Comment by Mistletoe 2 days ago
Computer software is on the chart as getting cheaper with time but that can’t be right? I remember Photoshop used to be a disc and you owned it for a reasonable price and now you subscribe to the Adobe protection racket. Software as a service would be a service which should go in the top of the graph with other extortionists like colleges and hospitals.
Your perpetual license on a fixed version of Photoshop would not have been transferrable across OS/compute generations for 25 years.
In practice most longtime Photoshop users paid the $600 once and some $200~ upgrade cost every 2-4 years. Adjusted for inflation its same or more than what you pay now.
If you think you'd be fine now with 25 year old Photoshop features you maybe forget how basic the product was compared to today. Further besides OS compatibility there were file format / camera raw version additions made over time that you'd have wanted.
You can get 2000-level Photoshop for free from many sources now, so you shouldn't be complaining about cost increases. Paid software has moved upmarket and bundled. The work done by people who need paid software has become more complex and vertically integrated (productivity increase.)
Are you also happy running Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma) which seem to be the last versions officially supported? (I guess on Windows it may have worked in some form or another longer than that but surely it doesn't work anymore on Windows 11 which is the only version currently supported.)
aren't there open source programs that have caught up to early 2000s era photoshop?
A great secondary point, yes. If you truly believe year 2000 Photoshop was good enough for life, there are plenty of cheap/free options out there today.
Arguably your base desktop/tablet/phone OS editor which is free may already do enough.
Well there are other examples, eg Google Docs is free, no need to pay for Office.
I don’t know about the aggregate data tbf
This is what came to mind for me. Certainly there are free versions of everything that used to cost money a decade or two ago. The paid software now is much more advanced.
The reasonable price was $600 in 2000 which is over $1000 adjusted for inflation. That's four years of subscription, the useful life of a perpetual license may not be much more than that.