#2, Apple may feel that some of these current "needs" and "standards" are overdue for a change. It's clear that analog tape is a dinosaur. Most I.T. shops don't even do backups onto tape anymore, despite LTO and DLT still plugging along with incremental updates every so often. The broadcast industry is whining about FCP X only working in the digital realm and not supporting everything they want anymore for tape. To that, I say -- too bad, so sad. Your precious tape is going away before TOO much longer. Apple has their eye on where the ball is going, in this case.
Every time you post you just look more and more clueless. The broadcast industry as a whole would love to go completely tapeless, but as it stands right now that is an impossibility. All new content from this day forward could be shot directly to digital files and you would still need to have backwards compatibility with tape.
The problem is not with editors, or post houses, but with our customers. Our customers currently have huge tape libraries that will need to be accessed. Tape libraries that they have no plans on digitizing themselves.
I am currently working on rebranding elements for the Pac12, elements that required mass amounts of past game footage from each school. Do you think all that footage came to us digitized on hard drives? Not a chance, a huge portion of it came to us on tape, miniDV, DVCPro, Betacam, HDCam,HDV, etc. The only format missing was one inch!
The other main holdout are the stations, a large portion of stations still request broadcast spots on Beta...BETA! Stations were already slow to upgrade equipment before internet video sapped them of a lot of their advertising profit, and they are in to condition to do so now. So output to tape is still a NEEDED feature. Trust me I would love to be able to drop every spot on an FTP or via DG but doesn't work that way.
Apple cannot simply snap its fingers and make all this legacy archive tape disappear. The need to access footage on tape on a near daily basis will be around for at least the next decade, and realistically for much longer.