“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.
@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.
“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.
you get what you pay for; aperture is only worth $79!
@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.
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!
Aperture is a lot cheaper. Wow! But… sadly it’s still piece of shit.
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…
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
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.
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.
Aperture 3. Good–and much much cheaper now. I approve!
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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 $79 on the Mac App store, whaddaya think I did? Yep!
Downloaded!
The only fly in the ointment, stick in the wheel, Phyllis Diller at a convent is that Aperture @ 79$ 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.
@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.
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.
I could crap better installers than the ones Adobe packages.
@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.
Am I missing something, or isn’t the reduced price because this version of Aperture that they are selling via the Mac App Store explicitly prohibits commercial use?
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/06/mac-app-store-pricing-of-featured-apps/
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.
Lovely – now give us a replacement for Photoshop!
PLEEZE!
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).