In case you recently bought CS4 and wonder whether you qualify for a free upgrade to CS5, you might want to consult the Post-Announce Upgrade Frequently Asked Questions document on Adobe.com, or simply call Customer Service (1-800-833-6687 in the US).
How about all of us on CS3? Why is it $799 for the upgrade instead of $599?
[I don’t set pricing, so I’m afraid I don’t know the answer. I do know that I’ve heard complaints from people who stay current & are offended that others pay the same price to jump up by several versions. We can’t please everyone. –J.]
I mean c’mon….they charge the same to go from Macromedia Studio 8 to CS5 as they do to go from CS3 to CS5!
[So, you’re upset that there’s a sliding scale, but you also want the scale to slide more? –J.]
I think the path to an answer is what John posted. The implication, of course, is that you won’t get an answer *here*. Honestly, if I had an answer for you, I’d share. But I suspect that most don’t want to hear any answer that doesn’t lower the price, anyway.
John, thanks for the reply. Yeah I know you’d don’t set pricing. I was just voicing my pain.
If I remember, CS4 was $400 for a while. So that means even you were current, you’d pay $400 for CS4 and $599 for CS5. That’s a cool $1000 bucks. Now how does that make sense since I can skip CS4 and get CS5 for only $799.
I’m just trying to say the pricing doesn’t make any sense, and I don’t remember Adobe doing this before.
As for the studio 8, I’m just using that as an example of why the scale isn’t consistent. If anything the $799 should be for studio 8 users and the $599 should be for CS3 and up.
Thanks again for the reply, I know you can’t set pricing 😉
-Kevin
So, if you stayed current you paid $1000. If you skipped CS4, you paid $800. So, I guess that for $200 you got all the benefits of CS4 for 18 months. Each of us has to decide what the benefits of a new version are worth. I’m still using CS2 because I couldn’t justify the cost of the upgrades even though I would have loved to have CS3 and CS4. Now, I have to decide if I will upgrade to CS5 for $800, or wait for CS6, which I’ll probably have to pay full price.
[I don’t know what pricing model will be in place in the future, but the current rule is that you can upgrade from three revs back (i.e. from CS2, 3, or 4). Therefore, as you say, if you skip CS5 & the current rules remain in place, you’d need to pay full price for CS6). –J.]
We can complain all we want about the pricing, but it’s up to each of us to decide if it’s worth it regardless of what anyone else is paying. If it’s worth it to you, upgrade, if not, don’t.
Thanks for the info John; I know you don’t set the prices, but conveying the info to the masses has been a big help.
I have a coworker who recently bought a personal license for production premium (about 2 days before the announce-announcement), and I passed the info along to him. I’m happy to say that he didn’t get squeezed by his bad timing; you guys did the nice thing and upgraded him free (and made yourselves a new loyal Adobe customer in the process).
If it helps anyone else to hear it, it seems y’all have good people *behind* the front lines as well.