The much coveted Photoshop Creative Suite is known being one of the major industry standards in editing software. It's also notorious for being really, really expensive. If you think it's bad over here, you've got nothing on the people in Australia.
Apparently it's cheaper to take a flight all the way to the US of A, buy a physical copy of The CS6 Master Collection and fly back instead of just downloading a digital copy over there. How crazy is that? If we break it down to some crude math (bleh): A boxed copy costs AU$4,345 (or AU$3,950 for a digital copy)...Opposed to the $2,600 USD you would spend over here, which is converted to around AU$2,500. That's a startling difference of AU$1,845.
You could potentially get a flight to LA for around AU$1,150, buy the physical copy and still have AU$695 left over...Even if you get smacked with an import tax for some reason, you'll still save money and you might even rack up a bunch of frequent flyer miles instead of waiting for your outrageously expensive download to finish.In response to the public outcry (and being summoned in front of an angry Australian Parliament), Adobe has cut the prices of their annual cloud subscription suite from $62.99 to $49.99 per month to compare with the US cost. That's great for people who are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, but it still doesn't address the problem with the price gouging on their traditional software that makes up a huge part of their sales. When asked about why Australia is getting screwed over, the CEO of Adobe began sidestepping the question, complete with waving hands trying to mystify the discerning customers with promise of a wonderful, cloud-driven future. Nonetheless, people aren't all to happy about it and we're left to wonder why Adobe beefs up the price on digital goods that aren't technically imported. The only answer we have right now is: Because they can...
Source: Gizmodo Australia