Apple has decided to compete for creativity app users

Apple should buy Sketch

I much prefer the interface of Pixelmator and Pages to Photoshop and InDesign, and paying once (for the non-AI-augmented version of Pixelmator, which Apple indicate will continue to receive some manner of updates going forward) is a nice plus.

It’s unfortunate there’s not a real Illustrator equivalent; Pixelmator has okay enough vector editing and export support for my needs, but notably will render the canvas rasterized at whatever the nominal resolution is even when zoomed in editing an SVG. Vector exports work as expected, just the editing is rasterized. Still, a small price to pay for not paying monthly for Adobe’s mountain of crufty malware.

A single job posting for an engagement team doesn't really tell you if its a company strategy or not.

Directors hire on random ideas all the time and then pivot as needed

Really not interested in this one. There is no data portability as none of the file formats they use for anything are documented and they are shovelling you into an eternal subscription model. At least Adobe file formats are well documented and have importers on pretty everything else so you can escape if you need to. I can open illustrator and photoshop files in a load of other apps, including open source. Pixelmator and their office stuff, nope.

I’ve been in this trap before and I’m only interested in portable, documented, non subscription stuff.

I’ve moved to Darktable, Inkscape and libreoffice here mostly for my needs. I don’t really need photoshop equivalent.

Sketch lost the market to Figma, and now Figma is losing the market to vibe coding.

I'm not sure what the value proposition of Sketch is these days apart from local, non-cloud editing (although you can even get that with a pretty decent UI these days with Lunacy).