I miss Apple Aperture as well...
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Apple Acquires Photo Editing App Maker Pixelmator
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Not with an app most Mac users know and use all the time. That one is rare. It would be like Apple buying Omni or Affinity or iStat or any other app you might use all the time.
Lots of comments here on if this is good or bad, but I'd be more interested in a discussion on why Apple decided this was the right move for them at this time.
Was it a talent acquisition?
Do they want to build a competitor to Adobe?
Are they wanting to integrate some of this tech into their own offerings?
Do they see it as a way to boost their subscription revenue?
I don't think any of us can know the answer, but it would be interesting to know what people think is Apple's motive here and why they think that.
Was it a talent acquisition?
Do they want to build a competitor to Adobe?
Are they wanting to integrate some of this tech into their own offerings?
Do they see it as a way to boost their subscription revenue?
I don't think any of us can know the answer, but it would be interesting to know what people think is Apple's motive here and why they think that.
I'm concerned for the future of Pixelmator because I remember what happened to two of my favorite apps: ClarisWorks and Bento.
My recollection from years ago is the Aperture concept and code wasn't portable to iOS and iPadOS. If you think about it, that makes sense as Aperture took a true file browser approach to image storage, something which iOS doesn't (can't?) do like can be done in MacOS. Consequently, Apple ended up with Photos which is structured in a iOS-oriented way with a monolithic database and no true file browser. It's basically why many half-serious photographers just don't like Photos or want to use it for the bulk of their needs.
All of that is a preamble to my view that Apple is really buying Pixelmator and will let Photomator die.
Well if they can offer a Photoshop competitor (ok not every feature, but enough for home users) for free, helping customers avoid Adobe's price gouging and anti consumer practices, then it will make devices like the mini and air even more competitive in the user space.
Remember when Jobs as running the show, every year the core "i" apps receive decent updates and really helped sell the Mac into homes across America and the rest of the western world. Being able to easily edit and burn DVD home movies was magical compared to what the completion offered, editing photos and sending them off for album prints was another.
Apple seems to be falling behind in these areas now, leaving it up to other companies to fill the gaps, where that just promote the devices, battery life etc... Thats great for power users, but for people like my parents, they don't want to have to pay a ton or shop different apps to accomplish tasks, they just want to buy a machine which does everything then need.
That's right, I forgot about Bento! Good little app, but at this point it would be probably dealing with competition from places like AirTable and the more GUI DB apps.
But yes, I miss that app also. I remember Filemaker saying something about it was supposed to be able to import Bento libraries at the time they were shutting it down. I had zero luck with that, and nothing I can remember of, could read that file format. Again, too long ago for me to remember, but I don't think the data was store in too friendly of a format to pull from.
So you added another great example of software that Apple had and buried somewhere. Because I don't see traces of anything that Bento did in any Mac app?
That is correct: Bento got killed, without a successor. Which is a crying shame; there's nothing out there that is that simple to use.
I was able to import my Bento DB into FMP, but that software is complete overkill for my taste. Plus it doesn't sync the design changes you make on OSX to the iPhone or iPad. Bento was brilliant in its simplicity. And customisable to put it to good use.
are you sure about that? Then why is bunch of Adobe stuff running permanently in the background, even if I have no Adobe app open (and not using Creative Cloud)?
Logic is probably their most successful acquisition and it’s one that is least integrated into Apple.
Hopefully they do the same with pixelmator
My gut says they want another in-house creativity app to bolster their future services lineup (particularly for iPad going forward). They already had video editing in FCP & audio editing in Logic, but no image editing. The two options available to them were Pixelmator (Mac first), & Procreate (iPad first). They have good relationship with both but Pixelmator has always struck me as the more “classic Apple” like of the two and I don’t think that was lost on Apple. They are also seem to align with Apple’s future interest in machine learning being applied to both image editing and image generation.
That is not to say that Procreate wouldn’t be valuable to Apple. I could see Apple going for both, but their suspected regulatory hurdles meant they felt like they had to make a choice and an app that leans towards image editing might be more aligned with what they want internally than an app that leans towards painting / animations.
With FCP being the first, made Logic second, which saved it from having Apple make mistakes with it, like they did with FCP later on. FCP at v7 would have been spoken of as the most successful acquisition.
I'm sure the Lithuanian developer team around Pixelmator will look forward to move to the Russian States of America soon.
That image looks like a shopping list of low quality shoddy products on Temu no matter which way you want to spin it. Just because there are a few good apps on it does not make it look good. That's deceitful.
Those are called background processes and dependencies ffs. Most of the major applications and operating systems use this. Save your energy arguing on the internets if you don't know how software works.
It seems someone got out of bed on the wrong side. Taking out your own negativity on others and accusing them of deceit - well, I'd rather be constructive than destructive.
Thanks for making the world a better place.
I don't understand why so many people see this as a negative news. Why would Apple invest money in this company just to kill it? Also, why integrate it in the OS instead of selling it for profit? I don't see Apple making it a subscription but rather following the same path as Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. And look where those apps are night now! It would be one more Pro app to attract customers in the Apple ecosystem. I don't see them making it a subscription for the same reasons they are not making Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro subscriptions. These are just hooks to get customers on Apple silicon and make money off the hardware.
Interestingly, my wife has an intel MBA with Lightroom installed via the creative cloud and has all of the background services installed. On my M2 MBA I installed from the App Store and none of the background services are present which, imho, is much cleaner.