[benrbray]

By your reasoning you're not expecting people to use the same software for more than ~4 years.

I bought Adobe Master Collection CS4 (student edition, for $1000) way back in 2008 and have been using it for the past ten years. It runs even better than it did back then because of the better hardware available now! The subscription model would have been much more expensive for a user like me.

[ken]

You were lucky. Apple doesn't guarantee long-term compatibility of applications on Mac OS. You bought just after the latest Mac transition, so your ten years didn't happen to cross any big one (OS X, 2001; x86, 2006).

I bought some Adobe software in 2001, and it was a gigantic pain to get it working under early OS X (hours on the phone with Adobe), and wasn't usable under Rosetta, 5 years later.

If the rumors and historical trends are to be believed, we're on the verge of another transition. I would not buy an expensive binary blob for Mac today without an assurance I could get an upgrade, if/when there's another architectural transition.

[c0nsumer]

I ran into this yesterday. I use Illustrator infrequently, in spurts, to do mapping work for a non-profit that donates our volunteer time to work on mountain bike trails in parks. I last purchased CS6 on a non-profit license because my of minimal use --- a week or two at a time every six months or so --- which really doesn't fit with the subscription model.

I hadn't fired it up since updating to Mojave, and last night when I went to update one of our maps I found that Illustrator CS6 pretty much isn't usable. It's so ridiculously slow that trying to type out a string of text on a blank artboard beachballed and took almost a minute for the 20 characters to display.

The workflow can't move to Affinity Designer because it's not really compatible with AI files[1], and I really don't want to get into the subscription model because even the non-profit license is $200+/year. Thankfully the CS6 perpetual license is for Windows as well, so I can spin it up in a VM... And MS is really good at backwards compatibility.

But it really sucks not being able to use it natively as I have for years.

[1] It'll open the PDF portion, but for a map with lots of complicated lines, these get changed from single paths in Illustrator to lots of curves in PDF. It's a mess trying to put these back together.

[benrbray]

Good thing I'm on Windows :)