“Final Cut Pro is a very complete and very expensive solution, costing almost twice as much as Adobe Premiere. This price difference might have left some breathing air for Premiere, but then came Final Cut Express, less complete than its bigger brother but more importantly US$250 less expensive than Adobe Premiere. Doesn’t it look like a full scale attack in DV-land to you? To me it does, and it’s no wonder that Adobe is finally putting some pressure on Apple, hitting them where it hurts the most: hardware performance.”
See MacDailyNews’ story, “Adobe prefers (and promotes) PCs over Macs.”
“Fortunately for Adobe, Apple doesn’t sell any of its DV applications (iMovie, FC Express, FC Pro) for Windows, and strangely enough the PC platform–more specifically Dell Precision Workstations–is where Adobe seems to be leaning, as of lately.”
“Something very similar to all this happened circa one year ago, when it looked like Discreet would cease development of special effects suite Combustion for the Macintosh platform. Discreet firmly denied those rumors, but the connection between this and a series of special effects-related acquisitions subsequently made by Apple (Shake, RAYZ and Chalice) was very hard to miss.”
“It looks clear that Apple is positioning itself as the Microsoft of Digital Audio and Video, anywhere from the home users, to the pro-sumers to the high-end professionals. This clearly marks the end of an era of close collaboration between the two companies, and it probably opens up a new era in which Apple will play a major role in the Digital Video and Audio Editing industries–that is, as soon as it pulls a 64 bit Monster Mac out of its hat,” writes The Inquirer. Full article here.
Apple yesterday responded to Adobe’s infamous “PC Preferred” web page on the Adobe.com site.
“Apple stands by our claims that our latest Power Mac systems perform equal to or better than competing PC systems,” Apple said in a statement given to MacCentral. “The reported tests on Adobe’s Web site showing slower performance of After Effects on a Mac than a PC is more an application test than a platform test and is not indicative of all Pro application performance on the Mac. Other applications, such as Apple’s Final Cut Express, run some of those same tests on a Mac faster than the results for After Effects on either a Mac or a PC,” Apple’s statement reads. “Apple and Adobe remain extremely close partners and have been working together to improve the performance of After Effects on the Mac.” Full MacCentral story here.
Apple should buy Quark. Re-do the app for OS X, put the Windows version on hiatus, name it iPublish and give it away.
That would fix Adobe’s ass.
Adobe is what keeps Apple from sinking.