Apple’s Mac App Store takes dead aim at Adobe

Apple Online Store“Apple’s launch of the Mac OS X App Store appears to be an instant success,” Mark Reschke writes for TGAAP. “Apple was on center stage Thursday with their iWork apps ready for download, but one application made available today from Apple caught everyone off guard —Aperture.”

“The arrival of Aperture on the App Store isn’t a just a shot across Adobe’s bow, that doesn’t do Apple’s move justice,” Reschke writes. “What Apple did to Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom software is equivalent to hundreds of cannon rounds being fired upon a ship at point blank range.”

Reschke writes, “Apple gave Aperture a massive price cut, and it can be downloaded for only $79. Until today, a boxed copy of Aperture retailed for $199 (as of now it is still available as a physical purchase). Adobe’s Lightroom currently retails for $199 as a physically purchased product. Which software is going to dominate? An easy-to-find, $79 direct download or a physical copy of software for $199… Boxed software sounds silly already.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Sleep tight, Shantanu.

74 Comments

  1. Ouch ! Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving, arrogant, nasty, lazy and greedy company.

    More and more every day it looks like there is indeed life after Adobe’s stranglehold on creative professionals – Bye Bye Adobe.

  2. Only if you want a bunch of programs that don’t work seamlessly together. No matter how much you wish – the working class still uses Adobe products.

    However – if you want the latest copy of Angry Birds or Pixelmator – then I guess the App Store is for you.

  3. Aperture at $79 is a fantastic deal. I previously bought Aperture 1, 2 and 3 but still prefer Lightroom, which is also available on many more Windows PCs. It may hurt sales of Adobe’s Lightroom but perhaps not too much.

  4. Or Apple could be shooting itself in the foot. All the adobe uers that prefer macs will be forced to move to a windows PC.

    Doh…

    The 1% market share that apple has just got cut in half…. OUCH !!!

  5. I have used Adobe products for a very long time, but I must admit, over the last three years I have moved away from Adobe. I turned off Flash and found I didn’t really lose much. I have also found Adobe products to lack the “fit and finish” they once had. I agree it is going to take some time but if anyone can do it…Apple can. I just wish Apple would come up with a good drawing program.

  6. Think about it. If I use certain software to make a living I’ll switch the physical box and operating system before learning a whole new software.

    I don’t know why Apple is such dicks to adobe (since adobe kept apple afloat all those pre-ipod years) I’d like to love apple but they are the biggest assholes I’ve ever encountered.

  7. @Jim – what bizarro world do you live in? The Mac market share is widely pegged at 10% and growing, and it’s share of computers costing more than $1000 – in other words, the systems that pro designers use – is known to be about 90%. You are obviously clueless about the facts.

  8. Adobe’s arrogance is exceeded only by it’s hubris. Both qualities a delusional.

    As a video professional in the 1990s, I worked closely with Adobe on the marketing of products such as After Effects and Premier. After a concerted effort to beseach Adobe not to abandone the Mac faithful, they turned their back on our community in favor of Windows.

    I’ve never looked back.. .:.

  9. The adobe trolls seem to be out in force today.

    Adobe thought they could be the demanding bully that told everyone how they should work. Now Apple
    Is the biggest kid on the block and the old bully is getting his ass whipped daily.

    It’s fun to watch justice beking administered.

  10. @Jim

    Adobe has been treating Apple users like second fiddle for years. As or keeping Apple afloat during pre-iPod years – that is an overly simplistic view to say the least. Adobe has behaved much like Microsoft for a long time, pummeling people into submission, forcefully cornering the market in certain software realms, hostilely crushing competition. That is the only reason that they have become synonymous within their software realm. It is always a sign of dictorial behavior when nobody else is really even trying to create an alternative.

    Only Pixelmator and Aperture really offer competition in terms of photo editing (open source offerings have been inadequate). Adobe is a company of brutal business practices. I’d argue that their corner on the market has set tech back years. They don’t necessarily do it the best, they just made sure they were the only ones doing it.

    I’d say you have things backwards – Adobe is the dick nd the asshole, as you so ineloquently put it.

  11. “All the adobe uers that prefer macs will be forced to move to a windows PC.”

    You are delusional.

    Most Adobe using pros HATE Adobe with a passion and can’t wait for alternatives. Adobe isn’t accommodating to it’s customers at all, it kills them with outrageous upgrade fees for buggy software and ties all it’s products into even more outrageously highly priced packages into which it throws buggy lagging software.

    Adobe makes no effort and shows no loyalty to anyone and specifically not to it’s customers – it takes them for granted – Always has.

    Chipping away at it’s locked bundled software alternatives will break Adobe’s stranglehold and dominance and it’s users will cheer all efforts of that sort.

    The PC ‘s architecture was NEVER created to support a graphical user or interface – No graphic designer or pro will ever forsake a Mac for a PC.

  12. @Jim

    Forgot… If your approach to tech is one fearful of change, i.e. your unwillingness to try a new product, then your are as much a part of the problem. The advancements (in technology, in this case) made by humanity were not instigated by timid apathetic people stuck in the mud of status quo and the muck of tradition. If we followed your philosophy, we’d still be looking for fire and the wheel.

  13. “What Apple did to Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom….”

    An outrageousness statement. Apple INVENTED Lightroom. It was called Aperture, and when it appeared Adobe execs were quoted as saying what a great idea, and that they had never thought of it. In a short time they made a copy called Lightroom. Adobe proceed to develop their clone faster and better. It became more popular among professional photographers, including myself. I have recently switched to Aperture because Apple has improved it immensely and it now even has capabilities now which LR does not. Most of my colleagues continue with LR because it’s what they are used to, but having switched, I can say LR no longer has the advantage. Photoshop only survives because of the number of tools imbedded in that hopeless hairball.

    @Jim, adobe users can continue on the Mac, nobody is disabling LR for the Mac. What photographers will NEVER EVER do is switch from the Mac to a pc. Adobe can never win that proposition.

  14. @m159

    Full agreement on the hopeless muddle that is Adobe software. It may be sacrilegious to say this, but I can’t stand Adobe suites. Counterintuitive cluttered UI able to do “everything” is not my idea of friendly ideal software.

    Honestly, as much as I love Appe, iTunes is approaching a similar state. I am overjoyed they did not cram the Mac App Store in with the rest. Some point, Apple needs to trim the fat.

  15. A boxed Aperture costs even more in Canada: $219.00, yet it’s still only $79.00 in the canadian App Store. You bet, I grabbed it! Hoping Apple makes similar deep discounts for the other pro apps as well!

  16. I downloaded the trial of Aperture 3 and it’s more of a hobby to Apple than the Apple Tv.

    The fact you can’t import more than one folder of images at a time is a waste to professionals, myself included. Oh well, I will get LR3 and try Aperture 4 if makes it out…

  17. The problem with Aperture is that a few months down the road Apple could decide they don’t want to develop it any more a la xserve (of which I have two), then you’re out in the cold.

    I’ve been using Adobe products since 1991. They still have the best graphics suite because of the integration of page layout, vector and pixel based graphics.

    Plus Aperture stinks. It’s not worth $29

  18. though pixelmator isn’t photoshop… If they really put some time and effort into it they could make it a lot more professional. And releasing that as a competitor to photoshop for half the price or less would definitely get more mac users to switch.

  19. jtc: not really as it’s not a competitor now.

    I’m not trolling for Adobe – but if we want to bash adobe – give me equivalent products and I will switch:

    And I don’t mean pipe-dream equivalents:

    InDesign (Quark is garbage)
    Photoshop
    Dreamweaver
    Illustrator

    Give me REAL equivalents and I will happily switch. Oh bill paying clients are still asking for flash. (that is clients who pay real bills and don’t give a monkeys b*lls what Steve Jobs thinks)

    Real Mac Fan but Realer Realist.

  20. For most, Aperature and Pixelmator will more than suffice.

    Both are great programs, however, in the eyes of some, they may not be enough.

    For years, Adobe became the leader in their respective fields because, like Microsoft Office, more was always better. Even though the majority of its users hardly touched below their respective surfaces.

    As creatures of habit, we are reluctant to change. And having invested so much in these products over the years, tossing them out and basically starting over could be financial suicide.

    But now, it is evident that a whole slew of new entrants into the digital age, unencumbered by old, legacy systems and everything it entails will become the audience of this new age.

    We should remember, that it was Steve Jobs and Apple that gave us the first word processor under a $150 vs WordPerfect (DOS)@ $500 and forced Microsoft to price MultiPlan and Excel to do likewise while Lotus 123’s $550+ price was norm. Now it seems, that Jobs has implemented the same pricing strategy in the Mac App Store.

  21. Adobe will disappear only when somebody comes out with competing products for:
    InDesign
    Illustrator
    Photoshop
    And arguably PDF format. Before then, it’s all hyperbola.

  22. SO, When is Apple going to kick Intuit in the arse??????

    That group is much worse than Adobe, in the sloth they bring into the Mac market, vs the software they offer in the PC market.

  23. @bildad
    Just like Adobe LiveMotion
    Adobe Premier who just recently got resurrected and off coures FrameMaker. So this development issue of killing it is not only subject to Apple, but also Adobe.

  24. As an Adobe LightRoom user…I’ve always wanted to get my hands on Aperture, but the $199 cost was prohibitive. Once I saw it available for $79 on the Mac App store, whaddaya think I did? Yep!
    Downloaded!

  25. The only fly in the ointment, stick in the wheel, Phyllis Diller at a convent is that Aperture @ 79$ is not available for all to purchase. That is, the MAS is for those running 10.6.6. What would be nice is to have a Gift To option but am sure that will be made available in the next update or 2.

  26. @cb …

    Dreamweaver? You’re still using the mess that is Dreamweaver? If you’re a real web developer or coder, you use Panic’s far superior Coda. I left DW behind years ago and haven’t looked back.

    Photoshop? 90% of what you need to do in Photoshop you can do in Pixelmator. Hell, even Acorn would suffice for most.

    Illustrator I grant you. I’ve tried to replace it because of it’s increasing horrid UI but nothing is close.

    And as a 20+ veteran of design with a background in traditional typography I’ll also grant you InDesign, but again, can we get an UI doc stat! It’s also still not a perfect page layout program, especially with what I think are so-so typographic controls, but is better than Quark. Now, if we were talking “back in the day” Quark 3 vs PageMaker, Quark wins hands down. But we’re not.

    But really, dude. Buy Coda and stop messing with the piece of junk that is Dreamweaver.

  27. I have been using Photoshop since version 1 and have owned almost every version—including CS5, which is the buggiest, most frustrating version of Photoshop I have ever used. Although Adobe keeps adding useful features to Photoshop, they have done virtually nothing in all these years to give it a modern, genuinely useful interface. Nor do they seem to care how bug-infested their products are. Add the sky-high prices that Adobe charges for most of the their products, and it’s clear that Adobe richly deserves the derision that is often heaped on them by readers of this forum. I still doubt that a consumer-oriented app like Pixelmator can replace Photoshop in my workflow, but every day I get closer to giving it a shot. I fervently hope that the day will come when I can say “good riddance” to Photoshop and all the other Adobe products that I’ve struggled with through the years. InDesign, for all its power, still looks and works very much like PageMaker did in the 1980’s. Illustrator’s interface has always been a bitch, and Dreamweaver is the most designer-unfriendly web design app in the universe. Lightroom alone seems like a pretty good product, but Aperture is calling to me at its new low price of $79. There was a time when Adobe was king, but now it’s just a decrepit old bag of bones.

  28. @mac-nugget: I completely forgot about Acrobat. Hah – I use it 10 times a day.

    ALSO – importing from Illustrator to PS as a smart object. But I digress…

    @daveyjj: “If you’re a real web developer or coder, you use Panic’s far superior Coda. I left DW behind years ago and haven’t looked back.”

    I did not know 1 piece of software would bestow upon myself the title of “web developer”. Sort of like a medal bestowing courage to the cowardly lion.

    Easy enough – I will try it out.

  29. Adobe can submit LightRoom and PhotoShop apps to the Mac App Store and compete. This is actually a great opportunity, a fresh start for Adobe, who for years has had trouble migrating its old codebase from OS 9 or Windows to Cocoa. With a new iOS/X API and apps paradigm, surely Adobe can hire programmers on a par with iOS game developers to develop decent software for the Mac again and keep making a living developing native Mac software.

    The only ambition Apple, Google, and MSFT are intentionally blocking is Adobe’s idea that Flash client/Flex server will overtake the browser and replace the desktop and become the only GUI/platform user need to interface with. Then they say No.

  30. I often have no choice but to use Photoshop for lots of my pixel work, but I agree – it has become more and more buggy and convoluted to use.

    Indesign is (like it or not) so far the only layout package out there.

    But I still use the vastly superior Freehand instead of Illustrator. I would love to see the Freehand codebase and rights yanked out of Adobes hands and modernized (it is still Carbon and PowerPC).

  31. is apple can make a replacement for illustrator, a easier web editor like golive was then apple will very likely destroy adobe within 1 year… as a programmer i have been looking for a good web app like golive was… fast and easy for basic sites.. better than iweb, less complicated than dreamweaver…to show how bad adobe is, i purchased golive 9 when they released it… not only did the software take 1,000,000 steps back, but it now doesn’t even work.. as a decent share holder of apple, i pray they make those two apps and be done with adobe

  32. if apple can make a replacement for illustrator, a easier web editor like golive was then apple will very likely destroy adobe within 1 year… as a programmer i have been looking for a good web app like golive was… fast and easy for basic sites.. better than iweb, less complicated than dreamweaver…to show how bad adobe is, i purchased golive 9 when they released it… not only did the software take 1,000,000 steps back, but it now doesn’t even work.. as a decent share holder of apple, i pray they make those two apps and be done with adobe

  33. Whine all you want but that’s all aperture is worth. No serious working photographer uses it. iPhoto on steroids. You may not love adobe but LR beats aperture everyday and twice on Sunday.

  34. @ChrissyOne: really? A “piece of shit”? Really? Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but a POS? Not in my experience, and I have both LR and Aperture. I don’t rely on either for a living, but since v2, have easily preferred Aperture.

  35. @Jfdi: You wrote:

    “Whine all you want but that’s all aperture is worth. No serious working photographer uses it. iPhoto on steroids. You may not love adobe but LR beats aperture everyday and twice on Sunday.”

    It’s not whining to point out objective aspects of software performance, nor is it whining to point out customer-abusive companies like Adobe. But it is pissing in the wind to make sweeping statements without objective fact.

    Funny, I know several serious working photographers who use Aperture, and they are all making a nice living. They may well be in the minority, but they sure give the lie to your bullshit.

  36. I agree that it’s not great as others have said. Like maybe $30-50 range. Better than iPhoto, but not the best. The file management is so piss poor pros will never use it. I won’t consider buying it until they do that. It has the same numbskull import and it just ends up on the left task bar. Fine for consumers, but not for pros. I think most of you have never even downloaded LR3 free trial and just bash it because it’s Adobe.

    And pixelmator… Same with aperture. Apple should buy them and make it free with every aperture purchase.

  37. I’ve been using Dreamweaver all-day, everyday since version 2. I’ve looked at every alternative when they’ve come out but have yet to find anything with the features I need. I hand-code all the HTML, CSS and JS I write and I find DW does that well.

    I’d love to move away from DW but need the following: (I tried to see if Coda could do all these but didn’t see how)

    1 Test that the JavaScript I write is valid while I am typing and offer type-ahead suggestions

    2 Allow me to easily manage dozens of web sites and all the associated files. Including the ability to find and replace “sitewide”

    3 Allow me to see the CSS associated with any HTML element just by clicking on the element.

    Pixelmator is almost good enough to replace Fireworks. It’s so close I probably could get away with it if I spent more time in that program. But, I have yet to find something to replace DW

    Thanks for your reply.

  38. I could go on all day about what Aperture is missing, but one simple tool makes it a non-started for me – Gradients.
    Contrast and saturation gradients are the most useful tool in Lightroom and I use them on almost every image. Aperture has nothing like this, only a clunky way to build a gradient preset that it almost totally useless.
    Someone also mentioned Aperture’s inability to import from more than one folder, which is true. Lightroom’s general file management and Publish Services squash Aperture like a grape if you’re publishing to anything other than Mobile Me, which I don’t do at all.
    I suppose if you use Face and Places a lot it’s really keen. I don’t.

    All that said, I have given Aperture a chance on several occasions, most recently when v.3 came out, but it’s just not there yet. I have no emotional attachment to either app and will happily use the one that’s best, and for now, sorry to say, that’s still Lightroom.

  39. I have been using Aperture since 1.2. I now have Aperture 3. I still needs refinement. However, I tried LR and did not like the feel of it. But I guess it works for some people. It does have some nifty features that I think are useful. One example is the easier watermark function than Aperture offers.

  40. This is one of my pet peeves with Apple.

    I bought Aperture v1 quite a few years ago to run on my then pretty new G5 Mac Pro. Fine. I liked it. Not much later, they came with an upgrade that that would not run on my machine. It would run on multi-proc G5 and it would run on G4 laptops, but not on my Mac Pro.

    I had no choice but to move to Lightroom. I am happy with it – just upgraded it – and I will stay with it. I still feel shafted by Apple.

  41. Sorry. As a semi retired photographer, I still use Adobe. Lightroom 3 is now my front end and Photoshop when I want to get down and dirty with an image.

    It’s the way I can step from LR and PS and how many imaging pro’s use PS. Many and many more plus some others.. oh and some more and a couple that I know. Now Adobe have just released PS Lite or Elements 9 as it it’s known. That will be bundles with cheap scanners etc.

    As stupid as Adobe can get, that’s not going to change in the foreseeable future because Aperture is now available at roughly $80. Adobe aren’t going away just because they don’t get on with Steve. One day maybe but not today.

  42. Grow the f up. Most of us simply want to use whatever tools work best. Apple has played the generation game for decades. And never made itself affordable. And still only $11 per $180 of each iPhone gets paid out to American workers.

    Yeah, my fsm got together and got me an iPad, but, like most now-starving graphic artists, I don’t need a toy … I need something that will help me work.

    And Apple ain’t Adobe … And Adobe has been the standard.

  43. A couple of points.

    I believe that you can jump to PS directly from aperture about as easily as you can from Lightroom.

    As for the new price of Aperture:
    To a Pro, $299 for LR (or $99 to upgrade) is small change. Especially since it is a productivity tool that saves you countless hours of labor.

  44. Two reasons why Lightroom will remain far ahead in market share:

    1) Camera Raw. Photographers were using Camera Raw in Photoshop for years before Aperture saw the light of day, and to this day more photographers use Camera Raw than Aperture OR Lightroom. Here’s the clincher: Camera Raw’s edits are proprietary to Camera Raw, but it just so happens that Lightroom uses this same Camera Raw engine split off into a standalone app with other features bolted on as modules. What this means is that for all those scores of photographers who have thousands or tens of thousands of photos with proprietary Camera Raw adjustments applied to them, the barrier to entry to Lightroom is zero. Lightroom honors all of their edits and the transition is seamless. Not so with Aperture. Moving to Aperture means all those edits will be lost. For most photographers coming from Camera Raw, this is a deal-breaker.

    2) Aperture only runs on Macs.

    I have both apps and use both. I use Lightroom because it supports my Sigma .x3f raw files while Aperture does not. I use Aperture because it has a vastly better user interface, real curves adjustments (including the ability to spawn multiple curves adjustments and stack them), superior brush-in local adjustments, and because it decodes my Nikon D700 much more naturally than any of the D700 profiles Lightroom provides.

    Lightroom does do a few things which Aperture does’t yet, such as lens corrections and gradients, but it’s all wrapped in a cluttered, ugly interface which looks like it was designed by a teenager — all full of flashing text and too many shades of gray and black and all manner of interface bloat which makes the software look and feel cramped and claustrophobic. Worse of all, it’s modal, meaning that if you’re making image adjustments and think of a keyword/tag to apply, you can’t just apply it. You have to stop what you were doing, switch to the Library mode, apply the keyword/tag there, then switch back and pick up where you left off. It’s a frustrating, artificial limitation introduced when Adobe rushed Lightroom to market. Then there are Lightroom’s menus. I have never seen more disorganized and confusing menus in my life, and to make matters worse, their contents change as you switch modes. The horror.

    BUT overall it’s a good app with great functionality and (its terrible user interface notwithstanding) the best piece of software in Adobe’s lineup.

    But to say that it’s better than Aperture is not really true. It’s just better in some ways. In others, it’s kind of a dog.

  45. @ChrissyOne, sherman, bildad & Jfdi

    Trolls, every one of you, and only one intelligent criticism among the lot.

    Gradients?! Really? That’s LR’s killer feature? If you need it, maybe. So, that counts as the sole substantial comparison point. But I know several dozen professional photographers, and none of them have any interest in this.

    Inability to import from more than one folder? Wrong. You can queue up as many import processes as you want and have them run simultaneously. I routinely import from several cards at once.

    Apple could cancel Aperture? Ooh, scary! Sure, and Adobe could go out of business. Which is more likely? With the massive development that Apple put into Aperture 3, I have no worries about their commitment.

    “Aperture stinks”? Well now, that’s certainly a brilliant and compelling argument from someone who clearly knows nothing about it.

    No serious working photographer uses Aperture, eh? Really? You’ve surveyed all of them, have you? I’m a serious working photographer, and I know scores of others in every corner of the industry here in NYC. They’re about evenly split between Aperture, LR, and PS+Bridge. The only ones I know who’ve switched went LR-to-Aperture, not the other way round.

    “Bite me…stfu”. Jfdi, I dare you to talk that way to the face of any man who’s not smaller than you. Get some manners, punk.

  46. Downloaded Aperture and like it though it doesn’t quite do everything I need to do; it doesn’t have an Invert function which turns negatives and slides into actual photos. So I downloaded Pixelmator for an additional $29. The combination of the two should take care of me for a fraction of Photoshop’s cost. Once I feel I’m up to speed, I can uninstall the Adobe bloatware.

  47. @Majikthize

    I did not speak clearly. But the fact is the ‘import’ button does not add images within subfolders inside subfolders. You have to file -> import every time which seems very intuitive. Feature not a bug?

    And I noticed you didn’t reply at all about file management which is the reason why I don’t use it.

    Not to mention the several other reasons why pros don’t use it. Among them the secrecy I love about apple. No beta testing to give input from the people who use it, not knowing when compatibility updates are set, or when the new version is set to release. Gotta love that….

    Troll….? Are you twelve? I am not. Just someone who likes apple products and however not afraid to criticize them because I need the best tools around to take pictures and make a living.

    Any valid counterpoints or just more name calling?

  48. You actually can invert in Aperture, but it’s a bit of a hack involving levels. There’s a levels preset here you can use:

    http://aperture-assistant.com/presets/negative

    The problem with this trick is that, because the image is now inverted, adjustment controls tend to do the opposite of what you expect, for instance increasing exposure will make the image DARKER. Nutty.

    We can probably expect a true invert function in the next version of Aperture. By then maybe Lightroom will no longer be modal.

    Honestly, though, isn’t inverting a negative something you should do when you scan?

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