Both Aperture 1.0 in 2005 and 1.5 in 2006 have been laid out at photographic trade shows, but photokina isn't until september and I don't know of anything else going on between now and then.
An update is obviously inevitable, but I doubt it would be a major one, otherwise they would announce it at PMA and ship it in a month or so if necessary. Very disappointing indeed, along with the MBP situation...
Yes, you are right that not announcing at PMA (so far!) is a real problem. As a pro user who bought into Aperture 1.0 back in 2005, I've watched (and participated) in the ongoing discussions of AP and it's development. But what is different now is the huge frustration level (seen on the Aperture Discussion threads at Apple Support.)
Though they are deleting the threads as fast as they can, they have a real crisis (hence the unusual post by Joe, the manager in charge of the application) with long time users leaving, and leaving full of ill-will towards Apple. Myself, I have been hard pressed to recommend the application to anyone else for a while now. Some great things, but some poor implementations as well. I just got the new MP Pro with 10 GB RAM and 2.3 TB of HD's and it runs better, but to expect every users to have to have that kind of setup for decent performance is just crazy. And the keyword searches are just a joke!
The biggest issue for Aperture, even unlike other pro applications like FCP or Photoshop, is that you are not only manipulating digital files for current use - a large amount of your time is spent keywording and sorting for FUTURE use, maybe 2-3 years down the road. So users invest 100's of hours of current time in the hope that this will make you more productive down the road. But once you start doubting the future of the software (due to limited upgrades, non-supported RAW formats, etc) the house of cards falls quickly. Since you can't easily export that metadata (and all those hours you've invested) to other programs, you start getting nervous about "wasting" the hours. I find myself doing MUCH less keywording than I should, as a hedge against moving to another application.
I do have some theories about what Apple is waiting for.
- there may be something in the 10.5.2 update that the new Aperture team needs to really run Aperture 2.0.
- Apple may wait until "Update Tuesday", the last day of PMA and after the press has finished covering the new Nikons, Canons, etc to steal the headlines and announce something (Aperture 2 with a 10.5.2 upgrade).
- Maybe Apple wanted to release something, but the software is still too buggy. So better to skip all the photo shows, get something stable to show, and then roll it out later (at a non-photo even). If nothing comes at PMA, APple can't wait until Sept without losing a lot of early adopters.
