X1 vs X4

[gawdzira]

For me, Annosets alone are worth the price of buying a new version let alone an upgrade. The other thing that came in (I think) X2 was the new render styles which gave us the watercolor rendering. I use this almost exclusively for my presentations and it is a big time saver over a ray trace. Probably because I don't know enough about ray tracing but still, a quick and easy way to give the client something that looks expensive and very artistic.

But, back to my metaphors (or are they similes?)

X1 is like Daniel Liebskind (an interesting structure and strong base yet slightly difficult to look at and somewhat buggy) to X4 is like Zaha Hadid (A lot of wow, so much so that I am drawn to her in an amorous way because I find artistic talent to be a very strong aphrodisiac).

[lbuttery]

Matt:

the releases are closer to 12 months than 18 months

X4 was 13 months

most chiefers find SSA to be a great benefit
but its not one size fits all and that is why it is optional

you can upgrade each release and stay current without doing SSA
but skipping some upgrades just doesn't make sense to me

you have to pay a higher fee to catch-up and thus you are paying for an upgrade that you never had the benefit of using

I just don't see where there is a savings by skipping upgrades

Lew

[sutcac]

Those would be similes.

[Ray LoRae]

I have 16 megs of ram and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti using Windows 7 64 bit.
I draw huge plans and find X4 very slow when redrawing. I could edit more rapidly
with X1.

[mkennedy]

God point Lew, I just googled CA v10 and got user threads from 2006, from which I assumed it was released at least 6 years ago, thus the 18 mo average. I also otice the website trumpeting ARTs 20th anniversary, 14 releases (if the ever was a v1) in 20 years also comes very close to 18 months on average. Perhaps with the advent of a subscription based model, the magnitude of the release will shrink and the frequency increase. OtherCAD used to ship many of their upgraded features one at a time as express tools for subscription users.
As for the expense, the persistence of software users is often driven by the other things I mentioned - loss of compatability (read todays thread on an x2 plan crashing in x4), hardware upgrade costs, training costs, installation and deployment time, revision and publication of office standards to reflect new methodologies, loss of compatability with colleagues and partners outside the office.
Sometimes the ROI just isn't there. For a design build guy doing 5 or 6 plans a year I'm not sure he could ever recover the cost. For a multi seat office, more likely but still slow. IMO, it's really only one or two seat, full time offices that recover the cost quickly.

[kiwideziner]

ray
older programmes are faster on the same machine as they do not do as much.
Matt
the only advantage for me is the new features, then I have to decide wether there are enough that i use to make a difference. I never have had X1 as there was nothing worthwhile in it for me. Since then I have had every upgrade

[lbuttery]

Ray:

you should check with tech support

could just be a setting or two that is hindering your performance ???

Lew

[mkennedy]

ray
older programmes are faster on the same machine as they do not do as much.
Matt
the only advantage for me is the new features, then I have to decide wether there are enough that i use to make a difference. I never have had X1 as there was nothing worthwhile in it for me. Since then I have had every upgrade

Graeme: My bad, Lew and I kinda hijacked the thread (mostly me and got off on the tangent of upgrades in general, not x1 v x4 specifically. I, like you skipped x1.

[tmunson]

At the user's conference last year, we were told of some really great things planned for future versions of Chief Architect. I would not want to miss out on any of that so will definitely keep current.

[Bradley Boltz]

I own two site licenses which cost $600.00 per year to keep current in SSA. It's a bargain keeping the 2nd license up to date for 1/2 price and especially compared to the upgrade costs of AutoCad and probably other CAD software (Archicad etc).

I always found it better to stay in the upgrade path even thought Chief made a few retrogressive changes(leader line arrows etc) that they will never give back. At this point they could slow down on the superfluous BS and have the program backwards compatable or create a "Backwards Compatibility Mode" for at least the next coupleversions.

They don't do this because it forces folks to upgrade to the next version.

Finally, why can't Chief go back and recreate the libraries with all the items that were lost from V7 forward? I lost a lot of stuff by not knowing how to keep the former libraries and don't anticipate being able reloading v8 just to grab missing library items.Seems like Cultured stone used to be better out of the box along with some others. -BB

[lbuttery]

I own two site licenses which cost $600.00 per year to keep current in SSA

$600 ???

SSA costs $395

Lew

[perryh]

Lew, 2nd seat is cheaper to renew

[Bradley Boltz]

Hey Lew,
you are correct about the cost of a single seat SSA subscription but if you own more than one site license the cost of subsequent license subscription is $200 per additional license subscription.-BB

[lbuttery]

Brad:

ahhh, I mis-read and thought you meant $600 per seat

Lew