An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop: Why I Finally Quit Adobe
After decades of loyalty, I finally uninstalled Photoshop, driven away by broken updates, invasive license checks, and a subscription model that felt like malware. Frustrated by the Creative Cloud app's decline and Adobe's hostile cancellation process, I switched to Apple's Creator Studio and Pixelmator Pro, finding a much better experience without the constant headaches.
At some point, the Creative Cloud app now felt like malware to me.
- yardie
> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
- pier25
I've been using Photoshop since CS1 (was a Corel user before that).
Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were the last good versions. Very snappy and with probably 99% of the features I use today. Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model which I've been paying since 2013.
Apple Silicon support was really bad for a couple of years (tons of GPU issues in Illustrator) but I will admit it's better now.
The worst offender is Creative Cloud. I remember their Sync crap couldn't even be removed from Finder at one point. Even today whenever you use an Adobe app a dozen processes will spawn in your computer and remain there even if you disallow any background stuff in macOS.
- donatj
My biggest complaint about Photoshop is that every time CPUs have gotten faster, it's gotten slower. I've used it since the mid 1990s recreationally, early 2000s professionally. Every time I get a major CPU upgrade, it will be fast for a while, but with updates become slow again. This pattern has repeated over and over again.
Most recently when I moved to Apple Silicon from an Intel Mac, I was excited how quickly everything worked again. Now my M1 is showing its age, and I noted when I started Photoshop the other day it took close to 30 seconds.
The UI is a little snapper than it was on a 68k Mac back in the 90s, but nowhere near the order of magnitude one would expect.
- dtagames
Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
- pauldoerwald
Remarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.
- amelius
> A little while later, Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file for license verification purposes.
Holy moly.
- d3Xt3r
Since you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO.
- mft_
A tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1].
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.