I bought Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign CS2 a long time ago. Still use it since it's mostly for hobby and very occasional freelance. There's a tiny bit of jank running it on Windows 10, but otherwise it starts quickly and runs perfectly. The only thing I'd change if I could is to have a 64 bit version. This one chokes occasionally on very large files. But I don't deal with those enough to invest in the subscription.

For Mac, CS2 was PowerPC binary. It ran on the first Intels with Rosetta, but that's not usable for a long time now. Mac users, if they want Photoshop, they must go for subscription.

There were a few versions of the suite in between CS2 and subscription. I have CS5 here non subscription. Wouldn't there be an equivelant on mac?

CS6 was the last. But even on Intel processors, running it on Catalina or later is crash-prone and requires a fair bit of hacking around. The main problem is that there were still chunks of 32-bit code in there and macOS has stopped supporting that.

This. I'm keeping a Mac mini on Mojave specifically to run Illustrator CS6. The price of an Intel Mac mini on eBay is fairly competitive with 2 years of Illustrator CC payments.

I feel this every time I start up my old Adobe CS4 on my private (somewhat older) Thinkpad. While the work notebook (Dell Latitude whatever) is faster than the Thinkpad, the current Adobe CC surely takes longer so start than the CS4.

> I would jump on an optimised version of Illustrator with the feature set from 10 (or more) years ago.

Genuine question, can't you just install an old version of Illustrator?

Not anymore! Adobe has been taking the activation servers offline for its older products for some time now. Newer versions as I understand it are the service model "Creative Cloud" meanwhile

You can, just not an official version :/

So... it was basically a subscription all along.

Other issue is version compatability if you're working on a team

Buy a USB cd ROM drive (around 30 dollars / euro), buy an old copy of illustrator, say 5 or 6. Use offline activation using the included code.

No need for a drive, a virtual image would do as well

Yeah I know it varies from person to person but for me the addition of useful features I use with any regularity stopped at like… CS2. And if I’m being honest, I’d have no issue getting along with CS1 or even pre-CS 6.x/7.x.

> I would jump on an optimised version of Illustrator with the feature set from 10 (or more) years ago.

The iPad version?

Affinity Designer?

Figma? Sketch?