Ever since Adobe moved to a subscription based system there has been a scramble to keep the old versions of the Adobe suite on your Mac. With a machine still running the old OS like Mojave (macOS 10.14) you can still use the old version of the Adobe products without paying the subscription based system. When you go to Catalina 10.15 which was the first OS that was a true 64 Bit version of macOS the old Adobe Product wont work along with a few other products like Office 2011 and some Steam games for Mac like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to name just a few. In short anything 32 Bit stops working unless you have a 3rd party app to allow it to run on 64 Bit. Outside of keeping an old Mac to run your very old version of Photoshop you are forced to look either to the subscription based Adobe Cloud version or look for a new product to use.
With the cost of the whole suit for around £60 per month depending on if you qualify for a discount like Education etc. you need to look at which products you use. For anyone that is in the creative world of things like Photoshop or Indesign I would look no further than the Affinity products from Serif. They can be bought separate from the App Store or direct from their store, the choice is yours. I originally bought each product from the App Store and signed up for the beta version of Affinity Publisher which I then got for a very cheap price when it was officially released. Total cost well I got change from £100 with the advantage of having the apps in my Apple ID library so I could install it on several Mac’s unlike Creative Cloud which only allows you to run it on 2 machine. Lets also not forgetting the Cloud part of the title from Adobe so all preferences sync between both machines its registered to. Not idea for those who who are using 1 licence for 2 people.
What products are there you ask?
Affinity Photo:
This product is Photoshop with nearly all the bells and whistles. The bolt-ons are excellent and the frequent sales from their website means you can pickup some amazing extracts for a very readable cost. Remember once Bought its yours no subscription required.
Affinity Designer:
This product is Illustrator with again nearly all the bells and whistles of its Adobe competitor . As mentioned above The bolt-ons are pretty good and watch out for the sales.
Affinity Publisher:
This one is Indesign in a nutshell. It works very well with page layouts and the Affinity Publisher Open Source material is very good. Like the other products it opens its counter parts file with very little effort.
I have placed links to each product from their website you can also look them up on the App Store which will show the ratings as well. Other advantages are there is a cross platform version from their site so it can work on macOS, Windows (why) and the iPad. For version 2 I bought the whole suite (Affinity V2 Universal Licence) which included the iPad version which was very easy to install and my iPad is version 9 so rather old these days. The cost was again less than £100 (Current price is £159.99) and this one was cross platform so if I needed (I hope I never have to) I could install Affinity products to a Windows machine using the same licence from their website.
In short it’s worth a look even if you sign up to their site just for the information and newsletter. I think you would be well surprises with over 3 Million users and counting and nearly 5 stars for each product.
Here is the link to Serif Affinity site, enjoy.