-It's time to sign up for a subscription to everything.
I'm Bridget Carey and this is your CNET Update.
You can no longer simply buy the full Photoshop program or any other software from Adobe's Creative Suite.
Adobe announced that, now, customers must subscribe to the Creative Cloud to get updated versions of Adobe's full software suite.
Getting the whole suite costs $50 a month whereas buying the whole suite at once
used to cost $2500.
In this subscription model, customers might be more willing to pay that $80 monthly fee for the chance to use all of the software and it's the equivalent to paying it off for over the course of four years.
And four years is probably when you want to upgrade again anyway.
If you just want an individual program, it will cost $20 a month.
This subscription Cloud service was first introduced as an option last year and Adobe says customers prefer it.
So, now, the company made subscriptions the only option.
Although if you use something like
Photoshop Elements which is a light version with less features, you could still buy that with the flat one-time fee.
This subscription stuff only applies the full versions of the Creative Suite now re-branded as the Creative Cloud.
We're seeing many software companies slowly switched over to subscription models.
Microsoft office began pushing a subscription option and so are other productivity and storage apps like Evernote and Dropbox with subscriptions, software updates overall that continuously to users rather than having one big update you pay for every year or two.
And YouTube wants to collect monthly fees from you as well.
We're expecting to hear something soon about YouTube launching a paid subscription service.
The Financial Times is reporting that YouTube will introduce a new ala carte service this week for a select group of channels that require viewers to pay $2 a month to access the videos.
YouTube confirmed it is working on this subscription model, but it's just unclear exactly when it will launch.
And if you're even thinking about getting a fitness tracking gadget, the Fitbit Flex wristband is out now and our CNET review says this is the
best fitness tracker you can buy and that's because it's comfortable to wear and has a good variety of help tracking features.
The unit tracks your steps, sleep, and calories burned.
Of course, that's an estimate of how much you're moving you arms around throughout the day.
Right now, it only offers direct bluetooth syncing with the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note.
But if you don't have those phones, you could just synch it to the computer to analyze your stats.
The Flex also has this little LED screen that displays how far along you are at meeting your daily step goal with little dots.
So you can quickly check if it's worth taking the stairs or the long way home to meet that goal.
You can also see how restful your sleep is.
It checks how much you move around the night.
It costs $100 and comes in several colors, although you have to pay extra for those fun colors.
That's your tech news update.
You can find more details at CNET.com/update.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
