said by ryzst:I bought my 27" iMac with an i7 chip in 2010, so that's interesting news.
The Photoshop CC rental is also a scam, so that's not an option. This could be Adobe's 'New Coke' moment.
CS2, however, is old enough that it was coded for ppc compatibility - probably coded natively for ppc (wiki says it came out may 2005). I would guess that up til 10.9 Mavericks, CS2 was allowed to run in some sort of PPC emulator mode of OS X. Apple has always been somewhat ruthless with the forced upgrage cycle.
Me, I went for the CC, as much as I dislike software as rental. 10 bucks a month for it and lightroom are fine for now. Hopefully by the time they ratchet up the price I'll be able to import 16 bit depth psds into Gimp with all 16 bits kept intact. There is a lot of free software out there... I like the Gimp & UFraw combo build from partha.com. I've heard good things about hugin for stitching and it is also f/oss and GPL software.