
Good Luck.
Hello Scott, you are great, I made the upgrade of OS X and CS 3 opens in Rosetta without a problem as it did before.
Thank you very much for your help.
Hansdiego
Hello Scott, you are great, I made the upgrade of OS X and CS 3 opens in Rosetta without a problem as it did before.
Thank you very much for your help.
Hansdiego