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I woke up this morning to find this unfortunate email from Amazon in my inbox.

The email states that in less than two weeks – on July 1, 2013 – Amazon will be closing all the Minnesota-based Amazon Associate accounts. If you are an Amazon affiliate based in Minnesota, you are simply out of luck. Your account will be closed at the end of the month and there is nothing you can do about it.

Amazon is closing all Minnesota Associate accounts because Governor Dayton and the Minnesota congress have demanded new tax revenues from multiple sources beginning the second half of this year. One of those sources is Internet sales from retailers in other states.

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Finally! Apple announced the new Mac Pro today. It is completely redesigned and totally awesome.

I providentially tuned into the WWDC keynote about two minutes before Phil Schiller introduced the new Mac Pro. When I heard the announcement, I may have run around the room a few times waving my hands and cheering loudly. It's a good thing that I wasn't physically present at the keynote, as I may have been dragged out by security.

I predicted the next Mac Pro would be a third of the size of the previous model. Apple reduced the size to one eighth. That means the new model is about 12.5% the size of the previous Mac Pro. Not only is it super compact, it is shaped like a cylinder, which houses a "thermal core" for heat distribution.

The new Mac Pro supports up to 12 Intel Xeon processor cores, includes super fast 1866 MHz ECC DDR3 RAM, has dual AMD FirePro GPUs, and standard PCIe-based flash storage. I had hoped the new Mac Pro would include four Thunderbolt ports, but Apple beat my expectations and added six Thunderbolt ports. Awesome. Best of all, the new model supports three 4K displays right out of the box.

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Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is next week, commencing with the always captivating keynote address on Monday. Apple is expected make several announcements, including forthcoming updates to iOS and OS X, new laptop models, and a new "iRadio" service.

While these are all exciting things, I have my own my wish list for WWDC.

1. New Mac Pros

That's right – my wish list contains one item – new Mac Pros. Apple has snubbed pro users multiple times over the past several years with either no updates or minimal changes to the Mac Pros. With all the attention Apple has given the iPhone and iPad over the past three years, they've largely ignored the Mac Pro. It seems Apple has forgotten about those of us who use our Macs for professional purposes.

If you are a serious web developer, graphics editor, audio engineer, video producer, CAD designer, or software programmer, nothing beats a Mac Pro. Not only do Mac Pros have tons of processing power, you can choose your own graphics card, install multiple internal hard drives, and add as much RAM as you want. Best of all, you can choose one or more custom monitors that suit your needs.

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Today, PC.net celebrates its 14th birthday. I suppose that means this website is relatively ancient in Internet years.

Technically, today is the 14th anniversary of Sharpened.net, which became PC.net on May 1st last year. But since the domain name was the only thing that changed, I think it is still appropriate to celebrate today as the website's 14th birthday.

What I am doing to celebrate? The same thing I do every year — sit at my computer and update the website. The life of a webmaster is not a glamorous one.

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Adobe hopes you will never buy their professional software again. Beginning today, the company wants you to rent their software for a monthly fee.

Attendees at Adobe's MAX conference were probably expecting the company to introduce Creative Suite 7 (CS7) this morning. Instead, Adobe announced a move from Creative Suite (CS) to Creative Cloud (CC). Unlike Creative Suite, Creative Cloud products can only be used on a subscription basis. You can no longer buy the software.

I understand the user benefits of the software subscription model. You always have access to the latest version and you get incremental feature updates rather than waiting for major version releases. But that's where the benefits end, at least for the user. Adobe, on the other hand, benefits by generating more steady cash flow (due to steady monthly subscriptions), getting people to overbuy (spending extra a software programs they don't need), and locking users into an endless upgrade cycle.

The negatives of the subscription model far outweigh the positives for users. First of all, the software costs more. Regardless of Adobe's claims that Creative Cloud makes the software more accessible for more users, most people will end up paying more overall. A CC subscription costs $49.99 per month with a mandatory one-year subscription. That is about $600, which is far more than the $375 upgrade cost for the last Creative Suite upgrade. Sure, you get more software programs with CC, but you probably don't need all of them or even half of them. The other option is to pay $19.99/mo for individual Adobe programs, but that is an even worse value.

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