Older Mac Compatibility with Older Adobe Creative Software

martian68 wrote:

I have however found my old hard copy of Adobe CS3 together with disks so I'm thinking it would be easier to get an older mac running and older version of the software and OS. I have my old Macbook Air 2015 (Monterey), but that won't run the installer app. Maybe a newer version of Adobe pre-subscription would work. Any suggestions anyone?

The only "newer, non-subscription" version of Adobe CS would be CS6 and the last version of macOS that it could be installed on was Mojave. Even then, the word is that Adobe took the CS licensing servers offline years ago, so you probably couldn't activate CS6 even if you could install it.

BTW, there is the Adobe Photoshop Photography Plan, currently $19.99/month that includes current versions of Photoshop, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

If you actually need all the features of Photoshop, Illustrator & InDesign, take a look at Affinity (Designer, Photo, Publisher). It's a good alternative. Currently $165 one-time license ... and there is a free trial.

martian68 wrote:

I have however found my old hard copy of Adobe CS3 together with disks so I'm thinking it would be easier to get an older mac running and older version of the software and OS. I have my old Macbook Air 2015 (Monterey), but that won't run the installer app. Maybe a newer version of Adobe pre-subscription would work. Any suggestions anyone?

Note that Adobe may have taken DRM activation servers offline for old products such as CS3. See, for instance, Adobe Community – Reactivate CS3 on new computer [CS3 is dead] . Purchasing an old Mac to run CS3 could therefore be a waste of money: you'd get the Mac all set up, you'd install CS3, and then you would discover there was no way to satisfy the DRM (a.k.a. "intentional incompatibility") so that you could actually use the product.

As for applications that would allow you to use a current Mac:

If you are not strongly tied to Adobe products, you could consider the Affinity V2 suite – Photo 2, Designer 2, and Publisher 2. You can get an Affinity V2 Universal License which gives you access to all three of these applications, on all three platforms (macOS, Windows, iPadOS), for a one-time payment of $165. In the past, Serif has run many sales on the Affinity products, so if you happened to hit one of those, the bottom line might be even less.

Some other possibilities for photo editing would be the free GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), darktable, and RawTherapee programs. Although the word processor in LibreOffice has some page layout features, I do not know offhand of Open Source alternatives to Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Publisher 2. There is Apple's free Pages application, but I am not under the impression that it is in the same league as the other two.

To add to Servant of Cats information.

I had the CS6 Master Collection and intended to use it into retirement. But then Apple moved away from Intel CPUs. That killed any ability to run an older version of macOS in a VM for CS6. I could have kept one of our 2018 Intel minis I had CS6 installed on, but wanted to move ahead technology wise. That, and Photoshop is really the only app I would use with any regularity in retirement.

For other apps in the suite, I no longer had a need to so much as open InDesign. Illustrator almost the same. Premiere Pro and Encore? Kind of useless going forward as it can't produce a Blu-ray disk higher than 1080. No 4K or above.

When I sold the CS6 app, I had to include all of my other Adobe software with it as each was an upgrade. And legally for Adobe, all of the previous physical copies had to stay together. So the buyer got CS6, CS5.5 and CS5. Anything older didn't need to be included. I then filled out the transfer of ownership forms so the buyer would be new owner of those serial numbers. Those titles disappeared from my Adobe account, and were added to the buyer's.

The catch to that now is Adobe no long allows transfer of ownership. Or at least that's what I somewhat recently read. You might be able to activate CS6, but that's a big if right now. When I activated CS6 on my 2018 mini, it couldn't connect to an activation server. After three attempts, you'd get a message saying something in the order of "Oops! We can't seem to find the server." You then got a link to manually activate the suite. But, I don't know if you can even do that anymore. And Adobe will also no longer help over the phone with anything involving CS6 or older.

Wanting to avoid paying for the full CS suite in retirement (even after they offered it to me for $35 per month after I said I was dropping the full suite), I did this instead. The goal being to eliminate all subscription software, if possible.

Photoshop - dropped down to the Photoshop Photography Plan at $9.95 per month. You can no longer get that price. And I'm never going to let my license for that drop, or I'd have to sign up again at $19.99/month. I looked at Affinity Photo, but there are a couple of third party filters I use a lot, and neither works correctly in that app.

Illustrator - replaced with Affinity Designer.

Acrobat Pro - replaced with Master PDF Editor.

InDesign - replaced with nothing. I haven't had a need to build a book layout since retiring.

Premiere Pro/Encore - replaced with the full version of DaVinci Resolve. This app is particularly nice as you pay for it once, and all future updates and upgrades are free. You can't burn disks, but that doesn't matter anymore. I can output up to 8K video as an MP4, put it on a flash drive and view it on our UHD Blu-ray player from there. If I really, truly need a disk, I can output the video as Apple Pro Res and create a 1920x1080 Blu-ray disk in Toast Titanium.

Audition - replaced with the full version of WavePad.

I know this is a lot, but with Adobe making it nearly impossible at this point to use any of their older perpetual license apps, it's a far better choice to look at other titles that aren't subscription software, and will run on the latest, and much faster hardware.

CS3 is PowerPC software. At the very newest, you'd need a 2010 Mac running Snow Leopard with Rosetta installed in order to use it. If you could even get it activated, which is very unlikely.