Heads up to any Mac users who have purchased the Adobe Illustrator CS upgrade. You might have a bum serial number.

Regular readers might have heard me describe Illustrator 10 as a “stabbing nightmare of deathly slow performance and unexpected quits”, so imagine how happy I was to see our Illustrator CS upgrade box on my desk yesterday morning, left there sometime in the night by the UPS fairy.

Full of hope I quickly popped in the CD, double clicked the installer, clicked through, and gladly typed in the serial number only to be greeted by an error message telling me the serial number was invalid. WTF?

Come to find out this is a widespread problem. My coworker e-mailed me this link (log in as a guest if you’re not registered) to an Adobe Forum which details the issue:

Roughly 1650 copies of Illustrator CS were shipped out to some retail outlets with bad serial numbers. We have recalled those units back to Adobe.
221 units of Illustrator CS that were purchased directly from Adobe were sent out with bad serial numbers. Of those, we were either able to stop the shipment and resend a new copy, or our customer service agents have been calling customers with new serial numbers.
The units affected were Mac Upgrade.
There have been incredibly long hold times when calling customer service.
There has been a very long delay in getting customers the serial numbers.

This is a pain in the ass, but they are working to fix it and will hopefully have it resolved soon. I am just hoping that this glitch is not indicative of the kind of user experience we can expect from Illustrator CS.