After having seen the whole Final Cut Pro debacle, and then seen what Apple did with iWork for Mac, I'm left to wonder what in the heck they are thinking inside Apple, especially now that they are doing it, yet again, with Aperture.
Shafting the Pros
You have all these customers who buy into your software and put tons of time in effort building up libraries of documents and skills around the software, coming to depend on it for their professions. Because remember these are professional apps: Final Cut Pro, iWork, and Aperture are professional software for doing work. People base their livelihoods on it. It's not a trivial thing.
So then Apple simply kills the software and releases something else in its place, possibly under the same name as with Final Cut Pro and Pages, or under a different name as with Aperture/Photos. The new version is missing many core features that the pros require for it to be usable for their purposes. Apple says nothing, doesn't explain why the features were left out of the new version, doesn't explain its strategy or when it might add those features back, doesn't make any gestures towards the user base that had come to depend on its software.
Instead, Apple just mysteriously does whatever it's going to do, leaving everyone angry and upset, scratching their heads, and wishing they could go back in time and never buy the software in the first place. I'll bet plenty of people wished they'd never gone with Final Cut Pro in the first place, instead going with a competing product like Avid MediaComposer or Premiere, so they didn't have to go through a raping. Pages people probably wish they'd just stuck with MS Word. And Aperture people will now wish they'd just gone with Lightroom in the first place.
At least Adobe and Microsoft don't randomly abandon their software or issue updates that remove tons of core features without warning people. At least those companies view their major pro software applications as cornerstones of their business, and their customers' businesses, and would never do something like that. However, evidently to Apple these pro apps were just some kind of experiment that failed, and without regard to their loyal customers' livelihoods, and even though Apple is the richest company in the world, Apple does not see fit to do right by its pro customers, and instead completely ignores what they want and need as it marches to its own drummer.
If any other company did that to me, I would leave them and never, ever, go back. I would say, "No way, Company, you can't do this to your users and not have there be consequences. You can't continually shaft people and leave people with abandonware. You can't continue to throw backwards compatibility to the wind and leave people with tons of documents they can no longer open without maintaining old versions of the operating system and software. I'm done with you, forever."
But it's Apple, so everyone's just kind of stuck? And Apple knows this, so they do whatever they want, without regard to who they piss off? Is this really the world we live in now? How did it get this way? I'd honestly like to know.
And don't just tell me it's because of the iPhone, because Apple could easily afford to keep all its pro apps going and still turn huge profits. They could've made a great iPad version of Aperture by now that would have sold tons of copies.
Is There Hope?
I mean, my hope is that you can keep using Aperture until Photos (maybe, eventually) has been updated enough to have all the features that Aperture did. The first version of Photos will be missing many things from Aperture but maybe they will add those features back in after users complain. Of course that would just be speculation, even though something like that did kind of happen with Final Cut Pro X. It was missing a lot of pro features but eventually they added some of them them back in, a year or more later, although I'm not sure how many customers they actually saved by doing that.
Why Does Apple Do This? Why Don't The Explain Themselves?
I'm really not sure why Apple does it this way. Any normal company would not anger and upset its users like this, but clearly Apple doesn't make its bread and butter from Aperture, and feels its more important to build an integrated platform around Photos across iOS and Mac. Personally I wish they would explain themselves better and explain to users why it's OK for us to just lose all these great features out of a program that we loved. I wish they would explain what their thinking is, what their intentions are.
They did the same thing with the iWork applications, where they removed a lot of features from Pages and made a dumbed down version so that everything could sync properly across all devices. Because you can't have extra features on the desktop version or else iCloud syncing would get all messed up. They needed to move to a unified code base.
I'm sure inside Apple they are probably rewriting all their apps into Swift and basing them on the newest APIs etc. They are a rich enough and big enough company to actually just rewrite their programs entirely from scratch and they are thinking from a somewhat idealistic software development, cloud syncing perspective.
Meanwhile regular users are trucking along with good old Aperture 3 and feeling left behind and thrown out in the cold. Apple says nothing about why it left features out or what people are supposed to do, and just like they angered many filmmakers with the Final Cut Pro debacle, now they want to anger the pro photographers who have possibly invested tens of thousands of hours into building up Aperture libraries and maintaining them.
All Apple would have to do is just come out and say, "Hey here's our gameplan... we aim to add all the same features as Aperture by the middle of 2016, so if you need all that, then wait until then," or something. But no, they say nothing, because Apple always says nothing, and just does whatever it does, often times, leaving us to wonder what in the heck they are doing, and why they are doing it.
Cleary they could afford to keep Aperture going forever, they're the richest company in the world! Why would they therefore abandon users, other than simply not caring at all about customers and what customers want? Why not explain themselves? I don't understand either. I wish someone could get an explanation on this out of Tim Cook though.
Shafting the Pros
You have all these customers who buy into your software and put tons of time in effort building up libraries of documents and skills around the software, coming to depend on it for their professions. Because remember these are professional apps: Final Cut Pro, iWork, and Aperture are professional software for doing work. People base their livelihoods on it. It's not a trivial thing.
So then Apple simply kills the software and releases something else in its place, possibly under the same name as with Final Cut Pro and Pages, or under a different name as with Aperture/Photos. The new version is missing many core features that the pros require for it to be usable for their purposes. Apple says nothing, doesn't explain why the features were left out of the new version, doesn't explain its strategy or when it might add those features back, doesn't make any gestures towards the user base that had come to depend on its software.
Instead, Apple just mysteriously does whatever it's going to do, leaving everyone angry and upset, scratching their heads, and wishing they could go back in time and never buy the software in the first place. I'll bet plenty of people wished they'd never gone with Final Cut Pro in the first place, instead going with a competing product like Avid MediaComposer or Premiere, so they didn't have to go through a raping. Pages people probably wish they'd just stuck with MS Word. And Aperture people will now wish they'd just gone with Lightroom in the first place.
At least Adobe and Microsoft don't randomly abandon their software or issue updates that remove tons of core features without warning people. At least those companies view their major pro software applications as cornerstones of their business, and their customers' businesses, and would never do something like that. However, evidently to Apple these pro apps were just some kind of experiment that failed, and without regard to their loyal customers' livelihoods, and even though Apple is the richest company in the world, Apple does not see fit to do right by its pro customers, and instead completely ignores what they want and need as it marches to its own drummer.
If any other company did that to me, I would leave them and never, ever, go back. I would say, "No way, Company, you can't do this to your users and not have there be consequences. You can't continually shaft people and leave people with abandonware. You can't continue to throw backwards compatibility to the wind and leave people with tons of documents they can no longer open without maintaining old versions of the operating system and software. I'm done with you, forever."
But it's Apple, so everyone's just kind of stuck? And Apple knows this, so they do whatever they want, without regard to who they piss off? Is this really the world we live in now? How did it get this way? I'd honestly like to know.
And don't just tell me it's because of the iPhone, because Apple could easily afford to keep all its pro apps going and still turn huge profits. They could've made a great iPad version of Aperture by now that would have sold tons of copies.
Is There Hope?
I mean, my hope is that you can keep using Aperture until Photos (maybe, eventually) has been updated enough to have all the features that Aperture did. The first version of Photos will be missing many things from Aperture but maybe they will add those features back in after users complain. Of course that would just be speculation, even though something like that did kind of happen with Final Cut Pro X. It was missing a lot of pro features but eventually they added some of them them back in, a year or more later, although I'm not sure how many customers they actually saved by doing that.
Why Does Apple Do This? Why Don't The Explain Themselves?
I'm really not sure why Apple does it this way. Any normal company would not anger and upset its users like this, but clearly Apple doesn't make its bread and butter from Aperture, and feels its more important to build an integrated platform around Photos across iOS and Mac. Personally I wish they would explain themselves better and explain to users why it's OK for us to just lose all these great features out of a program that we loved. I wish they would explain what their thinking is, what their intentions are.
They did the same thing with the iWork applications, where they removed a lot of features from Pages and made a dumbed down version so that everything could sync properly across all devices. Because you can't have extra features on the desktop version or else iCloud syncing would get all messed up. They needed to move to a unified code base.
I'm sure inside Apple they are probably rewriting all their apps into Swift and basing them on the newest APIs etc. They are a rich enough and big enough company to actually just rewrite their programs entirely from scratch and they are thinking from a somewhat idealistic software development, cloud syncing perspective.
Meanwhile regular users are trucking along with good old Aperture 3 and feeling left behind and thrown out in the cold. Apple says nothing about why it left features out or what people are supposed to do, and just like they angered many filmmakers with the Final Cut Pro debacle, now they want to anger the pro photographers who have possibly invested tens of thousands of hours into building up Aperture libraries and maintaining them.
All Apple would have to do is just come out and say, "Hey here's our gameplan... we aim to add all the same features as Aperture by the middle of 2016, so if you need all that, then wait until then," or something. But no, they say nothing, because Apple always says nothing, and just does whatever it does, often times, leaving us to wonder what in the heck they are doing, and why they are doing it.
Cleary they could afford to keep Aperture going forever, they're the richest company in the world! Why would they therefore abandon users, other than simply not caring at all about customers and what customers want? Why not explain themselves? I don't understand either. I wish someone could get an explanation on this out of Tim Cook though.
