Upgrades Gone Wild!
After weeks of pulling my hair our trying to figure out the best route to take with Adobe upgrades, I finally ordered individual upgrades of Photoshop (CS3 Extended.), Illustrator, and In Design. I’m still waiting for Adobe to release an upgrade to Go Live; when they do, I will order it, too. I ordered the packages from Apple at a slight discount; together and with shipping and taxes, they totaled up to $803. By the time I spend my expected $199 for the Go Live upgrade, I will have spent right at $1000.
My wife wanted us to get Flash and she can buy it at the educator’s discount, so I am expecting her to pick that up for us next week. Even though she’s getting Flash CS3 Pro at about half the cost of retail, when you add that to what I’ve already spent, then I saved only about $260 over buying the all-in-one “Creative Suite Upsell” I qualified for. If you’re not familiar with the “Upsell” package, it’s the one Adobe sells you when you already own Photoshop, In Design, or Illustrator. I happen to own all three, but I only get a $200 price reduction just the same. In Adobe’s mind, customer loyalty doesn’t count for much. Like a lot of Adobe users, I feel I deserved more of break than that. But que’ sera! At least, Adobe hasn’t wrapped up all their “professional” line of software in a suite like Apple has (i.e., Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Studio 2).
While I was shopping, I also ordered 2GB of Ram for my Mac Pro for $219 from Other World Computing. I hope to recover $75 of that by sending them the two 512MB sticks I’ve got. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, by doing this I slightly increase the Mac Pro’s upgrade potential by filling two memory slots with 1 GB sticks instead of 512’s and even pay a few bucks less than I would have had I ordered a single 1GB (two 512 DIMM’s) alone.
I also noticed that OWC had a 2GB stick that would work in my MacBook Pro (MBP) for only $192. While I hadn’t planned on doing that, it would max out the RAM in my MBP which currently holds two 1 GB DIMM’s. Since my MBP and my wife’s Intel Core Duo iMac use the same memory types, I’m going to take the spare 1 GB DIMM from the MBP and pop that into my wife’s iMac, maxing out the amount of memory it can hold at 2 GB. I also will trickle down a 512MB DIMM from my wife’s iMac into her black MacBook, giving her a slight increase in RAM from 1.25 to 1.5 GB.
Of course, if I was really took “upgrades gone wild” to the extreme I would have bought a 30 inch Apple Cinema Display and replaced my Mac Pro’s Nvidia GeForce 7300 video card with an ATI X1900. But the reason I backed off buying an entire Adobe Creative Suite (which I almost did when standing in the Galleria Apple Store but they didn’t have the software in stock) was because I was trying to keep the credit cards from swelling too much. Just this much will not only keep me busy for a while but will give me more to blog about. And I can always use help with that.
My wife wanted us to get Flash and she can buy it at the educator’s discount, so I am expecting her to pick that up for us next week. Even though she’s getting Flash CS3 Pro at about half the cost of retail, when you add that to what I’ve already spent, then I saved only about $260 over buying the all-in-one “Creative Suite Upsell” I qualified for. If you’re not familiar with the “Upsell” package, it’s the one Adobe sells you when you already own Photoshop, In Design, or Illustrator. I happen to own all three, but I only get a $200 price reduction just the same. In Adobe’s mind, customer loyalty doesn’t count for much. Like a lot of Adobe users, I feel I deserved more of break than that. But que’ sera! At least, Adobe hasn’t wrapped up all their “professional” line of software in a suite like Apple has (i.e., Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Studio 2).
While I was shopping, I also ordered 2GB of Ram for my Mac Pro for $219 from Other World Computing. I hope to recover $75 of that by sending them the two 512MB sticks I’ve got. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, by doing this I slightly increase the Mac Pro’s upgrade potential by filling two memory slots with 1 GB sticks instead of 512’s and even pay a few bucks less than I would have had I ordered a single 1GB (two 512 DIMM’s) alone.
I also noticed that OWC had a 2GB stick that would work in my MacBook Pro (MBP) for only $192. While I hadn’t planned on doing that, it would max out the RAM in my MBP which currently holds two 1 GB DIMM’s. Since my MBP and my wife’s Intel Core Duo iMac use the same memory types, I’m going to take the spare 1 GB DIMM from the MBP and pop that into my wife’s iMac, maxing out the amount of memory it can hold at 2 GB. I also will trickle down a 512MB DIMM from my wife’s iMac into her black MacBook, giving her a slight increase in RAM from 1.25 to 1.5 GB.
Of course, if I was really took “upgrades gone wild” to the extreme I would have bought a 30 inch Apple Cinema Display and replaced my Mac Pro’s Nvidia GeForce 7300 video card with an ATI X1900. But the reason I backed off buying an entire Adobe Creative Suite (which I almost did when standing in the Galleria Apple Store but they didn’t have the software in stock) was because I was trying to keep the credit cards from swelling too much. Just this much will not only keep me busy for a while but will give me more to blog about. And I can always use help with that.
posted by Andy Foster at
9:59 PM
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