“Since dropping out of MacWorld and most of the other big electronics/computer shows, WWDC (The World Wide Developer’s Conference) in San Francisco has become Apple’s most important venue for product announcements,” Scott Bourne writes for Photofocus. “The emphasis on mass market mobile is clear. Those of us in the professional photography community need to understand that we are no longer targets of Apple. They aren’t a pro apps company or a hardware company they are a mobile company. In so far as you are interested in mobile – then they are one to watch.”
Bourne writes, “There was a minor point release to Aperture (not really discussed at the keynote.) It offers a white balance brush, compatibility with the new retina display and a few other goodies, but it’s nowhere near the kind of upgrade that Lightroom got, moving from LR3x to LR4x. I’m officially done with Aperture – as of today my staff has begun the migration to LR4 and I won’t be switching back. Even if Apple does a major Aperture update, it’s going to be too late for me. I’m not a fan of their approach when it comes to the pro market and while it may make perfect sense for them from a business point of view, it doesn’t serve customers like me.”
“Aperture’s library now fully integrates with iPhoto’s library. Does that ring a bell with anyone but me? iPhoto is a purely consumer product. Aperture was originally touted, marketed and sold as a professional application and was managed by Apple’s pro apps team. Does anyone really think there’s a place for integration between a free consumer photo app that kids use in grade school and a pro app like Aperture?” Bourne writes. “This is like the Final Cut Pro debacle. Apple essentially has decided that the broader consumer market is more profitable so pro apps are history. I can’t and don’t blame them from a purely business point of view.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Lots of conclusions being jumped to, including claiming that the Mac Pro was dead even after Apple CEO Tim Cooke promised that Apple was working on a professional Mac for later next year. And FCP X is not a debacle. It’s quite the opposite, actually. Try to keep current.
And why shouldn’t consumer and pro apps share the same libraries? How do you expect interested consumers to become pros? Does it make sense to have the “consumer” and “pro” video, film, and photography apps completely separate and noninterchangeable or does it make more sense for them to share certain lowest common denominators in order to not only smooth the upgrade path, but to also improve support?
Writing as former “pro” video and film producers, videographers and editors, the so-called “pros” need to get over themselves. The “consumer” software and hardware available today runs rings around everything the “pros” had to work with for decades. It’s not about the tools you use, it’s about the results you produce.
Related articles:
Tim Cook: Apple is working on professional Mac for ‘later next year’ – June 12, 2012
Apple unveils all new MacBook Pro with stunning Retina display – June 11, 2012
PC Magazine reviews Apple’s Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3: Editors’ Choice for high-end video editing – February 7, 2012
From experience, Apple are losing the pro market in plenty of fields. Editing, photographers, 3D industry, archvis, animators. Apple’s total disregard for the pro market has been evident for far too long. We know Apple gets most their cash from the consumer spectrum and that the Mac Pro is just an afterthought. People that say pro users are impatient should understand that we’ve been waiting for a decent upgrade for nigh on 4 years. The iMac is not enough. iMac with thunderbolt will not miraculously fix everything that Mac Pro users need. Final Cut Pro X was released half finished and without communication from the company when people complained. My area is 3D and most of the community has already left or in the process of leaving. Or at worst in despair as they like Mac OS and are faced with having to switch their software at great expense, albeit to a platform that listens.
Remember guys. MDN honestly thinks Pixelmator is comparable to Photoshop. It really isn’t. I have a license for various 3D software (Maya, zBrush, Modo), Adobe Master Suite, Final Cut Pro and yes I do own Pixelmator. Apple has screwed the professional industry for far too long. It is impossible to get a high end Mac that can compare to the PC in performance. Most people are taking the hackintosh route or switching to Windows entirely once their licenses have been switched to Windows.
What we needed was at least a roadmap. Clear dialogue. Updated Open GL libraries that weren’t a laughing stock. We got nothing. We needed hardware that wasn’t only considered cutting edge in 2008. We’re not making iweb pages or ken burns effects videos for our holiday snaps.
I do like my iPhone and iPad. Luckily you don’t need to plug them into Macs to get em working as plenty in the professional market are leaving them behind.
This incessant whining by “pros” (read: kids who didn’t get the particular toys they desired) is becoming tiresome.
I suppose everyone has a right to complain when their particular iNeed isn’t addressed but when it is coupled with all kinds of dark threats (“I’m abandoning Apple for good!” – as though the app or hardware they used until yesterday has suddenly turned useless) and guilt-inducing statements (“We kept you afloat during your dark days” – those WERE dark days, weren’t they, until the “lowest common denominators” started liking Apple again?), it becomes yawn-inducing.
Don’t understand the point you’re making. The professionals are saying the tools Apple is providing them are inadequate. Not only inadequate, but laughable in the face of technological change in today’s world. Case in point: the Mac Pro. It’s insulting to think that Apple put a minor speed bump on the Xeon processor and have the cheek to charge $3,500 for really, really old tech. Not only old but totally outdated. Would you be happy shelling out that kind of money for the kind of crap Apple is churning out. It’s disrespecting its most loyal user base, a base that kept it afloat when it was floundering like RIM and Nokia are today.
If you’re not a professional consumer of Apple professional grade products you won’t understand. Apple’s roots are in Apple Computer Inc. Since dropping Computer from its name, Apple seems to have forgotten what it is in business for – selling high end, professional grade computers.
Extended silence from Apple is never good. It’s a cold shoulder which leads to end of life.
I received it with the Xserve and I’m afraid I’m getting it again with Mac OS X Server.
You may say: So what? You’re Apple’s kind of people.
But others care about the non-blockbuster products. Money isn’t everything. Loyalty is incalculably valuable, especially from power users.
My problem is iPhoto, which used to be a fast and smooth-running “pre-Photoshop” app.
It’s now a shadow of its former self, with many functions needing multiple-mouse clicks where one did before. And, holy cow, it’s soooo much slower importing.
So I am driven to Aperture and, sad to say, really need that integration.
At least he’s honest about his reasons. It shares a library format (there is ZERO scope for a Pro library format, that’s meaningless) and therefore it offends his pro sense of self worth. If something becomes useable, or affordable by consumers, then it cannot be pro. That’s just snobbery. All pro actually means is that you get paid to do work. This tends to mean you’re willing to pay more for (presumably better) stuff because there’s a cost benefit. It doesn’t make you a professional opinion former.
I hope Apple doesn’t listen to any of this whining, from either side.
I derive the majority of my income from my photography work, so by industry definitions I am a professional photographer. And the work I do exists in a complex world of experience, time, personalities and equipment vagaries. If I’m on a photo shoot I’ll customarily take between 3 and 20 images of a single “shot” — with every ounce of experience knowing that the more I take the more I have to consider in post, and equally that every shot might be off in some way I can’t control — blinks, bugs, wind, clouds, and on and on and on. So to those who claim pros control the shot and get it right and take few pictures and don’t need to spend time in post, I say go make a living doing that. I know world-renowned photographers who look at every pixel because their gallery prints are huge and they have to care about every pixel just as much as they cared about the composition and the technical aspects as they were taking the picture. I know world-renowned photographers who have 30 top-of-the-line camera bodies, bodies which cost $5K apiece. And they do their post on iMacs.
My Aperture library is over 300,000 images. I don’t know how big Scott’s is — but to have him report to the world that he’s done and switching makes me think he either doesn’t have a very substantial library or that he isn’t using the features Aperture excels at.
In essence, if Apple is smart, they are (as they did during the development of Aperture) spending their listening budget in-person with pros, rather than reading on-line grousing by folks who, I’m sorry, have only their experience and promote is as general experience by a select group of customers with specific needs.
I think you made Bourne’s point. Absent a coherent roadmap (alongside what has occurred in the past 3 years), we don’t want to continue to grow photo libraries on software platform that Apple may not be investing going forward. I switched to LR 2 years ago, because of workflow with photoshop and in-design. It was difficult first year, but boy am I glad I did it then versus now given all the 10,000’s of photos since.
Get rid of the “Pro’s and Con” and what are you left with?
Just “‘sumer”… Apple apps are ‘sumer apps. And as MDN take said… “It’s not about the tools you use, it’s about the results you produce.”
Stupid article
iPhoto has great user interface and tools, even for a “kids” application. It set the standards for all photo apps, pro and amateur alike. It can deal with many photos at once.
There is no question that Aperature needs iPhoto integration and no reason why it should not.
Aperature has additional processing tools. That is why it exists – not because it is better in some other way.
The author sounds like an Adobe zombie to me – sent out to hack into Aperature’s user base which is richly deserved.
I moved from Light Room TO Aperature and I am never going back, not to Light Room and not to anything Adobe. Big, bloated, boastful and dated is what Adobe means to me.
Just my 2 cents…
Apple has touted that they are successful because they are 1 company…not tons of divisions each doing their own thing. But this is one are in which that philosophy is not working. The pro market is what it is… they wan’t high quality, are willing to pay high prices, but in the end they are a limited audience. You’re only going to sell so many copies of Final Cut or Logic. The consumer market is virtually limitless. Apple has become consumed by the success in the consumer market that they don’t value the smaller markets that have always been loyal to Mac. Why? R&D & support costs are higher while margins don’t make up for the limited sales. Apple is, in many ways, doing the one thing that they never wanted to do…act like a business in which they make decisions based on business rational. This is not new to Tim Cook, Steve had them going down this road as well.
So, here’s what needs to happen… Apple needs to make up their mind which markets they want to be in, and commit to them. If they don’t see enough value in the Pro market, sell off your products and let someone else innovate. The company that prides themselves in innovating has stopped innovating in some of their efforts. Either re-commit yourselves and innovate, or stop focusing efforts there.
I used to think they felt each product category needed 3 categories… consumer, mid and pro. Example… Final Cut was Pro, Final Cut Express was mid and iMovie was consumer. Logic was pro, logic express was mid and garageband was consumer. In this model, the mid exists to temp the migration into the pro level. At some point they seemed to stop believing in that model. Now it seems like they should just go ahead and dumb down Aperture a little more, and call it the ‘new’ iphoto.
Renaming “Metadata” to “Info” is definitely dumbing down.
Grudgingly, I must admit the combining of photo libraries is nice. Now, when you take a photo with iPhone, your Mac is already updated, regardless of app.
But, doing White Balance from skin tones is awesome, especially if there is no true gray in the image to be sampled, and saves tons of time screwing with hues.
You have to admit, rather than using the old-school Photoshop way of masking a portion of the image (often requiring additional expensive masking software for things like hair and grass) then doing some sort of obscure fill on one of dozens of layers, Aperture automatically detects the edges while you brush-in your enhancements, and does it all without any layers or masks to worry about and still be able to make adjustments to those brush strokes later. Absolutely brilliant.
I expect Apple to do more complex adjustments in the future, like being able to identify objects within an image so you can say, “Siri, I need the sky more vibrant with a soft bokeh beyond the horses and sharpen their mane.
If you think this is impossible, you probably don’t work for Apple.
I just don’t get it….the wand of mediocrity is passing over apple….. It is catering towards the masses…and the masses are sheep and they are generally stupid….. Good business is making money….and apple has been amazing….but it is still the creative minds that drive everything and apple is starting to loose these people at an alarming rate…..what does it take to for example to have done the Mac Pro properly….let’s say 1 billion……they would have probably made 5 to 7 billion. In sales….now it is going to loose a lot of the professionals to the pc world after this last debacle……and maybe pull in 2 billion in pro Mac sales….not good business and the people they are loosing are the cream of the crop……that is bad business and a bad idea!
“pros” have NEVER been Apple’s focus. Producing and selling great computers (insert hardware here if you’d like) and software has their focus. I have to ask the people like Bourne “did your existing solutions suddenly stop working?” that’s a point way too many people overlook on their way to making knee jerk reactions. Hmmmmm……
What a self-aggrandizing clown. First, he throws a hissy fit because Apple won’t spill its secrets to him. Join the club, Bozo. Then, he falls for the “4 is better than 3” canard even though most of what’s new about LR 4 was lifted from Aperture 3.
All the hand-wringing over Aperture looks to me like a concerted campaign by Adobe shills. As a high-volume professional event photographer, I much prefer Aperture for its elegant, efficient and non-modal interface and superb editing & organizing tools. I can select and rank thousands of images much faster in Aperture, adjusting as I go without having to repeatedly switch back and forth between “Library” and “Develop” modules. And, doing color-critical art reproduction work, I found Aperture’s built-in color profiles more accurate than Lightroom’s and on par with custom profiles I generated with Xrite’s Color Checker Passport. Not having to deal with custom profiles is a huge time-saver. Yes, LR has two features I hope to see in Aperture 4 – lens corrections and better high-ISO noise reduction. But these are features I typically need on only a handful of images, and I can handle these with third-party plugins. And, most of what’s “new” in LR4 was, in fact, lifted straight from the five-year-old version 1.0 of Aperture. Aperture’s ease of use still greatly outweighs any feature-list advantage LR4 may have at the moment. And, I fully expect Aperture 4 to leapfrog LR4, just as Aperture 3 leap-frogged LR3 with much better selective adjustments. Seems like the Adobe fan-club is desperately trying to peel away prospective Aperture users before Aperture once again leaves LR in the dust. And, let’s not forget that LR4’s initial release was an unmitigated disaster – buggy and unusably slow.
Let’s face it, when it comes to UI, Adobe is the Microsoft of imaging software. I mean really, MODAL workflow?! What moron thought that was a good idea? And a “loupe” that’s really just a zoom that Adobe calls “loupe” so they can claim feature parity? Puhleeease.
All the talk of Apple abandoning pros is impatience at best and misdirection at worst. We heard it when LR3 briefly eclipsed Aperture 2. Now the same Chicken Littles are clucking again. I don’t buy it. Apple’s prompt support for new cameras in Aperture clearly demonstrates that Apple is not letting up. Aperture’s engineers will once again innovate in unexpected ways that Adobe’s copy machine will need 12-18 months to replicate. I predict that some of the new one-touch adjustments that recently debuted in iPhoto will migrate to Aperture, where, like the improved Auto Adjust Pro feature, will make working pros work easier and make LR apologists shriek “consumer!”
The real reasons LR had any success at all were that it was “good enough” and soothed the hurt feelings of Windows sufferers who felt left out by Aperture. For Mac users – almost every one of scores of pro photographers I know in NYC – Aperture is a better way to get work done.
… it might be somewhat sobering to consider that the cash cow for both Nikon and Canon has long been in their consumer products division – not in the selling of D4s and 5Ds. In fact, none of their pro cameras of the past 20 years would have existed without the R&D money the soccer parents provided. This, by their *own* admission – not as my mere opinion.
And this very discussion of the ‘this and thats’ of Apple *may* not have even existed on *this* day, were it not for a plastic music player with shitty headphones that served up compressed music files.
Beyond this, if the truth be known, PhotoShop *Elements* is beyond the capabilities of many current photographers to *see*, just as Logic is far beyond the capabilities of most people to make – or even hear – music. Yeah, that includes ‘The Pros’. Think I’m wrong? Then look around you, and – while you’re at it – have a listen.
is it me or is Aperture a pokey/buggy pos???
I’m a pro photog and have been using Aperture for a little over a year. it’s buggy and pokey on all machines I’ve used it on. My i5 iMac (8GB RAM), my i5 MacBook Air… both machines, especially the desktop should run Aperture just fine. they don’t. the files are admittedly large but my hardware should be enough to handle it. RAW files from a few different Nikons. 20-30MB…
am I expecting too much from Aperture?
this is 2012…
this is 2012.. isn’t it???
I loathe Adobe probably more than anyone you or anyone on this planet—I obviously use PS for a lot of things and have been for almost 20 years (remember PS 2.5… no layers? heh..). I absolutely hate them!!! I don’t want to give another dime to Adobe but… is LR-4 the way to go?
advice?
p.s. heh… remember when this site was about openminded, constructive discussion?