As Creative Suite sold in the UK and rest of Europe is so over priced compared to what it is in the US, I’m thinking of traveling to New York to purchase my copy. Am I allowed to do this under the EULA? It is a very tempting option as this way I would save hundreds of pounds even after paying for the flights. I believe I can’t order direct from Adobe Online Store in the US? If you can, could you also explain some of the reasons behind charging customers in the UK almost twice the amount? I understand if you cannot comment.

Yours Sincerely, Kristian Tapaninaho

And Adobe responds (emphasis added):

Dear Ms [sic] Tapaninaho
It is possible for you to go the USA and buy the product.However you will not be able to receive support from european support. I would also have to mention that yyou [sic] can only upgrade to North American versions. The offical [sic] reason for the pricing is as follows. The price of software in EMEA (europe-middle east-africa) reflects both the additional expense to develop and test Adobe’s applications for local markets and operating systems, as well as for the delivery of complimentary Warranty support. Adobe’s complimentary Warranty support covers product installation and defect issues for the life of the current version of Adobe’s desktop applications.

Yours Sincerely,
Mr. Lennon
Adobe Customer Service

This to me raises at least three questions:

1. Does it really cost that much more to localize it to Arabic, Chinese Simplified (Windows only), Chinese Traditional (Windows only), Czech, Dutch, English, French, French (Canadian), German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean (Windows only), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Spanish (Latin American), Spanish (North American), Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian?

2. There is no ‘UK English’ or ‘International English’ version of the apps. So if it costs more to develop it for UK market, is there some extra features we’re paying for? Of course not. Does support cost more for UK customers than US customers? No, the call centers are probably in India in both cases. (I realise that I can’t back this argument, I am merely assuming)

3. If this is the ‘official’ reason, what is the unofficial reason? To loosely quote Chief Executive Bruce Chizen: ‘We can charge as much as we want’.

Anyhow, I’m gonna stop complaining about this and start paying up.

But this should not be a big deal. As Adobe’s Chief Executive Bruce Chizen said:

CS3′s prices may seem steep compared to other shrink-wrapped software. But Adobe customers — particularly graphic and video artists with deep-pocketed corporate clients — spend money relatively liberally compared with average software buyers. Via NY Times

And he is right. I guess. It’s always the customer who pays in the end.

Problem is that I’m in the start of my career in the creative industries. I don’t have that many deep-pocketed corporate clients, yet. I need to find a way around. I’m still working at the UCCA until this Friday so I would qualify for the lecturers edition. Or I could always find a student to order it for me. Respective prices for these two options are £230 for the student edition and £540 for the lecturers edition. Very tempting as an idea. Get the program for fraction of the price. Obviously this would be too good to be true. EULA for these editions says that you can’t use them for commercial work. So that’s not gonna work.

There is one way to save money on buying Adobe software (actually applies to just about everything else, too), fly to the US. Compare these prices on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Madness. Almost the same amount of money, only one is in Sterling and the other in USD.

$1,780.99 or £1,592.99. Quite embarrassing. That’s $1,355.60 difference.

Of course you must take in count that UK price includes 17.5% VAT but the US price doesn’t have the sales tax which, as far as I can remember correctly, is 8% in NYC. If you calculate that in, the difference comes to only $1,213.11. Bargain.

Conclution: the cheapest way to get the suite is to fly to NYC (£170), get a hotel for few nights (£70), buy the suite (£900) and fly back.

I don’t really understand why this is. It would be more understandable if we were talking about something like this paper machine, shipping and handling cost are clearly high. But no, it’s only a box size of a small box. I really do appreciate all the hard work that the brilliant software engineers put into this product. Functionality of this piece of software makes my life easier every day. But I don’t think we should be punished for having such a strong economy. After all, if we pay $1600 for something, it’s still $1600 when you take the cash back to States.

–kristian

Side note 1: I really like the public beta of Photoshop 10.

Side note 2: This sort of corners the fact that it’s cheaper to fly than take the train, even short distances. Appalling. Doesn’t make any sense.

Side note 3: Back in 2003, when I was planning on buying my first Mac, it would have been cheaper to fly to NYC to get it than buy it here in the UK. Including staying in a hotel, eating great meals, seeing the Empire State Building and flying back. And possibly even paying the VAT at customs when you fly back.

[update]: As I was writing this yesterday, Adobe’s Product Selector wasn’t working. I had tried it before with some interesting results. Now that it’s back online I can show what I got. Here’s what I selected:

And here’s what I should be buying:

Interesting. It tells me to get the Master Collection although I wouldn’t touch Premier for video editing. And actually, the selections I made, wouldn’t necessarily force me to take Photoshop Extended either.

First benchmarks for PS 10 beta:

MacBook (rev A) 2Ghz/2Gb/120Gb : 1min 25sec(!)

This is the same machine that earlier did the benchmark in 2:10 (CS2) and 1:39 when booted to Windows. This obviously means that optimisation to Intel processors has been done very well and as this beats CS2 in Windows XP Photoshop itself is a lot faster.

I’ll be adding other benchmarks (CS3 Windows and CS3 PowerPC) later on when I find time to do them. Do post your own timings as comments.

Back soon,

admin

[edit] Almost forgot, here’s links to the image and Photoshop action that is used to do this benchmark. Also, you can find the other, earlier, benchmarks from here.