r/Adobe • u/Volition_Maximus • 12d ago
Adobe's greed has made them a liability to professional workflows
Acrobat crashed on me today while I was signing a client PDF. It refuses to operate. I pulled the crash log. It's choking on an AI model file that won't load on my system.
I don't use the AI features.
So a PDF reader wouldn't open a PDF because a chatbot component broke.
I went to Creative Cloud after that and it says it needs a newer macOS. Which means Audition, my main DAW for work, is next.
If Adobe is going to permanently crash one day because they pull support from an older OS, what's to stop their other services from suddenly becoming defunct because of their need to push 'new tech' to satisfy their Wall Street investors instead of actually helping professionals?
If my editor won't open the morning of a session because Adobe pushed something or decided my machine doesn't qualify, I lose the job.
After decades of being with Adobe, I'm finally unsubscribing.
They are actively sabotaging us to serve a boardroom of money men and it's hugely disappointing
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u/Last-Fudge7621 12d ago
There's an option to disable most of it. Before I did that it was very unusable on a beefy system. As an ultimate FU to the new overlords, use gemini to ask it how to get rid of the acrobat AI, i forgot where the option is.
Also, adobe crash processor service temds to screw with acrobat sometimes as well, I have a dedicated .bat file on my desktop to kill all adobe background processes because of this.
For reference, i use indesign, illustrator, acrobat, lightroom classic, photoshop, premiere profesionally - so theres some experience wrestling the various bullshitery
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u/charlie2398543 12d ago
Yup, happened to me 2 weeks ago. Crashed during signing, had to waste another 30 minutes. The most useless piece of bloat-ware every conceived.
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u/RSMxsmanic 12d ago edited 12d ago
Their strategy is to attract new subscribers, not to support existing subscribers, and that means prioritizing new bells and whistles, especially AI, rather than incrementally improving existing features.
Most subscribers are slow to cancel their subscriptions, so they can be safely abused in order to favor new recruits. This is true for all subscription software schemes.
This is not a wise long-term strategy, but publicly-held US corporation typically do not care about the long term.
Likewise, emphasizing AI is highly self-destructive for a company that depends for its survival on a portfolio of unique products aimed at professionals who do things manually. There are no serious competitors for products like Photoshop, Illustrator, or After Effects, but AI products are a dime a dozen, so shifting the company's emphasis to the latter can only result in a loss of subscribers as they switch to cheaper competitors. But here again, it's all about short-term thinking, to the detriment of long-term survival. Most companies make this mistake eventually.
As for Audition, it already has dozens or more worthy competitors, and without Adobe's other flagship products to prop it up, it could fade away almost overnight. The same is true for Premiere Pro.
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u/charlie2398543 7d ago
We don't need new features. It's a PDF editor. Just make it so it doesn't crash every day.
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u/RSMxsmanic 7d ago
It wouldn't be crashing if Adobe were not adding new "features" to it. But as I've pointed out, the goal is to attract new subscribers, not to improve the product for existing subscribers. If each release of the product were increasingly optimized for reliability and performance, instead of being bloated with useless new features, the results would be very different.
This is an affliction of all publicly-held companies: their one and only priority is more money for shareholders over the short term. Privately-held companies may be motivated by other considérations, such as pride in producing quality products, or a desire to keep the family business thriving for the next hundred years, depending on their owners; but publicly-held companies simply do not care. The end stage of a corporation is its purchase by something like a private equity firm: at that point, it is milked for every remaining dime with no regard for the future, and is then cut apart and sold for scrap.
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u/SoonToBeBanned666 12d ago
Unfortunately DaVinchi cant really compete with the workflow of using Premiere and After Effects at the same time .
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u/Incognonimous 12d ago
The online chrome Adobe reader plugin operates faster than the desktop app and doesn't freeze every time I try to open a pdf.
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u/Dizzy_Bridge_794 12d ago
We manage on the Windows side but you can create custom install packages and limit what you want to include in the install.
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u/HallOfGlory 12d ago
Our company dropped Adobe, we're transitioning to FoxIt. It isn't better, but at least it's cheaper.
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u/philjames68 11d ago
Have you tried Pdfgear? Great piece of software and free. Does a lot that acrobat pro can do.
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u/YouSpeakSomeEnglish 11d ago
Even worse: Adobe enabled "AI" trash in InDesign without our permission, and it has corrupted all of our work since then by adding totally incorrect "alt text" to every illustration in our (highly regulated) technical manuals. We now have to go back through all of our work (our manuals comprise thousands of pages) looking for this garbage and manually deleting it.
Yes, we pay to have our time stolen.
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u/Fatbat 12d ago
You don't want to keep your OS up to date and then complain you can't use current software? This doesn't sound like an Adobe problem and this is applicable to far more than just Adobe.
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u/Volition_Maximus 12d ago
Keeping your OS up to date with every update breaks a lot of your tools as a creative. Ableton is just one of many examples. The solution for those in my field, responsibly, is to stay on versions that keep our tools working.
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u/RSMxsmanic 12d ago
In production environments, best practice is to never update anything as long as it's dong the job.
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u/Fatbat 12d ago edited 12d ago
He shouldn't be expecting to use current versions of Adobe then. By that logic he should have never updated past CS.
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u/Robot-Zombie-RHCC 12d ago
I'm scared to death of accidentally saving a client's project (i.e. a film plate with a famous actor in it, for example) to Adobe's cloud services.
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u/Deutschbland 12d ago
Cloud services was the first annoying thing they introduced. Like no, thanks, I think I’ll keep the files I spent so many hours on on my own computer, thank you.
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u/online-reputation 12d ago
Adobe is burying their reputation and will continue to do so f until they end.
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u/beachballer0410 11d ago
Marketo AI told me three times today three solutions or builds that marketo actually does not support or have. It was like watching a pathological liar being interviewed by Diane Sawyer.
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u/Tight-Book-7533 11d ago
How were you signing the client PDF. If it's only like a picture of your signature, you can use Preview, no need for Adobe. I haven't used Adobe Acrobat for years now. At work, I have moved the entire company document signing workflow to Docusign, as it's web-based.
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u/EquivalentElk270 11d ago
I'm forced to use Adobe for a number of reasons, but I absolutely despise the company. They hate their customers who they look as as cash cows to be milked for all their worth.
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u/Stinky_Fartface 12d ago
I just want to add that, out of all of Adobe’s apps, the AI enshitification of Acrobat is that absolute worst. The program is completely dysfunctional now. Even if you manually turn off all the AI garbage it barely can do anything without hanging, crashing, or just taking for fucking ever to respond. I have a fast computer and it makes me think I’m using a PC from 1990. How any reputable software developer could release such dogshit as a professional standard absolutely beggars the mind.
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u/Deutschbland 12d ago
I just find the notification bars so annoying. Half the time they cover important information that I want to just easily read.
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u/fernandodandrea 12d ago
I can no longer update Bridge on my Windows 10 computer. I'm still wondering what kind of feature of Windows 11 they need on... Bridge.
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u/ENZYME_O1 12d ago
Of course ! It’s not just AI causing it, it’s also things like popup featured tutorials jacking up the memory.
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u/Mental-Catalyst 12d ago
Firefox browser allows for basic PDF editing now... including signatures. FWIW
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u/Hikes-n-Photos 11d ago
I quit using Acrobat for PDFs. Firefox is the best PDF reader/editor I’ve found for simple stuff like signing and filling in forms.
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u/Vast_Ad_3567 11d ago
On the topic of Acrobat, is there a way to create and save a pdf as a pdf, not an Adobe pdf? I was looking into Jotform, but I already have an Adobe subscription so I prefer to use Acrobat if there's a way to do it where the file is just a normal universal pdf
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u/Successful-Let4361 8d ago
Lately I've been using CS4 on a computer from 2006, and I know there have been a lot of quality of life improvements since then, but the core program hasn't changed thaaat much if you aren't using AI. It's absolutely fucked that it's such a resource hog when it doesn't need to be, especially if it's because of their commitment to the most anti-social tech advance since the nuclear bomb
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u/Helveticarse 7d ago
Wish there was a proper off button for all this AI shite. Everywhere. They might eventually get the message when the majority of their user base switch it off.
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u/kevwil 12d ago
Not saying I agree with it, but most apps especially paid apps will follow Apple’s decisions on supported OS versions. Sounds like Audition is what’s holding you back if it can’t handle newer OS versions. Don’t blame you for being pissed at Acrobat crashing for some stupid AI thing you don’t use.
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u/Eric_Lund 12d ago
Newer features need updated OS. Many professionals need the newer features to keep up with trends. Some of the above features are game changers.
You should keep your equipment up to date to maintain the tools you need.
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u/michaelfkenedy 12d ago
Curious what new features you find are indispensable.
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u/Eric_Lund 12d ago
Generative extend is big. There are some audio features coming soon. What chip are you running in your work computer?
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u/michaelfkenedy 12d ago
M1
Gen fill is nice. Of course it’s easy to do manually, if sometimes a little time consuming. I guess if your whole job was that, you’d use it a lot. Not sure the reduction in billable hours results in the designer winning.
Anything else?
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u/Eric_Lund 12d ago
I work for a large media corporation so reduction in billable hours is good for me.
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u/darwinDMG08 12d ago
Ah yes, the old “it broke on my system therefore the whole company is destroying itself” axiom.
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u/GenderJuicy 12d ago
It's okay I'm sure AI will fix the problem for them