What has changed so significantly in EAGLE to warrant a major version change (V8 -> V9)?
The Design Manager is quite a significant usability improvement, it makes navigating your design, getting useful information like trace lengths, layers used, via count etc really easy and makes making changes to a trace or groups of traces quick because you can find and form a group of traces quickly.
The Rip-up tool has changed significantly. It now has many modes. Some of them are just exposing features which were previously only available on the command line (all and polygons) but it's added various modes for ripping connected copper or ripping between devices.
The new quickroute modes which enable you to tell EAGLE to finish off the route you are currently making, or you can also get it to route a number of nets at once. It's not 100% yet and on my boards which tend to be very dense with very tight DRC rules it does struggle. I tend not to use it but I'm sure it'll get better and become usable.
In the schematic there are lots of enhancements to make using busses a lot easier and also for breaking nets out from components. I had a ULP previously which added a context menu entry for defining and managing busses. With v9.0 this is now no longer needed as the bus functionality has been significantly improved.
It also seems that every release takes longer and longer to open to the main control panel, comes to something when Altium loads faster than EAGLE these days!
How long does it take to load on your machine? I just timed loading up the latest version on macOS and it took around 3.5 seconds to get to the control panel. This is a little longer but not significantly longer than with v7 which took just over 2 seconds. I'd be more concerned it if were taking tens of seconds.
All of this subscription rubbish is fine if you use it occasionally, those of us who use a package daily is not cost effective, there might be a lot of releases vs Cadsoft, but the releases are not in my opinion significant enough to warrant paying over and over again for the software.
It only costs more if you used to use a previously licensed version for a number of years and not upgrade to later versions. But if you kept the license up to date and were always licensed for the latest edition of EAGLE under the old scheme it works out similar if you pay for the annual licensing. If you use it less often then the monthly may work out cheaper when you don't subscribe every month.
Thankfully those who still produce OSHW projects that use EAGLE (lot more using KiCad these days) are small enough to use comfortably in the free edition.
You can still open larger designs even in the free edition, if they are larger than the free limits you can still view them and run the CAM. But yes you can't edit in that case.
Someone I spoke to recently summed it up nicely, EAGLE is no longer worth it for businesses, but fine for hobbyist use.
That's just one opinion. There are lots of people who find EAGLE worth it for business, I'm finding more people now using it for commercial purposes than ever. Compare features between EAGLE v7 and EAGLE v9, there's lots of worthwhile changes.
Of course, that's just my opinion too
Best Regards,
Rachael
Personally I still use V7, which I have a pro license for, and yes I know you can open larger designs, but sometimes you need to move stuff out of the way to see what's behind it etc.
For me there are not significant enough changes, they might be "nice to haves" but certainly not necessary between V7 + V9, especially considering how much it has cost me vs how much it would have cost me at the current subscription rate. Started using EAGLE on V4, moved through to V7 progressively, tried 8, nope.
EAGLE starts in approximately 8 - 10 seconds, providing I don't have to "sign in", I have an i7 with 32GB RAM, Windows 8.1 x64, Altium starts in around 5 seconds for comparison, EAGLE 7 starts in around 1 second. This has been true since V8, though it does seem to get slower, from clicking the icon to being able to use the control panel.
That is interesting as I find less people are using it commercially, 99% of jobs for PCB design are all asking for either Altium, ORCAD, or bizarrely some are asking for Pulsonix. I haven't found a single one asking for EAGLE.
I do see a LOT of adverts on sites like UPWORK and FREELANCER that ask for designs to be ported from EAGLE to something like Altium, particularly in the UK.
I have even seen 1 advert asking for skills in KiCAD! Never thought i'd see that but hey ho!
EAGLE was a good tool, it seems a bit bloaty now with the online connection and subscription code they have added, when it is running it runs as well as it ever did, and I have used V9 just to see if it was any improvement on V8, sadly for me I can't see one, some new icons perhaps.
You pay your money you take your choice, if you find the new version and the subscription model works for you then great, for those of us who do not think that way it is quite sad to see the decline.