Why did Apple neglect, and then abandon Aperture, but continue to nurture and support Final Cut Pro?
That's my question.
That's my question.
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Why did Apple neglect Aperture?
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Basic75
macrumors 68030
They are a business, they must have run a cost-benefit analysis and concluded that it wasn't worth it. Perhaps some people buy Macs for Final Cut Pro, but nobody buys a Mac because of Aperture. They should open-source it so that the community can develop it further.
From what I understand, Aperture was a popular app with both professional and amateur photographers alike, and that was a population who overwhelmingly used Macs in the first place, hence, part of the popularity of Aperture. So, it is baffling as to why they abandoned it. Other than Final Cut Pro, many have seen Apple as abandoning the creative class, the very class of users who kept Apple alive when they were at their lowest. Especially under Tim Crook.
For non-Apple users, they bought a Mac. For Apple users, they kept buying Macs.
thisispeak
macrumors newbie
Yes, that was my understanding too, broadly. Though this chapter, as it evolved, probably also included Capture One, which was being used more at the time (in the UK and Europe at least) by studio and commercial photographer…
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
Someone here may know more, but I seem to remember hearing that Aperture was being built by a fairly small team and they may have lost key people working on it.
Not competing with Adobe doesn't make much sense to me, see: Premier.
I've never quite gotten over the loss of Aperture. It was a remarkably good application.
Not competing with Adobe doesn't make much sense to me, see: Premier.
I've never quite gotten over the loss of Aperture. It was a remarkably good application.
thisispeak
macrumors newbie
I liked it, a lot, but they were neglecting it for quite some time before they killed it … I'm not sure there's a comparison to be made with the video/film market…
Small team rings a bell though but if they'd been serious, they could have dealt with that. For whatever reason it wasn't their priority; they were ditching iPhoto too, to go instead for Photos (and to unify with iOS?!)…
It's Apple logic we're talking about… not your's or mine… 😁
And we know how that goes sometimes
At the time they killed it, Lightroom and Capture One were better, for one reason or another (and more widely used, when I think of those around me at the time)…
Small team rings a bell though but if they'd been serious, they could have dealt with that. For whatever reason it wasn't their priority; they were ditching iPhoto too, to go instead for Photos (and to unify with iOS?!)…
It's Apple logic we're talking about… not your's or mine… 😁
And we know how that goes sometimes
At the time they killed it, Lightroom and Capture One were better, for one reason or another (and more widely used, when I think of those around me at the time)…
It's hard to say. I purchased and enjoyed using Aperture, it was released before Adobe had Lightroom on the market, and I couldn't tell you why Apple decided to put all that time and effort into a project and then just abandon it, instead of competing with Lightroom.
The second part of your sentence, "...but continue to nurture and support Final Cut Pro" is kinda the same funny/sad bucket. Final Cut Pro was a great piece of software and actually used within the film industry... before Apple decided to destroy their product, reboot the whole thing in 2011, and turned it into "Final Cut Pro X." I believe it's back to just being called Final Cut Pro at this point, but they managed to alienate a huge volume of their professional users, who all concluded that perhaps Adobe Premiere wasn't that bad after all.
Apple essentially gave away their entire high-end professional market to Adobe, leaving only Logic Pro as the core app that many studios were still married to circa Mac Pro 2019, albeit I couldn't tell you where that stands in 2026 ... things have probably not improved.
TL;DR: Because Apple prints money by selling iPhones, supplanted by services, and has become a consumer-oriented company that only pays lip service to "professional" users. That's all in the rearview mirror.
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
Better? I think that depends on how you're evaluating. I do not like Adobe's business model by a long shot, so I've never used Lightroom. I went the Capture One route after Aperture died, and it's capable. I'd say as a non-destructive, full frame adjustment tool it's exceeded what Aperture was, I can only guess what Aperture could have become.
I've never used my DAM tool as my main image editor. It's helpful that I can do global edits easily, but if I want to do fine edits it has to round trip to another tool and I don't want my library manager to take on too much of that role because I want flexibility in which tool I use, so I want an open interface.
Nothing, in my mind, has come close to Aperture as a DAM tool. The ability to sort, group, compare, and manage versions of images was top notch. The keywording engine was fluid. The geotag and facial recognition support was ahead of its time. The catalog search and filtering was fantastic. Capture One has more flexibility in how a catalog of images is managed, but I prefer the usual Apple approach: Aperture had an opinion on how things should be done and they implemented it so smoothly that I care about having less flexibility. I use Photo Mechanic+ as my image ingest tool not because it's great, but because it uses a barebones on-disk organization that means if I find a better tool I can easily change.
Aperture was fantastic at what it did: ingest from the camera, make it easy to sort, filter, compare and organize, let me do some low effort punch-up to get a sense of what the potential of an image is, let me quickly get to a set of of selects I can round-trip through other tools, and keep that whole mess organized and searchable. All at a price point that made me feel I was being given a gift.
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
Yeah, these higher end tools have probably migrated from professional to "prosumer". They're still good in that slot though. It's weird that video has FCP/iMovie, music has Logic/Garageband, but photos doesn't have an upper tier product in that mix.
I'll also say that having been jilted by Aperture, I'm much more reluctant to trust Apple for anything I need consistently over a long time span.
thisispeak
macrumors newbie
Yes, it certainly did feel like a gift, at that price…
…as for evaluating, of course a lot of this is subjective, it's GUI was lovely and I didn't like Lightroom at the time (I've got used to it and I never used C1 enough to get into its flow but understood it to better from colleagues) but they (LR/C1) were both being developed, Aperture just wasn't.
I know what I mourned – Media Pro's demise, as a DAM package rather than Photo/RAW processing (at the time I can remember heated debates amongst some about what didn't and didn’t' constitute DAM software!)…
That was another gift, too
Anyway.
uacd
macrumors 68000
It was never as good as Lightroom. They have integrated most of the basic features into their Photos app and added a (seemingly pretty useless) extensions.
They are now offering Pixelmator instead in their subscription suite.
Another reason for that is that Apple these days is all-in computational photography: “you don’t need to work with your RAWs, we will develop them for you”. In fact, most often they ruin those RAWs but to the degree that majority of people will never notice. Apple seemingly wants a future where no one will ever want to edit an image. But this future will never happen, with iPhone 18, XX or 30. Creative people will always crave natural images, free of AI nonsense
They are now offering Pixelmator instead in their subscription suite.
Another reason for that is that Apple these days is all-in computational photography: “you don’t need to work with your RAWs, we will develop them for you”. In fact, most often they ruin those RAWs but to the degree that majority of people will never notice. Apple seemingly wants a future where no one will ever want to edit an image. But this future will never happen, with iPhone 18, XX or 30. Creative people will always crave natural images, free of AI nonsense