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Apple Finally Discontinues Shake?

Apple sold 5 million iPhones last quarter.
With ~50% profit, ~$300 per iPhone average,
let's say 30.000 iPhones gives them $5 million profit.
There is no more than 300.000 FCS users worldwide, how many
upgrade or buy anything new per quarter? Let's say 20.000 users
spend $250 per quarter (optimistic).
That's how much Apple make on 30.000 iPhones.
How long do you think Apple will continue developing pro Macs
and pro applications? Seriously, 30K iPhones more or less per
quarter is nothing, they sold 5 million of those!
 
snowboarder said:
Apple sold 5 million iPhones last quarter.
With ~50% profit, ~$300 per iPhone average,
let's say 30.000 iPhones gives them $5 million profit.
There is no more than 300.000 FCS users worldwide, how many
upgrade or buy anything new per quarter? Let's say 20.000 users
spend $250 per quarter (optimistic).
That's how much Apple make on 30.000 iPhones.
How long do you think Apple will continue developing pro Macs
and pro applications? Seriously, 30K iPhones more or less per
quarter is nothing, they sold 5 million of those!
Click to expand...
There's something like 1.2 or 1.3 million registered FCP users.


Lethal
 
hayesk said:
I challenge you to find one instance about Apple making waves about a tablet. You confuse rumor sites with reality.
Click to expand...

I don't know. Maybe you're right, but maybe Apple is deliberatly leaking info to boost the stock market. Everytime apple has a big rumor ... stock goes up. Rumor of jobs attending CES ... bam 5$ up.

I think it is a mixed reality. Sometimes things leak before apple wants it and sometimes apple uses the rumorboards to create the buzz. That is advertising these days.

Anyway, with iPhone, iPod, game-rigged iMacs, multimedia tablet (unless they do what I mentioned in the tablet post), and the Mac Pro let down (I have one, and I find it not the MP I expected it to be, my old MP does Logic way better, FCP is somehow equal and a lot of crazy quirks, but most aff all the minor upgrade for the higher price) the MACINTOYS stands :D
 
snowboarder said:
Apple sold 5 million iPhones last quarter.
With ~50% profit, ~$300 per iPhone average,
let's say 30.000 iPhones gives them $5 million profit.
There is no more than 300.000 FCS users worldwide, how many
upgrade or buy anything new per quarter? Let's say 20.000 users
spend $250 per quarter (optimistic).
That's how much Apple make on 30.000 iPhones.
How long do you think Apple will continue developing pro Macs
and pro applications? Seriously, 30K iPhones more or less per
quarter is nothing, they sold 5 million of those!
Click to expand...

GM sold more cars than Porsche did, still GM is going bankrupt (let's hope not) while Porsche is buying Volkswagen. If you claim to have the best products in the market, then act on that. If Apple loses it's pro market, the general idea about apple being superior and therefore a WANT instead of a NEED is over. If people stop perceiving Apple as the superior product, the magic that shines on the other products will fade as well. Then it will be just an expensive computercompany. Pure marketing basics.

HP and IBM once had the upper hand, unitll they started to manufacture for the masses.
 
Realistically, a compositing package is the primary thing missing from the suite and I still expect one, although it sounds like they haven't even begun work on it yet. I never expected Phenomenon to be anymore powerful than Shake, just less buggy. I would have thought Apple could build a compositing package from the ground up, fairly easily by borrowing operators from Shake and rebuilding the UI from scratch. That is perhaps something they still plan on doing as FCS becomes the default post-production package for all but the most high-end applications (film and high-end realtime commercials still use Avid or Flame).

Shake helped make compositing more mass-market and Phenomenon could be easily built to appeal purely to the growing number of semi-professionals and broadcast facilities that demand less and buy up the bulk of licenses anyways.

As for the big facilities, however much better Nuke is, they're not gonna be switching over altogether quite yet. Most of them have invested huge amounts in a Shake pipeline with their own custom plugins and Nuke licenses are more expensive for both render and floating licenses than Shake's Linux version. Shake will live on for at least a couple of years in every small facility that can't afford to splash out on all those Nuke licenses at once, and every large facility that bought the code.

It does seem a bit ridiculous, however, for Apple to have bought a market-leading product upon which an entire multi-billion dollar industry relied and then ran it into the ground just because they suddenly became the most fashionable consumer brand in the world.
 
nickane said:
It does seem a bit ridiculous, however, for Apple to have bought a market-leading product upon which an entire multi-billion dollar industry relied and then ran it into the ground just because they suddenly became the most fashionable consumer brand in the world.
Click to expand...
If they discontinued Shake because it was not a mass market product, why are they still selling Final Cut?
 
ThuggyBear said:
Great point. Now you just have to go to every single post-production house in NYC and tell them that. Everytime I see someone trying to rotoscope in AFX, I have to heave a sigh.

Maybe people will go back to using Flame. Heh.
Click to expand...

The commercial industry never stopped using Flame. Most people in the biz know that....
 
The other thing is that it seems odd to me how much of Shake people attribute to Ron Brinkman, when my understanding was that the guy pretty much existed as an outside adviser/consultant that seemed to pop in and out until the product became commercially successful. My guess would be that once Apple bought the other Compositing software it conceivably pushed him further to the periphery and being a guy with an established reputation and an ego he didn't like it too much and left. I could be wrong, but that's been the impression that I got so far.
 
To be honest if you want this software download it from "one of those sites"

Is this not now "abandon-ware"?

If so couldn't production studios on tight budgets legitimately have top quality comp software for free.
 
Imhotep397 said:
The other thing is that it seems odd to me how much of Shake people attribute to Ron Brinkman, when my understanding was that the guy pretty much existed as an outside adviser/consultant that seemed to pop in and out until the product became commercially successful. My guess would be that once Apple bought the other Compositing software it conceivably pushed him further to the periphery and being a guy with an established reputation and an ego he didn't like it too much and left. I could be wrong, but that's been the impression that I got so far.
Click to expand...
Whether or not Brinkmann gets too much credit or not doesn't really change what events have transpired since Apple purchased Shake and pretty much let it die on the vine.

fluidedge said:
To be honest if you want this software download it from "one of those sites"

Is this not now "abandon-ware"?

If so couldn't production studios on tight budgets legitimately have top quality comp software for free.
Click to expand...
"Abandon-ware" doesn't exist in the world of copyright law. Apple still owns the rights to Shake even if even they stop selling it.


Lethal
 
manu chao said:
If they discontinued Shake because it was not a mass market product, why are they still selling Final Cut?
Click to expand...

I meant mass-market within the context of video production. Almost all videos require some form of editing, but only a(n ever-increasing) fraction require vfx. Shake dominates the top-end of a specialist field in post-production (ie compositing for film). Final Cut dominates the field of non-linear editing for all video production, although that same high-end sector (film) still probably has more avid licenses. But its the semi-pros and broadcast facilities who make up most of the market and require far less compositing. Thus, FCP is mass-market and shake is still niche, and they are in fact popular with fairly different audiences.
 
Not really

Apple is using Motion as a dumping ground for technologies that they are abandoning or tired of. Live Type? Oh, it's in Motion now. Shake? Oh, it's in Motion now. Steve's old liver? Oh, it's in Motion now.
 
In the end Apple doesn't want to compete with the Nukes or Fusion of the world. No worries it's undertandable to me. It's a lot of work for pennies on the return. They probably came to their senses years ago.

Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, Aperture are enough for Apple apparently.
 
nuckinfutz said:
In the end Apple doesn't want to compete with the Nukes or Fusion of the world. No worries it's undertandable to me. It's a lot of work for pennies on the return. They probably came to their senses years ago.

Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, Aperture are enough for Apple apparently.
Click to expand...

Question is, will there be an Aperture Studio?;)
 
I wouldn't be surprised to see those 3 go the way of old yeller in the next 5 years. Aperture in the next 12 months.
 
fluidedge said:
I wouldn't be surprised to see those 3 go the way of old yeller in the next 5 years. Aperture in the next 12 months.
Click to expand...

I don't know how Aperture and Logic sell, but Final Cut has been gaining market share steadily over the past few years. I can't see that going away. The software also exists to sell Apple's hardware, which is why they can sell it so cheep.

I do hope next time though we get a better update than what was currently given.
 
fluidedge said:
I wouldn't be surprised to see those 3 go the way of old yeller in the next 5 years. Aperture in the next 12 months.
Click to expand...

Overly pessmistic IMO.

I haven't really seen any clue that Apple's losing interest in Final Cut Pro or Logic Studio other than various "chicken littles" and their banal whining.

Let's be frank, technologies like Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, scripting and other features that have been added or improved in Snow Leopard are features that have been added to improve the performance and featureset of desktop applications not iPhone apps.
 
nickane said:
I meant mass-market within the context of video production. Almost all videos require some form of editing, but only a(n ever-increasing) fraction require vfx...
Click to expand...

Some people need to either a.) Know what they are talking about BEFORE start typing things that expose their extreme ignorance. or b.) Not make up things, because think they can and no one will call them for it.

This is one of those comments where the poster just has absolutely no idea and is guessing, posting his opinions or beliefs as fact. In post-production, processes outside of editing probably account for 80% of post costs just for the pure simple fact that even "non-FX" movies now utilize a wide assortment of compositor type post-production editing.

Fact:
I don't know whether Apple really has discontinued Shake, and no one else does either.

We're all working off of speculation that because Apple took down the US Shake pages and told resellers that they've discontinued producing Shake 4.1 or have run out of stock and aren't selling anymore copies that Shake is done. That could be the case and it could not be. As I've already said the timing of this happening days before the "Mecca" of VFX conventions opens seems peculiar. The other issue is that a great deal of the features that will be in Snow Leopard really only cater to high end graphics users. Who really needs a "Supercomputer" inside there computer outside of highend users? With so many VFX/compositing software developers now on the Mac it seems kind of foolish to not capitalize on the fact that first party apps would decidedly have major performance advantages in the marketplace. Siggraph opens TOMORROW, Apple could very well make a product announcement or a press release of a big acquisition at any point in the next couple of days.
 
Imhotep397 said:
Some people need to either a.) Know what they are talking about BEFORE start typing things that expose their extreme ignorance. or b.) Not make up things, because think they can and no one will call them for it.
Click to expand...
You should probably heed your own advice.;) The market for an NLE is much broader than the market for a high end compositor. There are 1.4 million registered users of FCP and the bulk of them are used by people doing event, corporate, and/or industrial projects because that's where the most work is. TV and movies are higher profile but they don't constitute the majority of work that is done.


Lethal
 
LethalWolfe said:
Whether or not Brinkmann gets too much credit or not doesn't really change what events have transpired since Apple purchased Shake...
Click to expand...

To a certain extent this is true, but Brinkman's departure seemed to signal the change in public opinion about Shake even though a.) It was a "Best of Breed" application and progressed exceptionally well probably without much input from him. b.)Even when compared to current compositing applications it's as good too much, much better when pairing it with Motion than a lot of apps.

Nuke with it's 3D rendering operations moves ahead for certain tasks, but I tend to believe as we move forward better pairing with "Full Featured" 3D applications with stalwart renderers for compositing will be viewed as preferable to partial 3D systems within a compositor.
 
LethalWolfe said:
You should probably heed your own advice.;)
Click to expand...

3Dtracking/matchmoving, color grading/timing, 2D animation and title generation actually aren't part of editing either but these are post-production tasks that are slowly starting to fall under the "Compositing" label and more and more these things will probably head towards all being under one application "roof" which will be compositing. Even now though, looking at all of those areas combined that are not best done within NLE operations it paints a more accurate picture what part of the profession in is editing and what parts clearly aren't. Certainly there are a 1.4 million FCS users, but there are significantly more people cutting mattes, doing 2D animation, building titles, matchmoving, color grading, reworking color timing, animating graphics etc.

Generally for most projects there's ONE editor where there are a whole staff of people doing things that have absolutely nothing to do with NLE and that's just how it is. ;)
 
Imhotep397 said:
Some people need to either a.) Know what they are talking about BEFORE start typing things that expose their extreme ignorance. or b.) Not make up things, because think they can and no one will call them for it.

This is one of those comments where the poster just has absolutely no idea and is guessing, posting his opinions or beliefs as fact. In post-production, processes outside of editing probably account for 80% of post costs just for the pure simple fact that even "non-FX" movies now utilize a wide assortment of compositor type post-production editing.

Fact:
I don't know whether Apple really has discontinued Shake, and no one else does either.

We're all working off of speculation that because Apple took down the US Shake pages and told resellers that they've discontinued producing Shake 4.1 or have run out of stock and aren't selling anymore copies that Shake is done. That could be the case and it could not be. As I've already said the timing of this happening days before the "Mecca" of VFX conventions opens seems peculiar. The other issue is that a great deal of the features that will be in Snow Leopard really only cater to high end graphics users. Who really needs a "Supercomputer" inside there computer outside of highend users? With so many VFX/compositing software developers now on the Mac it seems kind of foolish to not capitalize on the fact that first party apps would decidedly have major performance advantages in the marketplace. Siggraph opens TOMORROW, Apple could very well make a product announcement or a press release of a big acquisition at any point in the next couple of days.
Click to expand...

Clutching at straws i'm afraid. Though the timing of this abandonment is interesting i'll give you that.
 
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