You just explained WHY Apples does not have to care one hoot about you. 400 people??? That is nothing. Aple can afford to loose 400 customers. All the money those 400 people would spend keeps all of maybe two engineers employed by Apple.
Seriously, lets say each of those 400 people spends $1,000 of Apple software every year. That adds up to $400,000. If you live in "silicone valley" California and own a home, have a family and a car and hope to send a kid to school. You need to make at a minimum $120K per year and that is a reasonable pay for a mid-level engineer. Add on payrol taxes, company overhead (cost of the building, utilities, trash hauling, vacation pay health insurances and so on..) and at will cost Apple $200K per year to keep an engineer. But it taks a LOT more then two guys to maintain a product like FCP. A LOT more.
So Apple makes more money if they simply dump the pros and forget about them.
So now, tell again way Apple needs to care about 400 professionals? A few years mm=back Apple figure out that that are MANY more people who like to sit on the sofa and watch TV then there are people who make stuff. Why not sell products to the larger crowd?
Wow. I couldn't respectfully disagree more.
Chris, Apple should care about the pros - no matter if it's 10 or 400 or 1000 employees.
Who kept Apple afloat over those lean years? The TV watching sofa folks or the professionals?
We could argue the mathematics of how much each employee would spend, but you forget to include the very critical trickle down effect on purchasing hardware (Apple and 3rd party Apple related products) - iPhones, iPads, monitors, macs etc..etc..
Then add the halo effect of those professionals talking to their buddies and family members etc..etc.. - heck, my 7 Macs, 3 iPads, 3 iPhones, 2 iPod Touches, 3 Apple displays over the years were ALL b/c a buddy of mine in the entertainment industry told me to buy a mac b/c the folks editing in his sphere, were using Macs. For Apple software, I'd say it's between $2000 and $2500.
Then I'd take the number of people who have bought Macs partly b/c of seeing my office flowing so efficiently etc.. There's been quite a few.
Now maybe those friends would have bought Macs on their own, but I would say the majority are because of my buddy convincing me to get a Mac and then those folks saw me happily working away.
Sure, that's not going to be in the 1000s of people buying Apple products, but I'm ONE guy (and to be honest, not a 'professional' editor as I don't edit anything for broadcast or otherwise....video transfers etc...).
It's hypothetical to think, but let's say Apple bites the bullet on updating FCX to make it that editing leader. So people stop buying Mac Pros to edit in FCX and buy Windows PCs instead. Then the Windows Tablet is out and hey, great tools to related to those editing tools are released so instead of iPads, it's Win8 tablets being purchased and then hey, let's buy a Windows phone instead b/c it all works together better. I might be crazy or might I be on to something?
In my opinion, Apple does need to care what the pros out there think.
I also believe Apple realizes it given some of the feature requests implemented since FCX's release (which the pros were shocked at not being included in FCX). They are listening.
Then again, I watched 4 games of soccer in the pouring rain so maybe I'm just really tired and didn't quite understand your post