Aperture 3 - how stable is it?

I'd wait. Odds are if you bought 3 you'd have to pay full for 4; note there aren't upgrades in the App Store.

I would have recommended you try the demo, but it's gone. So I'd wait a bit, and in the meantime try a demo of Lightroom

I haven't found Aperture 3 to be very buggy; slow on occasion, but not too bad a problem. But it's a good idea to compare it with LR anyway.

 

I've had it now for only a couple months, but buggy? You bet.

If I'm lucky, I can get through a 4 hour session without a crash. But Ive never seen it crash more than once an hour at the very most. Its not destructive, however; reopen the app and you are right where you left off. Still, Apple software crashing? Usually unheard of in my experience.

The other thing is that if you zoom in to fix issues with a photo, such as a patch of a blemish, it can take a long time, at least on a 1.7 i5. It also regularly distorts the entire picture when editing while zoomed in, and it takes a minute for it to come back. Sometimes retouching just seems like it might not be working at all, and I have to restart. But that is not often (the distorted screen redraw while editing zoomed in seems to happen a lot). Killing all other apps seems to minimize the problems.

I have a MBA with a 128 SSD and 4 GB of RAM, and had about 30-40 GB free on the HDD. After editing for an entire day, maybe 6 hours or more (I can't put this thing down its so much fun) I got a "HDD full" message. WTF!? I checked, and it was reporting 2.8 GB. I did not have all that much in the Aperture trash, but I emptied that trash, the main trash, and iMovie and iPhoto trash (none of which should have had much in them either) and then over about a 2 minute time span saw my available space slowly grow back to 30-40 GB.

At the time I chalked that up to Aperture maybe creating a lot of temp files, but that never really made sense to me; heavily retouching a couple dozen 12 MP photos really didn't seem like it should eat up 35 GB in temp files.

Maybe this was due to the memory leak you have alluded to; at the time that did not cross my mind. I have not seen this sort of issue since, but I have not hammered it as hard as I did that particular day.

 

I have never had any problems with Aperture 3, I am not a heavy user of it by any means, but love the organization and tools to be able to edit photos.

 

I have never had a stability problem with Aperture. All in all I have been very happy with it and it works great. I don't know where you heard of stability problems but I have never experienced them, I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs photo editing software!