It's a shame Adobe doesn't have as much competition for its other apps.
There are better ways to compete than just slashing prices. There are plent of things that I wish Adobe would do with its applications, but their upgrade prices aren't really unreasonable. Usually when people complain, it's over specific terms, some of which have been fixed. It used to be that complaints were related to things like having to upgrade for the latest camera raw as the old ones often didn't gain support for the newest cameras. The DNG converter helps a bit with this. The irritating things are upgrade terms on creative suite and when they attempt to change upgrade policies late in a cycle.
They aren't the most interesting company, but in terms of remaining competitive, dropping prices is something you typically do when you don't have much of anything else to add. Note that Apple does not typically compete based on price with their hardware, which is their main business (aside from phones where subsidies apply).
Writing as an Aperture 1.0 devotee to now, an open letter to Apple:
Do you or do you not want to transform Photography? (Was this one of the 4 areas Steve noted?) I see what you've done with music, communication, and soon TV/video. But I'm not feeling that the push is there to innovate in photography. Everything seems reactive and second-thought now. At the photo trade shows and conferences, Lightroom is *assumed* to be the tool you are using. (There are only the occasional Aperture speakers; Apple is a no-show.)
Even if they did this, never rely on Apple to maintain interest in software. They are just too unpredictable with changes, as these programs make up a small portion of their income.
Photoshop (Elements or CS) is a destructive editor. If you go into Photoshop and change the sky purple and save it, the sky is purple. Granted, PSD files can use layers to keep things from being destructive and can store an edit history so you cn go back in the sequence, but at heart it's a destructive editor with "oops"-recovery features bolted on.
Lightroom (as Aperture) is a non-destructive editor. If you go into Lightroom and apply a filter to make the sky purple, you can always go back and remove that filter or adjust the filter to make the sky green, whatever. While you can take the current version and send it over to Photoshop etc for pixel-by-pixel editing, at heart Lightroom works as a "cookbook" where you create a recipe and see the results live.
As far as when they are used, generally speaking Lightroom/Aperture replace what a traditional photographer would do in a dark room, tweaking exposure and color image-wide and with masks, etc. Photoshop is more along the lines of "creating" information in the image (such as removing power lines and creating the sky that would have been there). The tools of each can sometimes be used to accomplish the tasks of the other, but if you have both then you're in a more efficient position.
They've improved over the years in terms of non destructive editing. Layers are much more than a go back. They offer a lot of masking options and stuff. If I was going to compare to something, I'd look at Nuke, because it's an interesting design, even if it's not geared toward still imagery. Rather than a layer based workflow it uses nodes. You work with connections between one thing and another.
You should probably understand that you're working with cached previews in lightroom. Considering the necessary steps to make the raw data usable, you aren't going to dump it into PS completely raw. A lighter level of processing with adjustments similar to those in raw editing while it's proofed on screen as it would be seen in srgb or your preferred colorspace would be a functional alternative here. As it is when you make your raw adjustments, it's clamped at 0-255. In 32 bpc mode this is not the case. In CS4 they finally gave us anti aliased vector paths like those available in Illustrator.
I'd still like to see an option for 10 bit displayport, but that is Apple's failure on the driver end. It's not just a PS thing. You simply can't get it aside from a couple mac pro/gpu combinations running Leopard. I am guessing thunderbolt does not support it.
