I wonder if the Knoll brothers, Thomas and John, ever dreamed anyone could take the joy out of creation in their home-grown Photoshop by typing words into a prompt removing the artist and the art from the equation? I highly doubt it on every level. I still remember the joy of using Photoshop before it even had layers. Adobe’s latest tell of their full investment in supporting the GenAi$$ance is crystal clear. I’d place bets that they’re now steering their bloated ship of fool’s tools based on ChatGPT’s navigational charts. They have clearly lost the war with keeping their pro users onboard. Their gluttonous Creative Cloud’s license agreement even gives them full access to our screens, files, and sensitive data. Period.
“The Adobe mud hut has been on double-secret probation for over a decade that started the day we were sent a series of bean counter surveys inquiring how much we would pay for a monthly subscription.”
Now Adobe is placing all of their bets on folks that get a God complex while generating plagiarized, mediocre AI slop with their chatbot marriage engagement of the week. It actually makes good sense. Adobe acquired most of its software just as MicroSoft bought Halo when it was originally being developed for the Mac. They followed this pattern again with MineCraft, and are now so fully invested in artificial intelligence there’s no going back. I jumped the Adobe mud hut two years ago. I kept renewing Creative Cloud just in case I needed it only because Adobe charges me a minimal $29 for everything just to keep me as a paid customer. Affinity Design, Photo, and Publisher easily replaced Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. They’re much snappier and for the most part much more stable and rarely crash (usually related to maxing out RAM with a heavily layered file).
Now that Affinity by Canva has been released we get all three and then some in their latest release on October 30, 2025, timed just right as the Adobe Max “creative” conference ended. Their free-for-all time studio toolbox that’s no bigger than 700MB shows just how modern code writing is done right. Each Adobe application is so bloated with legacy code weighing in at multiple GBs. Slow, buggy, always in Alpha mode software that’s costing people over $850 annually. We cherished Adobe back in the early 90s when Photoshop arrived. That was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away when art and design not only mattered, but the artist was front and center in that universe. We’ve come to the end of Adobe’s reign.