Adobe CS Woes (Warning: Contains Rant)

[Allen Davis]

I dragged my feet for far, far too long before jumping onto the Intel-Mac bandwagon. I did so because I’d made such a huge financial investment in all the Adobe software with which I’d made most of my living.

My previous most-loved Mac was my G4 MDD that I’d done everything imaginable to trick out. It was gloriously fast and unbelievably stable running OS X 10.4.11 (which I believe remains the most stable version Apple ever released).

Most of my professional life was spent “living” inside Photoshop and Illustrator, as well as Pagemaker and InDesign. The amount of money I gave Adobe over the years was both infuriating and embarrassing, given the initial expense of purchasing the software and then the costly upgrades.

I knew there were abundant options to Adobe’s software in the Open Source world, and after I bought my first Intel-Mac a few years ago (a 2008 20” iMac), I tried them all.

And they sucked. Every one of them.

Aside from the hideous user interfaces, the learning curves were incredibly steep. Being a senior citizen now, I wasn’t very amenable to learning a bunch of new tricks. Moreover, these apps lacked some very serious features I’d grown to love and use in Photoshop and Illustrator. For both raster and vector work, I found at one point I needed two separate applications for a single job because the open source apps didn’t have all the features/capabilities I needed under one roof.

And I’d also grown to loathe Adobe and especially its move to a subscription model for its software. But its policies regarding software upgrades really burned me up. For instance, if you skipped buying an upgrade for more than ONE FULL VERSION, Adobe would refuse to sell you an upgrade. Period. You had to pay the full toll for new software. It was painful enough over the years to cough up $159 every time Adobe upgraded Photoshop or Illustrator, but to have to hand over 4-6 times that amount was unbearable to me.

The last versions of Adobe’s applications I’d paid good money for were Pagemaker 6.5, InDesign 2.0, Photoshop 7.0, Illustrator 10.3 and Acrobat Pro 6. None of these would run on an Intel-Mac without a little assistance, which I got for a brief while by running a PPC emulator called SheepShaver.

SheepShaver was a pain in the butt to install and get working the way I needed, but I muddled through and was happy until I upgraded my OS from Yosemite to El Capitan. SheepShaver simply wouldn’t boot anymore and I soon learned its support and development had been abandoned.

Since I refuse to rent software, my little sister encouraged me to do some shopping on eBay for the software I wanted. The road was a little bumpy, but I ended up with Creative Suite Design Standard 3, CS Production Premium 3, and CS Design Standard 4. Despite having the original packaging and serial numbers, installing the software was an issue until I miraculously found solutions on Adobe’s website.

I’ve done all the troubleshooting I can think of, but Photoshop and Illustrator still have issues. When I launch Photoshop CS 3 or 4, I get a dialog box saying

I’m blue in the face from doing this.

The good news is, Photoshop runs just fine, so I simply chalk this up to a minor annoyance.

On the other hand, Illustrator CS4 simply refuses to behave on my MacBook running Sierra 10.12.6. It crashes, freezes, throws spinning beach balls up and/or just quits. It works nicely on my iMac (topped out at El Capitan), but doing any work there makes it necessary for me to remember to save my work as a CS3 file or I won’t be able to make any revisions or do any editing on my laptop.

Since I’ve got a roomy 1 TB SSD in my MacBook, I re-installed CS3 and use its version of Illustrator there. Can’t see that I’m missing anything in the way of features between 3 and 4, and CS3 is WAY more advanced than my PPC Illustrator 10!

All this being said, I believe I’m going to hang on to Sierra and permanently park any ideas of lurking into High Sierra territory. Given all the glitches, hiccups, etc. that 10.13.x has experienced thus far, I’m even more firmly convinced to stay right where I am now as long as I possibly can concerning macOS.

Yeah, this post is mainly a rant, but I’d really like to hear from other Mac users who may have found themselves in a situation similar to mine.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hi,

I totally understand your story and frustration. A lot of what you stated is why I have abandoned Adobe products all together on my personal devices, including Flash, as I mentioned in one of the other threads. I also have parted ways with all Microsoft products. Of course, Adobe and Microsoft software is installed on my work machines, as I have to still support end-users and clients.

The only counterpoint I have is that CS3 and CS4 aren't officially supported on Sierra or High Sierra. Some users have reported they do work, albeit with certain limitations and issues.

CS3 (2007) was a Universal Binary, that supported PowerPC and Intel Macs. CS4 (2008) removed the PowerPC support for some of the apps included. They are both over 9 years old, so it isn't any surprise that they don't function 100% in an OS that is 8+ versions newer. The technology included in the newer OS versions is just too different and advanced.

These days, it's really hard to expect anything to stay compatible for more than 2-3 years, as the advances are so much faster than they were previously. One really has to think about software/hardware purchases more, as the useable life is much shorter, and the ROI is much smaller.

C

 

[Allen Davis]

Hi,

I totally understand your story and frustration. A lot of what you stated is why I have abandoned Adobe products all together on my personal devices, including Flash, as I mentioned in one of the other threads. I also have parted ways with all Microsoft products. Of course, Adobe and Microsoft software is installed on my work machines, as I have to still support end-users and clients.

The only counterpoint I have is that CS3 and CS4 aren't officially supported on Sierra or High Sierra. Some users have reported they do work, albeit with certain limitations and issues.

CS3 (2007) was a Universal Binary, that supported PowerPC and Intel Macs. CS4 (2008) removed the PowerPC support for some of the apps included. They are both over 9 years old, so it isn't any surprise that they don't function 100% in an OS that is 8+ versions newer. The technology included in the newer OS versions is just too different and advanced.

These days, it's really hard to expect anything to stay compatible for more than 2-3 years, as the advances are so much faster than they were previously. One really has to think about software/hardware purchases more, as the useable life is much shorter, and the ROI is much smaller.

C

I really appreciate your response, Cory. Like I said, Illustrator CS4 doesn't behave on my MacBook, but CS 3 does. And since I'm such a late-comer in even using the software I now have, I'm finding features I never dreamed of a couple of years ago. In fact, Photoshop by itself has so many new features, I'll never learn them all, let alone use them.

Speaking of new features, I think many software companies overload their products with new features and give little-to-no information or help in finding and using them! And this is especially true of Adobe, who used to provide nice, big, thick User Manuals. But that being said, Adobe's manuals might as well have been written in Hebrew because they were always largely incomprehensible.

From what you've said, I'm going to consider myself very fortunate that I have CS 3 and CS 4 and that they work so well under Sierra (Illustrator CS4 on my MacBook being the only exception). They do everything I could ever want to do, and I'll likely be dead long before I ever find a need for anything more.