Adobe announced a lot of changes to their core creativity suite today, CS6, as well as a massively overhauled Photoshop, but forget features, here’s the real thing you need to know. Adobe Creative Suite 6 is the last app suite Adobe is ever going to let you buy. From now on, you’ll have to rent your Adobe apps.

Yup, that means forget about buying Adobe Photoshop CS7, or any other Adobe CS7 app for your Mac. Now they are all “Creative Cloud” apps: Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC and Premiere Pro CC. And if you want to use one you have to subscribe and you have to do your work in the cloud.

In other words, you can’t just “buy” Photoshop anymore. It’ll cost you $50 per month for all apps, or $20 month per individual apps.

Adobe’s software has long been probably the most pirated software out there, so I guess this is one way to kill piracy: make sure that stuff like PhotoShop is “always on.”

It’s also fantastic news for the developers behind PhotoShop-competing apps like Acorn and GIMP. This is a major opportunity for them, appealing to professionals who want to own the software upon which they bake their bread and churn their butter.

Still, it’s the end of an era. From now on, you either rent Adobe’s software or you go with an alternative: buying it or pirating it is just no longer going to be an option.

Source: The Next Web