dug 
I’ve loved Photoshop since I first played with version 2.5–it did stuff you could only do at expensive post-production facilities on an old all-in-one Performa. Version three came along and wow, layers. Before you know it everyone had two gig of ram installed as every layer contained all the file’s data so we were routinely working with 100meg+ files (on an already rusty 8200 tower in my case).
So anyway, I’ve watched Photoshop grow up and my hard drive has kept up as best it could. I’ve queued at the door to buy every upgrade or new version, but to be honest, once you’ve got alpha channel manipulation and layer compositing along with a reliable and easy to use selection tool, what else do you want? I’ve been living happily with version 7 and no doubt only using a tiny fragment of the app’s awesome functionality set for a while now…
It seems to me a lot of the OSX ports have been excuses for major version upgrades. I mean Suitcase X11 (or whatever it’s called) is a rough and ropey fix of bugs that shouldn’t have been in version 10 in the first place. Illustrator stopped being stable after version 5 and to be honest, the version currently on my machine is labeled version 10 but should probably be more like 7.8 and now Adobe wants me to buy CS versions of all my software.
This is really getting silly, Adobe InDesign 2 is a barely acceptable bug-fix from 1.0 that just about does what Quark can do on a bad day and I’m supposed to pay full whack for it? I vote we cool it on the version numbers, try and stabilise the software and develop some sensible upgrade pricing policies.
So in the end, just for fun, I’ve put a copy of Photoshop CS on an iBook. The main difference with v.7 as far as i can tell, is that I can no longer find the Photoshop icon in the dock or on the desktop as the bold and colourful graphic has been replaced by an empty white box with a dirty feather in it. This is no doubt some clever in-crowd reference to the fact that all releases of photoshop have had cat code names and the feathers must be the remains of the big cat’s dinner…
I guess I won’t be upgrading anymore for a while :-)