When Will Adobe CS7 – or CS6.5 – Be Released?

Six months ago today, Adobe released Creative Suite 6… While that wasn’t long ago, this is usually around the time customers start asking when the next release might be coming out, and what new features and improvements will be included in it.  We’ve covered this topic before for CS6, ahead of its original launch date, so let’s take a look at the future…

What should we expect going forward?  Will the next version out be CS7, and when will that be? Or will we instead see a mid-cycle release like CS6.5 available first?  Fortunately Adobe has already answered all these questions, and in fact they answered them last year.

Back when CS5.5 began shipping in May 2011, the company for the very first time shared a great deal of information about their future Creative Suite product release schedule. Previously the cycle had been for a new version of the CS software coming every 18 months or so. But beginning with CS5.5, Adobe rolled out a new plan in response to accelerating creative needs:


This launch marks a major change to Adobe’s product release strategy for Creative Suite, the industry-leading design and development software for virtually every creative workflow across print, video, mobile and online media. Adobe now plans to have milestone Creative Suite product introductions at 24-month intervals and – starting with Creative Suite 5.5 – significant mid-cycle releases designed to keep the worldwide creative community ahead of the latest advances in content authoring.

And further to that:

Adobe plays an important role here, and we have realized that our historical 18-month release cycles are not going to be sufficient to address these rapidly-evolving trends. So Adobe decided to ship major milestone releases of Adobe Creative Suite software approximately every two years, with mid-cycle releases that incorporate the most critical features customers need in the interim years. The first mid-cycle release is Creative Suite 5.5, and it addresses these challenges.

So add it up and what does it mean, how does the future look? It means we might expect Adobe CS7 to be released in the spring of 2014, with an interim CS6.5 release coming out in between, probably in May of 2013…  As with CS5.5, we may not see all Creative Suite applications upgraded for CS6.5 – for example, there wasn’t a CS5.5 version for Photoshop or Illustrator.