I'm trying to get my head around the Technical Suite bundling scheme, relative to Draw X7.
I just updated Designer Technical Suite to X6 in August of 2013. What do you fellow Designer users typically do when a new version of Draw is released, but a corresponding version of Designer is not? Do you go ahead and upgrade the Draw Suite, or wait until a new version of Technical Suite is announced? If one doesn't upgrade the Draw Suite to the latest version, does one end up suffering an upgrade price "penalty" due to not upgrading from the most recent version? If one goes ahead and upgrades every new version of Draw as soon as it's announced, does one end up with costly "upgrade glut" because Designer versions occur between Draw versions?
I actually prefer working in Designer over Draw even for general commercial illustration, not just for techish drawing, and can get away with that for the majority of my work. But I like to keep up-to-date with all my programs, and would like to maintain current working and conversational familiarity with Draw as well as Designer. So I like the fact that they are bundled (so long as they continue as two separate programs), but they are so similar that the bundling of them is a bit awkward, given that they don't maintain version parity.
It's similar to the historic situation with Adobe's insistence on releasing new versions of Acrobat Pro between new versions of its Creative Suite bundles. I've repeatedly been "hit twice" by upgrade cycles when keeping Acrobat up-to-date, and want to avoid that kind of situation here.
Frankly, it seems to me that the Draw X7 upgrade should be lower-priced for current-version licensees of the higher-priced Technical Suite, given that the two programs are so similar and assumedly Designer users consider Draw rather "secondary".
(Please don't trot out any advice for rent-based licensing. I'm not at all interested in that; it's why Adobe has lost my business completely.)
JET
I would love to be a Premium Member for Corel Technical Suite but unfortunately that does not appear to be an opportunity?
Taking out a Premium Membership for just CorelDRAW, purchased as part of the Tech Suite, if it is possible is somewhat short of a halfway house.
I am not at all interested in 'renting' and Adobe CS3 is no longer supported on the later Mac OSs, so it was a case of swinging back to Corel because the latter also has the ability to natively handle the myriad of sketches produced in my pre Mac years.
@JET
I opted for the Tech Suite because Designer offers useful tools to create 3D style sketches amongst many more technical type tools. Personally I would like to have seen DRAW updated rather than a separate Program. DRAW is still my favourite, horses for courses.
G